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How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

krebsonsecurity.com

141–150 of 152 posts

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#141
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not quite sure what this implies? That the team who did the initial infection was in fact some sort of FBI undercover? I suppose that's one of the many possibilities that are implied, but its not even close to the most likely. I think its more likely that some of the attackers' systems or accounts were compromised (AKA hacked).

why is that more likely that the attackers systems were compromised? Does it not sound weird that a cybercrime gang would leave a hot wallet on some random VPS? That seems incredibly unlikely.

I’m not surprised. There is no reason to suspect they’re going to be particularly elite with that respect.

It doesn’t take a _ton_ of technical proficiency to get ransomware someone else made and target a company with it.

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#142
post #10
post #4

This reminds me of the story in Freakanomics about the street level drug dealers making basically minimum wage, with the majority of the money going to high level traffickers who are typically firewalled through layers of middlemen.

It doesn't say what these coders make. But, as with the dealers, it's likely tax free, so even "minimum wage" is better than it sounds.

It's not tax free. The IRS has a line for you to report illegal income on. If you do illegal profit-making activities you are guilty of tax evasion unless you pay your taxes on those ill gotten gains.

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#143
post #89
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quality of life is higher than Russia Have you been to Russia?

Have you? What's your impression?

I have lived there. Only been to the US briefly, SF, NY, Seattle, Portland etc but the difference is pretty stark. America feels like a 3rd world country, life is only bearable if you’re rich.

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#144
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're being honest, there's a small segment that sells because they think it cool. That whole gangster rap testosterone street $900 shoe guy. In college, I moved into a very cheap apartment. I had no idea, it was the worst part of Oakland. I saw some things that didn't make any sense. Some successful dealers had other opportunities. Most probally didn't. I was so naieve, I didn't know my roommate was selling un…

I'm sorry to hear that about your friend. Its never good to hear about how someone threw their life away for temporary rewards. You say they weren't violent, but violence is not the only reason we incarcerate individuals. He broke the law, he knew it, he got caught, and now he's living with those consequences. I hope he learns a lot from this and decides to no longer break the law in the future. I hope others can rea…

I am very much your ideological opponent on this issue, but I agree that there is a solid ethical case for obeying the law regardless of its content, because the rule of law is a phenomenal human achievement that enables us to live vastly more peaceful existences than would be possible if it were absent. My own lifestyle, which doesn't involve much concern at all for self-defense or alliance building wouldn't be possible in conditions with significantly weaker rule of law, and the rule of law is not a given — it can be threatened; we could lose it.

But there's another consideration that's in tension with that one. No one ever ascented to the laws that they're governed by. Yes, there are endless backs and forth in the philosophical literature on this point, but I think the strongest case that governments can justly impose restrictions without explicit consent is going to have to say that there are some kinds of restrictions that governments can impose, but some that they can't. Otherwise you're committed to saying that governments can justly enforce regimes of slavery and so on. The question is how much less evil than slavery do you have to get before governments can justly impose restrictions on their subjects.

You say that selling drugs is not value neutral. I agree. It's value-positive. Drug dealers are heroes: they put their lives and freedoms on the line to let others enjoy the cognitive liberty that their governments would deprive them of. The idea of cognitive liberty is that it is a human right to have the freedom to shape your conscious experience as you see fit. It's not presently recognized as a human right by any nation, but neither was freedom of thought some centuries ago, yet we don't recognize historical rulers as particularly respectful of human rights. The legal scholar Richard Glen Boire has spent his career elaborating and promoting this principle.

You're, I take it, concerned that drugs cause harm to the people who use them and the people near those who use them. Drugs definitely do have the potential to cause harm (although cannabis, the drug in question, is especially weak in its potential to cause harm). But the idea that people have about the harm of drugs is distorted in three main ways:

1. Prohibition makes drugs far more expensive than they would be without distortionary market policy. Much of the harm of drugs comes from people being driven into poverty by addiction. This is almost entirely a consequence of prohibition, and would be a much lesser problem under a regime that respected cognitive liberty.

2. There's selection bias in the stories that we hear about users of drugs. Due to the stigma and legal risks around drug use, people who are able to keep their drug use private choose to keep it private, and we get an exaggerated sample of people who end up in need of an intervention or on the streets as a result of their drug use. See the recent book Drug Use For Grown-Ups by Dr. Carl Hart for more on this.

3. The lack of drug education, and the belief — widespread even among users of drugs — that drug use is inherently self destructive, leads people to be far more reckless in their drug use than is necessary. Certainly there will always be people who are reckless with drugs, but we can do a lot better than having young people learn about drugs from their peers in contexts where it's uncool to be concerned with safety, and half the point of the activity is to signal disregard for authority and rules.

I'm not sure that respecting people's cognitive liberty wouldn't result in more people suffering at the hands of their own drug use, but I suspect that it would be fewer than most people imagine. And cognitive liberty is something that's valuable in itself.

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#145
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._j... Marijuana is legal or decriminalised in most of the developed world, including the USA. It's widely accepted to be relatively harmless, much less harmful than alcohol. This guy? He was an entrepreneur, just another person running a small business with a couple of employees. He didn't deserver a long jail sentence for someone else's fuck up. Just because…

What do we call entrepreneurs that break the law? Criminals.

What a way to avoid dealing with actual arguments.

Btw we don't.

Most law breaking in entrepreneurship is usually finable misdemeanours. Like 99.99% of it. We don't call those people criminals.

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#146
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying she's dumb because she Googles the answer.. not the part where she hosts malware on her own domain? Maybe voluntarily travelling to the US from a country with no extradition deal with the US? It's the Googling that does it haha Being able to search is a legitimate skill that relatively few have too. We will probably disagree a bunch here, I can't be fluffed to have that to and fro -- so I downvoted and…

That wasn’t what I was saying. All of the things you mentioned made her come off as not very smart. Google = skill development is a separate point I took issue with. I also didn’t say that searching itself isn’t a skill. Of course it is. I’m saying that advertising you know how to Google doesn’t mean you can acquire any new skill, which is what the bio implied.

Disagree with this. You can acquire skills using Google. You can build a curriculum and a path by Googling on a domain you don't know a fuck about. It can give you a head start. I learnt Mathematics in same way. Being able to find Dr Keith Delvin was Godsend.

It's much like Blackbox testing you know.

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#147
post #114

Not entirely related, but at the end of the 90s, just before the big Y2K, I was living in San Francisco, and interviewed at a residential house with some guy who was in the business of popups. The malware of that time. The job was to basically to do WHATEVER it takes to make those popups pop. No rules, anything goes, dirty tricks and all. Hated popups. Didn't take the job.

Before popunders then?

I think any unwanted pop - over, under or sideways, is bundled up in the term "popups".

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#148
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn’t what I was saying. All of the things you mentioned made her come off as not very smart. Google = skill development is a separate point I took issue with. I also didn’t say that searching itself isn’t a skill. Of course it is. I’m saying that advertising you know how to Google doesn’t mean you can acquire any new skill, which is what the bio implied.

Then I and possibly others misinterpreted what you were saying. Personally it's the wording that did it for me, I dunno about others. I've never bumped into skill development as a phrase so it got parsed wrong I guess. Put a rogue "in" between skill and development and there's the downvote For what it's worth because I replied my downvote was nullified

[deleted]

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#149
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._j... Marijuana is legal or decriminalised in most of the developed world, including the USA. It's widely accepted to be relatively harmless, much less harmful than alcohol. This guy? He was an entrepreneur, just another person running a small business with a couple of employees. He didn't deserver a long jail sentence for someone else's fuck up. Just because…

What do we call entrepreneurs that break the law? Criminals.

Didn't Uber start off by breaking laws just about everywhere it operated by being an unlicensed taxi service?

Re: How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

#150
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do we call entrepreneurs that break the law? Criminals.

Didn't Uber start off by breaking laws just about everywhere it operated by being an unlicensed taxi service?

In my opinion its basically a miracle that Uber was ever allowed to operate.

The government seemed to just decide to enforce the law differently because computers were involved.

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