[efitz]

I’ve been on the defender side of security my whole career.

I know in some markets crime pays more than legitimate work, but it never ceases to amaze me how much thought, effort, planning, and engineering goes into providing infrastructure IT services for cybercriminals. The people involved definitely have the skills to be profitable at legitimate work; it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.

[Aurornis]

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.

[kspacewalk2]

>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.

[kirubakaran]

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.

[gessha]

Generalization is a tool, not something inherently bad or evil.

[kspacewalk2]

Re-read my comment as it is written and note that my observation does not generalize.

[coldtea]

Generalizing doesn't mean everybody or even most in the group. It means it's a common behavior in the group relative to other groups.

[Rp8yXmdmr]

> he enjoyed the thrill of feeling superior to others [...] He got caught through a mistake that was really dumb in retrospect.

It seems to be common occurrence. I still can't get over that one hacker who dumped stolen data on forum, to sell it/prove his capabilities, in form of tar.gz archive, that accidentally included his entire home directory

[pbgcp2026]

[flagged]

[KellyCriterion]

sounds like Markus Braun & Jan Marsalek / Wirecard, the fraudsters :-D

[cm2012]

Sounds like Breaking Bad

[thewebguyd]

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.

[locknitpicker]

> 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.

[goobatrooba]

I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big. What night not tempt a Google engineer might tempt a telecoms infrastructure key from Anytinytown, Moldova/Romania/...

That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.

[locknitpicker]

> I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big.

I'm pointing out that this reasoning doesn't pass the smell test. A 30k salary in those countries actually represents between 5-to-10x your average salary. You are already considered rich and we'll off and leading a comfortable life.

It's like claiming your average FANG engineer earning half a million a year would be easily tempted to engage in criminal activity if that meant they could aspire to earn a few millions instead.

> (...) meaning you can live a decent life in most places.

Yes, there are only a few countries on earth where your average software engineer earns more than that, and mostly because their average salary and cost of living is already way larger. Some sources even state that the average salary of s software engineer in Japan is as low as $36k/year. Japan has a higher cost of living than most east European countries, they have a reputation of competence and technical expertise, and still you don't see Japan as synonymous with cybercrime.

[nerdsniper]

The median annual salary in places like Moldova and Romania is $3-6k USD? Edit: apparently $5k and $10k, respectively.

[r_lee]

why is this downvoted?

[KellyCriterion]

...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

[parliament32]

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.

[r_lee]

> 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

[derefr]

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.)

[pocksuppet]

Both forms exist. There are real hosting companies that just turn a blinder eye to crime than others, and those ones should maybe be forced to divest from certain customers but shouldn't be completely raided. And there are cybercrime groups who form fake hosting companies. These ones were from the latter group. I tried to rent servers from them once, but they don't actually take customers because they aren't a real hosting company.

[davidwritesbugs]

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!!

[fancythat]

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.

[cryptoegorophy]

You were not born in eastern Europe that’s why. That’s the whole Eastern European mind set - the only way to succeed is to rip people off or scam. Anything else is already taken or no money in it or government will take it away from you.

[amelius]

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.

[SoftTalker]

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).

[sandeepkd]

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.

[afroboy]

> it just puzzles me that they choose to support criminals.

Same reason for CIA and NSA engineers.

[dist-epoch]

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).

[spwa4]

> 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.

[cpursley]

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.