The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
arstechnica.com
The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
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Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#2just to clarify – when it says "hacking a gmail account costs this much", it means "attempting to hack", right?
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#3just to clarify – when it says "hacking a gmail account costs this much", it means " attempting to hack", right?
Unless they have zero days in the Gmail stack, I would think so.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#4This isn't just a "Russian" thing.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#5It has always fascinated me how history, individuals, geography and natural resources influenced people, their mentality in various world regions.
While Russia is rich for natural resources (diamonds, gas, oil), just a few people profit from them. Next tear of wealthy individuals mostly profit from serving those who profit from natural resources… Natural resources imply that value is already created. You dont have to think how to create it. You just have to sell it. This stresses a high importance on relations, closed ties between limited political and business. These ties generally are not based on pure smartness nor on common sense logic or ethic. The rest of population, stoned by these in-transparent "success stories" are leaved to strive for fast money and basically steal+cheat.
Also, considering Soviet past, where entrepreneurship have been suppressed for decades, it is just amazing how many super smart people there are, focusing their brain power on anything but long term intelectual value creation and monetization (i.e. intelectual value driven businesses). There are many terrific examples of this, including AK-47, chess players, Nginx… Though nginx is amazing it is not amazing in monetization. I'm wishing Nginx and Runa Capital all the best to in monetizing it! (details of their monetization strategy are not apparent to me).
And mature cybercrime market is nothing surprising in these circumstances.
All this being said, I don't want to say that there are no great, profitable intellectually driven companies in Russia. Among those are Kaspersy Lab, Parallels, some others. These observations are general and highly abstract.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#6This isn't just a "Russian" thing.
So, we take you at face value, with no citations or other authority? What if you're one of the Russian cybercriminals? Or that hacker that the Georgian CERT unmasked? So, +1 for vaguely menacing vagueness.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#7This isn't just a "Russian" thing.
I'd love to learn about examples of particular socio-economic reasons in particular countries for cybercrime being more mature than IT business.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#8just to clarify – when it says "hacking a gmail account costs this much", it means " attempting to hack", right?
It could be "No cure, no pay". That also prevents arguments about the quality of efforts made.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#9I'd be willing to fork up the $150 to see if they could hack into my own gmail account. Seems like cheap penetration testing. Pointing them toward myself should be legal as well. So who do I pay?
In fact Google should be paying them to hack honeypotted accounts and see what they try.
Re: The Russian underground economy has democratized cybercrime
#10In case anyone else is looking for it, the original Trend Micro Report: http://www.trendmicro.com/cloud-content/us/pdfs/security-int...
Some fairly interesting stuff there.