Yeah, absolutely this. There's a bias towards the low end of the skill/intelligence curve as those guys get caught doing really stupid shit and end up in the news as a result.

I was looking over Wikipedia articles on software piracy groups of the 1980s/90s the other day and it was really interesting how many of them died to either a blatantly stupid move on the part of one of their members/leadership resulting in the whole group dropping like dominoes, or a political split when the leadership could not agree on policy (especially during a leadership changeover)

It was particularly interesting to see at least one major group collapse due to leadership getting nailed on phreaking charges, which spilled over to the entire group getting nabbed on the piracy.

A few of the brightest in the scene got out when they found an opportune time, then disappeared. At least one or two of them are CEOs in big business, if the articles are to be believed. I bet one or more are reading this now, even!

We had one running for president just a couple years back. Sadly, I don't like him much, nor do many from his home state. But it's kind of cool that he went from hacker to political candidate.

Isn't he running for governor there now?

People might like him better if he didn't keep making 180-degree changes to his stance on major constitutional questions.

Whichever side of that issue you find yourself on, it's disturbing how easily he could his tune.

My initial reaction to that is just that he likely was too green and not groomed enough. We expect normal people to not know everything already and be willing to change their stance on something when new information comes to light (even if it's just new to them). When that happens to someone in power, we're upset because how could they not already have thought deeply about all the specific aspects anyone could bring up about that topic, as well as the 20,000 other things that might be asked of them randomly.

And the only thing that's worse for them than changing their mind is when they admit they haven't come to a decision on that yet, which is just admitting up front that they don't know as much as they should and are fallible.

It's not just that we don't expect politicians to by truthful, we disincentivize and sometimes outright punish any natural and truthful behavior that we would expect in a normal person, and force them into the mold we so like to criticize.

I think that goes to the matter of leadership. Politicans aren't normal people. They're supposed to be the best people, who surround themselves with the other kinda-best people. We expect them to be better than us. We want them to be better than us. We want elites. And then we ask them to not make us feel bad about it by pretending to be the same as the rest of us. But it's pretend. It's a game we play. At the end of the day, elites are supposed to act like elites, and that means knowing what they're talking about, and making us feel like someone competent is at the wheel and everything is going to be okay.

There's definitely survivorship bias here. But I think even when accounting for that, there still likely is a correlation.

Also, I'm referring to a certain subset of cybercrime. The kind associated with forums like RaidForums and HackForums and LeakForums.

You only need to be slightly more intelligent than the people trying to track you in order to not get caught. I heard and read enough true crime stories to noticed that successful serial killers and incompetent law enforcement tend to go hand-in-hand.

>You only need to be slightly more intelligent than the people trying to track you in order to not get caught. I heard and read enough true crime stories to noticed that successful serial killers and incompetent law enforcement tend to go hand-in-hand.

There is a caveat to this. As the perpetrator of a crime (what and how stuff is defined as a "crime" is a different discussion), no matter how smart you (think) you are, you have to get it right every single time, in perpetuity

For law "enforcement", they only need to get it right once.

No, you have to be more intelligent than anyone who is ever going to investigate you, because any traces you left behind at any point could lead back to you.

When you're doing low-level crime barely on anyone's radar, this matters little. But if you ever scale up, any mistake you may have made in the past could be used against you in the future.

I would guess that things like search history, email records, cell phone records and security cameras are a huge crutch for police these days. So avoiding those things probably gets you most of the way there.

License plates, CCTV, purchase records, public transport etc.

There are so many ways in which you could be tracked that the safe assumption is that you won't be able to avoid it.

Which brings you back to asking why half don't get solved, I suppose.

In most countries: priorities.

" So avoiding those things probably gets you most of the way there."

How do I get anonymous internet access, from inside my cave?

More serious, the "best" way to do crime, is probably doing crime no one (in your jurisdiction) bothers enough to demand police action.

Which is why most(?) cyber gangs are operating from russia, kasachstan, etc. against the west.

Also your list misses IP logging from ISPs.

Uh, meaning don't discuss your crime, search for crime related things, etc, on your phone or home pc, etc. Not living in a cave.

Yes, so often you will hear the testimony of investigators like "if he hadn't [done single mistake], we never would have caught him". You can hear it in every true crime show like that.

Reminds me of the IRA statement to Thatcher:

> Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always

They just need to be unlucky once to go to jail.