Well, you hear about Russian hackers on the news a lot, which would seem to indicate that either:

1) they are very good at hacking

2) they are not so good at hacking

3) Russia is a popular place for hackers to set up proxies

Alternatively, news about hacking that you read, including their primary sources like Google/Microsoft/FireEye/whatever, usually suppress news about hacking by U.S. and allies. IIRC last year Google publicly announced a zero day actively exploited by the U.S. which was considered highly unusual, since apparently they usually just patch it without fuzz. The article was discussed here but I can’t find it now.

This thread was kicked off by discussion about ransomware hacking, though. I'm sure US intelligence agencies get up to all sorts of no good, and I'm sure our news is less likely to report on it, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent ransomware industry in the US (and the news has no reason to cover for petty hacking criminals in the US).

Actually I don't see a ton of news about national-security related hacking by Russia.

Oh, TFA is about nation states so I was talking about that.

Asymmetric commercial hacking is pretty easy to explain: hacking foreign entities is safer than hacking domestic ones in terms of risk exposure, and hacking entities in countries richer than yours is more attractive than the other way round.

How about non-nation states, such as the US?

Pedantry is seldom useful or interesting.

That's why Kaspersky is important. I wish they survive.

4) The news is not geopolitically neutral

4) You're only looking at American propaganda.

Nah, most of the stories are about ransomware type schemes from Russian criminal gangs. I'm sure both of our intelligence agencies get up to no good, and US news sources are less likely to cover US intelligence agencies, but they have no real reason to cover for petty hacking criminals.

There are obvious incentives to present Russia as a lawless criminal wasteland and the US as a good global citizen.

I don't think they're obvious, and this comment strikes me as baseless innuendo.

What precisely are the incentives for multinational corporations to censor news about American cyber malfeasance, especially given how acute and prolonged a regulatory headache unchecked American surveillance created for them in Europe?

> most of the stories are about ransomware type schemes

And where are these news stories coming from?

are you living under a rock? Do you remember the recent oil pipeline and meat packing facilities that got ransomwared? Ton's of government sites and corporations get hacked. It's way more than what's publicly available too. Most of the time entities just pay up and keep it secret. Lots of the attacks come from russia. They pump out a shit load of malware.

All of the above!