Sure, but I think the country's image suffered greatly as a result. In contrast to Russia, I can hardly imagine that the country's leadership doesn't care.

India is a federal country. There are various layers of federal, state, local, and municipal governments and enforcement you need to peel through to crack down on stuff like this, especially if an operation ends up partially co-opting the state and local portion, or if the state and the federal portion are opponents of each other.

The Indian version of the FBI can't operate in states without their explicit permission, and there have been multiple cases where state police will end up arresting each other because competing politicians in neighboring states would file motions against each other. For example - https://m.timesofindia.com/india/explainer-inter-state-polic...

> country's image

abstract terms with no implications

Compare that with solid $ figures: if there's 1B in cyber crime money flowing to India per year split by 100k workers

that's $10k/year each, double average salary in india

Same like Russia, there can be a lot of complaints about Russia, but everyone still buying oil from Russia

It does care. Folks like PaywallBuster here are just posting their pet opinions as facts without actually checking their assertions. Indian police regularly work with the U.S. FBI.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/international-cyber-...

I can post 2 dozen such bust-ups in the last few years alone. The problem is that India is large nation with a humongous internet-growing population and the Indian police are still far behind their western counterparts. Also, compared to the FBI, the Indian CBI lacks teeth.

I'm pretty sure Russian hackers target former USSR countries. Estonia and Ukraine come to mind, but I would imagine all of the Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova would be ok as well.

There was an article about this -https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/try-this-one-weird-trick... . Basically, malicious programs will not target hosts that have Cyrillic or other languages of Russian aligned countries.

There have been a ton of attacks originating from Russia against Ukraine and Estonia very publicly. Read Sandworm for a deep dive. Just because some hackers are lazy and use a Cyrillic keyboard as a lazy man's geofencing does not mean these countries are off limits.

[delayed]

I read a lot of James Bond novels, so I can imagine what goes on...

More likely hackers in Russia can avoid prosecution as long as they don’t target Russia’s allies (not all exUSSR countries are) and work for state agencies when asked (blackmailed).

There was a fantastic conversation in the leaked chat logs from the Conti/Trickbot groupings where one of them asks if they will be putting on their “young pioneer hats”, and other chats referencing being given tasks by the security services.

The machine translation of those chats and internal read me docs from Russian to English resulted in some hilarious loss of nuance - sentences like “removing the admins eggs” (which is idiom - eggs meaning balls, and more so meant subverting the admins privileges).

"Cyber crime usually targets external countries and it brings money in to the local economy, so little incentive for the government to target it"

A lot of baseless speculation here considering that the Indian police regularly work with the FBI to bust up cyber-crime - and this is regularly reported. Could you please offer some evidence to support your allegations ?

From my side: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cbi-and-delhi-police-...

https://theprint.in/india/delhi-police-busts-international-c...

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/cbi-operation-target...

Well, just read the article

India is a hot spot for cyber crime and scam call centers

Sure you can read articles about apprehensions every single day, but India is a big country, arresting 10 people every day makes no difference if there's (imagine) 100k people in the industry at any given time