I watched the downfall and eventual jailing of someone who had a great job, career, and family after he started getting involved in cybercrime.
As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process.
He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect. I think he believed his intellectual superiority combined with the stupidity of others so much that eventually he couldn’t imagine anyone catching him.
>As far as I can make sense of it, he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others: Evading the law, exploiting people who viewed as stupid, and enriching himself in the process.
I sadly see this pattern of thinking far more often than I want to in my fellow eastern Europeans.
That's just what 40 years of communism does to a society.
If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?
> If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?
By communism I don't think people talk about the philosophical basis of an idealized society, but the totalitarian regime that oppresses a society and keeps the working class constantly in survival mode under the risk of losing it all.
Well, that answers the America question.
Let's not generalize, even if you feel like you can say that because you're a member of a group you're generalizing. It's unfair to most of the people in any group being generalized.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. It's exhausting having to address this concern trolling every single time they're mentioned. Nobody thinks everyone in the group conforms to the stereotype. And they certainly don't need your white knighting.
It isn't "concern trolling" or "white knighting" to call out racism or bigotry, and expect some decency in the discussion. If it is "exhausting" for you to be propagating unfair stereotypes, perhaps stop your bad behavior?
Your comment assumes, a priori, that the stereotypes are in fact "unfair". I don't know enough about cybercrime rates per capita amongst Eastern Europeans vs. other populations to be able to say if it is actually an unfair stereotype, but it is an indisputable fact (supported by virtually every jurisdiction that tracks crime rates by things like national origin, ethnicity, etc.) that there are population level differences in crime rates.
I don't think a person saying Eastern European are observed doing something more than expected is inherently racist. It is a claim he either does or doesn't have evidence for.
If he made the claim with insufficient evidence or made the claim in contradiction of the evidence, then it becomes racist, but I don't think making the observation and doing the calculation is the racist part. It is a simple chi-squared goodness-of-fit test.
I’m eastern-ish european, is it even racist to say that tech talent in the region is through the roof but for various accidents of history, the best opportunities available to talented people are in cybercrime (both sides)?
Not everyone has a hundred tech unicorns in their back yard. I think my country (Slovenia) produced one in its entire history so far and even that was mostly in the US
sounds like Markus Braun & Jan Marsalek / Wirecard, the fraudsters :-D
It's not easy to go legit, especially in today's job market, depending on where you live in the world also.
The US is unique with its high salaries for tech work (on the lower end of those of high salaries is pure ops work like this though). If you're in a country where the average sysadmin salary is substantially lower (to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.
> to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year
This is a disingenuous claim. Not only are there software engineers in rich western European countries that in absolute terms earn less than that but also your east European software engineer still earns multiple times their country's average salary.
...because on HN, experiences which somehow contradict the perspective when salaries are highly varying across countries, esp. when someone decides to pick an explicit example, which, even if it shows the truth, is against the base-assumption of the reader of a comment.
To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D
Imagine working for an organization where 1) cybersecurity is actually the #1 priority, ahead of "shareholder value" and all the other gobblygook, 2) you get to design systems where you actually have to assume that every other entity is malicious (not the usual carve-outs like "oh yeah we do zero trust.. but our entire management plane is Azure-managed it's unavoidable"), 3) your budget is effectively unlimited, and 4) you get paid several factors more than you would in private industry.
In a previous life I've employed contractors and software engineers to run a criminal website. Motivations for my guys were that it was well paid work that was technically challenging in order to evade enforcement agencies, and was 'fun' in that respect; they were "sticking it to than man (my service was regarded as moral by all my users & others); and there wasn't so much work about that they could pick and choose; lastly, I was a good employer because I had to be!!
I wouldn't advise thinking of it as "providing infrastructure IT services to cybercriminals", as if these people are primarily IT people, running primarily infrastructure, who just happen to favor this audience.
I would rather advise thinking of these efforts as various cybercriminal groups going through the schlep of setting up their own backend IT infrastructure for their own use (because they couldn't find anyone to host them); and then, with built infra in hand, either:
1. realizing that their own needs were emblematic of a more-general unmet market demand for "don't ask, don't tell" hosting, and so branching out into hosting as a secondary business;
2. taking the charade of a hosting company they made up when e.g. registering for an ASN, and deciding that the more real they make that charade, the more it protects them; and so slapping together a facade of a hosting site (that serves no real customers and has no real control-plane);
3. or deciding that having real customers with actual legitimate traffic coming from their ASN further legitimizes them (and makes other ASNs more wary to just block them wholesale), and so actually standing up the facilities of your average VPS provider on some single sad box somewhere — probably running some turn-key IaaS appliance (usually not OpenStack, more likely some shoddy old thing they bought on a cybercrime marketplace);
4. or (and I think this is the most common route) chatting with cybercriminal friends of theirs, and those friends hitting them up for hosting when they realize that they've actually built something out for themselves; and this gradually just evolving into a de-facto hosting arm of the business (as they accept more of these "high-touch" word-of-mouth customers; eventually begin to feel burdened by manually configuring their systems to accommodate these customers; and so begin to automate things.)
> The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.
I don't think it's that easy to go legit. having a tech job nowadays is already a luxury
Because they cannot be profitable. Job market is not the same on both ends. If you are east European and you try to get a job in an international corporation, the in all cases offer salaries adjusted for regional averages, unless you are willing to reallocate. Only few startups and FAANG like companies, often compensation in line what is received in the western world.
And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.
Some people provide services exclusively, or partially, to government(s).
Crime really isn’t that much different.
If we use one of the comments from here that it was done at the behest of some government then its more like the offensive team of a legitimate government. Pretty much every thing can be colored grey that way and one just needs to find people that they can persuade or convince for their cause.
Cybersecurity is always last on the budget list. It is not easy to make money working in cybersecurity.
The only upside here is that criminals will (through legislation) eventually force companies to invest more.
Some people are just born into it. Mafia families, etc. There were some very smart people in the American mob, running scams that were immensely profitable. Eventually they get caught though, and with the ease and pervasivness of electronic surveillance today, it's pretty much impossible to do it anymre at least if you're anywhere where the authorities care about it (edit to add: and aren't in on it).
You fail to take into account the ideological angle.
Some people are ready to die for their beliefs. Others just to run businesses supporting their causes.
3 of the 4 persons named have russian links (a large number of Moldovan citizens are ethnic russians).
> Some people are ready to die for their beliefs.
Really? Because while I've seen this, rarely, in individuals. In many cases once you start tracing money the amounts involved in many "die for their beliefs" situations is absurd. Terrorism, for example.
What point are you trying to make other than bigotry? Ethic Russians are not the only Eastern Europeans perpetuating cyber crime. Anyways, Nesterenko is a Ukrainian surname - at least get your racism correct.