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.
I sadly see this pattern of thinking far more often than I want to in my fellow eastern Europeans.
By communism I don't think people talk about the philosophical basis of an idealized society, but the totalitarian regime that oppresses a society and keeps the working class constantly in survival mode under the risk of losing it all.
You're nitpicking on semantics. Communism is the poster child of totalitarian regimes that oppress their citizens to extreme levels. When you talk about communism, people think of gulags, forced labor, murdering political opponents,and even force-admittong rivals to psychiatric hospitals.
If he made the claim with insufficient evidence or made the claim in contradiction of the evidence, then it becomes racist, but I don't think making the observation and doing the calculation is the racist part. It is a simple chi-squared goodness-of-fit test.
Not everyone has a hundred tech unicorns in their back yard. I think my country (Slovenia) produced one in its entire history so far and even that was mostly in the US
I've lived in four countries on three continents, from third world to first world, and human behavior is pretty constant across all of them.
In this case the person is itself a member of the group, and the statement they made isn't even a generalization to the group at large - just an observation about certain common tendencies seen in it.
Racist remarks against your own people is worse, because not only does it perpetuate discrimination against a group by advancing a narrative about the group ("should we hire from this subgroup prone to x?"), it gives the bigots yet another vector ("even they themselves say it about their subgroup, so it must be true!")
We're on an international forum. Making "observations" like what the original commenter did can only decrease employment opportunities for an already geographically disadvantaged talent. Why do that?
I know. Are you maybe confused? I qualified it that it's not generalization "to the group at large". Not that it's not any kind of generalization at all.
>Racist remarks against your own people is worse, because not only does it perpetuate discrimination against a group by advancing a narrative about the group ("should we hire from this subgroup prone to x?"), it gives the bigots yet another vector ("even they themselves say it about their subgroup, so it must be true!")
Oh, come on. ranger_danger put it perfectly "There can be other valid perspectives than your own. Not everyone is going to agree with your specific definition of what's racism or bigotry or whatever, and not only is that OK, but it's expected, and we shouldn't try to change other people's minds unless they asked for our opinion.".
Trying to tell people their way of thinking is incorrect just because they disagree with you, is not only childish, but such dogmatic thinking is going to alienate you from a large part of society if you cannot learn to get along with people without constantly trying to correct everyone who you think is "wrong."
It really tells you something about US culture, when spotting patterns is now seen as racist or bigoted.
Patterns also can save your life. They are a built-in defense mechanism and many women are taught to ignore them.
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
I don't think it's that easy to go legit. having a tech job nowadays is already a luxury
The only upside here is that criminals will (through legislation) eventually force companies to invest more.
you can build your own skills and develop your own motivation. but if the only funding you can access is illicit, there's one path forward.
or maybe it's ideological. this example seems to be a bit of a geopolitical thing too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D
:-D
Honestly: I Like when implicit political statements form their groups.
NOW give me additional downvotes!! GOGOGOG!!!!!
NEXT ONE!
Give me more downvotes because of missing the HN-political correctness :-))
Looking forward to at least 100+ downvotes, guys!
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).
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.
And there is also a thrill of doing it, which other guys already mentioned.
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.)
Crime really isn’t that much different.
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.