No, they are pursued aggressively by the government because they compete with it.
DS: Obviously, there are many talented professionals on your team. Why is it that this talent is aimed at destructive activities? Have you tried legal penetration testing?
BM: We do not deny that business is destructive, but if we look deeper—as a result of these problems new technologies are developed and created. If everything was good everywhere there would be no room for new development.
There is one life and we take everything from it, our business does not harm individuals and is aimed only at companies, and the company always has the ability to pay funds and restore all its data.
We have not been involved in legal pentesting and we believe that this could not bring the proper material reward.
For me the line between organized crime and robin hood is very blurry.
This is such a transparently self-serving joke of an excuse.
A serial killer could likewise say "Sure, I kill people, but as a result of my murders the police develop new forensic techniques."
Right.. as if that justifies anything. These people are just interested in money, no matter who it hurts. They are sociopaths.
I guess if you're ok with taking something that isn't yours you would see no problem with this. The rest of us see this as sociopathy.
That some countries legalize theft of property in other countries does not change the ethics of this at all.
> That some countries legalize theft of property in other countries does not change the ethics of this at all.
It literally does. Because those people are participating in a society where their actions are not strictly unethical. Their society does not necessarily view them as sociopaths.
Well I should concede it depends on whether your worldview accommodates different ethical frameworks or not. If you are absolutely ethical then all people must adhere to the same ethical standard and you can rightly justify punishment of outsiders.
We're not arguing about whether that's ethical, we're simply pointing out that people like that exist.
You and the parent commenter are no longer arguing about what is and isn't ethical (as you've stated, you both seem to agree), but instead on what to do about the practical reality that society in Russia does see this as ethical, and doesn't give a flying fuck what you or I think.
Now the question becomes, what should we do about that.
They outright admit that they see the targets primarily as money bags, and that they are making the economy better in exactly the same way that breaking windows makes the economy better, and your opinion is that it's ethically blurry?
Based on the recent pipeline incident, it seems that these crime groups realize there are other places you'd better not mess around.
Screw with Bank A or Company B ... fine. Screw with infrastructure of a country with a large scale military, control over large chunks of global finance, and so much more ... probably not a good idea.
These are multi-million (billion?) businesses. There's strategic leadership, target acquisition pipelines, R&D, talent recruitment and coordination with other businesses in the space.
There's every indication that with a little bit of protection money, you can even run your business with no interference from the law, as long as you don't mess around in your own backyard.
You can see from the blog post, that this "company" has done a product-market-fit analysis. They've taken a look at their competitors' work, considered the pros/cons, and decided that they can do better. Since they are a b2b company (hehe) you can be reasonably sure this is not some PR aimed at consumers. I think it reads as a recruitment pitch to their lead generators (read: hackers whom infect other networks for them).
You can see the pitch, it almost reads as a vacancy post:
- We make a lot of money
- We're new to the scene but already have had success
- We only work with the best hackers
- We pay you lots of money to infect a network, if you got what it takes