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> Imagine being the chief compliance officer at DarkSide. People constantly come to you with crimes, and you are commercial, you are like “sure go ahead do that

> Imagine being the chief compliance officer at DarkSide. People constantly come to you with crimes, and you are commercial, you are like “sure go ahead do that crime,” but occasionally you have to stop them and say “no the reputational risk of that crime is too great, we can’t do it,” and the sales reps grumble that you are getting in the way of business. Just like at a bank! https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-11/crypto-markets-are-where-the-fun-is https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-11/crypto...

shadowgovt 5y ago
My understanding of organized crime in general is that this is more-or-less what it looks like. Sustainable organized crime finds a niche and stays in it. It ends up like any other large, long-lived business; optimized for its niche, vulnerable to niche disruption, and conservative about branching out because of the risk of compromise to its core competencies.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Definitely organize crime is just another business. We have this idea that hackers tend to be loose knit groups of people with more moral objectives. While that may have been true twenty years ago like all criminal markets eventually that stopped being the case.
  - indigochill 5y ago
    I don't at all believe it's stopped being the case. The demographics of the hacker community have certainly changed, with a higher degree of polarization between corporate/fed white hats (e.g. people like Mudge) and criminal black hats, but you still have some grey hat vigilantes in the middle like Janit0r, who wrote BrickerBot that went around bricking open IoT devices so that they wouldn't fall prey to Mirai.
  - watwut 5y ago
    It was never like that. If you look at those peoples actions, high moral objective was super rare thing. Case in point: I remember people glorifying veev making him sound like good guy and making his detractors sound like liers. Turned out differently.
deckard1 5y ago
This was a major plot point of the Godfather. Don Corleone wants to stay out of drugs to keep their reputation with police and politicians.
- silexia 5y ago
  We can stop all ransomware by making it too expensive for reasonable people to do business by killing anyone we find creating the software anywhere in the world.

shadowgovt 5y ago

My understanding of organized crime in general is that this is more-or-less what it looks like. Sustainable organized crime finds a niche and stays in it. It ends up like any other large, long-lived business; optimized for its niche, vulnerable to niche disruption, and conservative about branching out because of the risk of compromise to its core competencies.

edgyquant 5y ago
Definitely organize crime is just another business. We have this idea that hackers tend to be loose knit groups of people with more moral objectives. While that may have been true twenty years ago like all criminal markets eventually that stopped being the case.
- indigochill 5y ago
  I don't at all believe it's stopped being the case. The demographics of the hacker community have certainly changed, with a higher degree of polarization between corporate/fed white hats (e.g. people like Mudge) and criminal black hats, but you still have some grey hat vigilantes in the middle like Janit0r, who wrote BrickerBot that went around bricking open IoT devices so that they wouldn't fall prey to Mirai.
- watwut 5y ago
  It was never like that. If you look at those peoples actions, high moral objective was super rare thing. Case in point: I remember people glorifying veev making him sound like good guy and making his detractors sound like liers. Turned out differently.

deckard1 5y ago

This was a major plot point of the Godfather. Don Corleone wants to stay out of drugs to keep their reputation with police and politicians.

silexia 5y ago
We can stop all ransomware by making it too expensive for reasonable people to do business by killing anyone we find creating the software anywhere in the world.