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Does anyone find it funny that each criminal group could have been better off relying on a "kid who knows computers" level of expertise and bog standard devices
by michaelmrose 5y ago
Does anyone find it funny that each criminal group could have been better off relying on a "kid who knows computers" level of expertise and bog standard devices running open source software which at least wouldn't be trivially systematically turned against them all at once quite so easily.
- cylde_frog 5y agoI wonder about this too. What sort of people do international criminal organisations hire to manage their info-sec? A criminal that became a computer expert or a computer expert that became a criminal?
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoCodefellas https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/ https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/
- sumedh 5y agoI would imagine its more of a computer expert who then becomes a criminal because of the money.
- Gibbon1 5y agoYou hire people you can burn is what you do. Shipping coordinators got busted? How sad. Over my life Ive met people who while they seem competent and can tie their shoe laces appear to make bad decisions because they have trouble with judging likely outcomes. Those are the people getting hired to do this sort of work.
- cdogl 5y agoI suspect that people don't fall into such neat categories. You could pose a similar question re: lawyers whose bread and butter is protecting and representing people associated with organised crime (the kind of individuals represented by Maury from The Wire or Neil Mink from The Sopranos). Are they lawyers who developed a slippery version of ethics & morality, or people with loose ethical standards who entered law? I'd bet good money that the truth is usually quite banal: these individuals make a series of small and highly contingent decisions over time that gradually push them in the direction of criminality or culpability, reinforced over time by social & financial reward for doing so.
- liquidify 5y agoWhat? Representing criminals is not unethical or 'immoral'. Period. Protecting criminals legally is not unethical unless you are knowingly doing something illegal yourself. I imagine that most layers are just doing their job and getting paid for it. Bringing morality into that equation makes no sense in a legal system that has little to nothing to do with morality.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoRepresenting criminals is fine, but aiding them in committing future crimes isn’t. If you do that, you’re just part of a criminal conspiracy, and being a lawyer doesn’t give you an exception from moral culpability.
- xwolfi 5y agoDoing their taxes okay, but representing them in court with the goal to free them is the purpose of the justice system...
- remus 5y agoI think the GP meant 'aiding them in commiting future crimes' in the literal sense (e.g. helping launder money, abusing attorney privilege etc.) rather than implying that by defending them in court the lawyer would then be culpable.
- flukus 5y agoWell the criminal organizations can offer a whole range of addictive non-monetary incentives that a computer expert may desire, so I'd guess that's the main path in. There's more unemployed tech people out there than many here realize though. People that don't present well in interviews, people that didn't stay employ-ably current in tech, hardware guys replaced by the cloud, people in less hot locations for tech, etc. Criminal organizations are much less picky and judgmental than your average tech startup and in some cases may be the only one's willing to give them a chance.
- adolph 5y ago> People that don't present well in interviews Those are the worst. There was this one candidate who gave all the interviewers mousepads with his picture and aol email address on it. Who even wants that kind of stuff? The best ones give some candy, like there was someone who gave us gum with a custom printed wrapper “Hope I ‘stick’ in your mind!”
- srmarm 5y agoNever mind people who struggle to get a job in IT because of a previous criminal record. Those people may also have been in prison and made connections while inside.
- Nextgrid 5y agoIn some countries, getting into tech is impossible if you're not lucky to have the right credentials. In France for example, any even remotely technical job will require years of higher education and experience (yes there's an obvious catch-22 here). You can have perfectly serviceable skills that would put you at a junior/mid developer or sysadmin level and be completely unemployable - at this point crime doesn't sound that bad if you have no other alternative despite otherwise having no propensity/attraction to participate in criminal activities. For what it's worth, I would still be completely unemployable in France despite having 7 years of successful commercial experience under my belt in some well-known companies. Thankfully I played my cards right and managed to move to a saner country where tech is still more or less a meritocracy.
- 5y ago
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y agoFrom 2003, an inside look at the mafia IT: https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/ https://www.wired.com/2003/12/mafia/
- worik 5y ago"Organised crime" is a bit of a oxymoron. These people are organised in that they make deals with each other in friend networks. But the people involved are not the sharpest knives in the draw. They get their positions via violence and intimidation more than cunning and planning. There are cleaver crooks, but we do not often hear from them. A lot of them work at Wall Street, which contains the biggest and most profitable criminal gangs
- sbassi 5y agoWatch "Start-up" in Netflix (American version, not the Korean one).
- na85 5y ago"Kids who know computers" are still vulnerable to evil maid attacks and badUSB and stuff. The kid's gotta sleep and eat and do whatever else kids do when they're employed by cartels. There's a reason that classified processing and data storage employs layered physical security too. There's that old saying about what happens when you give someone physical access to the machine.
- XorNot 5y agoStill, the damage is purely local and limited and much more likely to be detected. Human intelligence operations are among the most risky and expensive.
- girvo 5y agoFor what it's worth: some do. Signal (and Wickr) are used extensively.
- mardifoufs 5y agoYep, and for some reason wickr is Imo even more popular than signal in those circles. It's curious since I've basically never heard of wickr here or in any cybersec community & signal seems to be the daily messaging app for tons of people. I guess it's something to do with the phone verification required by Signal... and I'd guess both apps are pretty similar when it comes to security?
- vbezhenar 5y agoI've heard that in Russia and Kazakhstan drug dealers use Telegram. It just might be a local fashion, when few people started using it and spread it around. I don't think that it's difficult to find phone number tied to unrelated person. Just ask some homeless guy to buy one.
- wruza 5y agoWestern naivety. Unbound / fake data SIM cards are sold in boxes by carrier’s employees.
- jeltz 5y agoYou can still buy SIM cards in Sweden in stores without presenting an ID.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoEven in countries where you can still buy a SIM card without ID, once you use your bank card to buy more credit for the SIM (and in Sweden you always will, because cash is basically dead there), it is trivial for the authorities to link the phone number to your real identity.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> anyone find it funny that each criminal group could have been better off relying on a "kid who knows computers" level of expertise and bog standard devices running open source software which at least wouldn't be trivially systematically turned against them all at once quite so easily Tradeoffs. Traditional tradecraft would inhibit such discovery methods. But it's slow and expensive. Your competitors would outmaneuver you in the short term. To enable the "kid who knows computers," you also need to train your people in opsec and digital sanitation. That might similarly be expensive and growth inhibiting enough to invite more daring competition.
- simondotau 5y agoNothing wrong with inhibiting growth in return for long term stability. Does it matter if your competition is more daring—if they aren't going to last very long? If anything, they might serve as a useful distraction.
- hervature 5y agoYes, we are seeing precisely this in action. The short term guided organization has gone down and the long term stable strategy remains uncaught and now has one less competitor.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Nothing wrong with inhibiting growth in return for long term stability For long-term plans to pay off, they must survive a series of short terms. Criminal gangs and dictators don’t ignore the long term because they’re stupid. They ignore them because they must. A drug gang practicing classical tradecraft would be decimated by one coördinating electronically. The latter will be caught faster. But a series of short-term motivated actors is the equilibrium state of illicit and physical trading systems.
- simondotau 5y agoI can't help but imagine that what you're describing are the criminal gangs we know about; the ones which are well documented. If there are criminal gangs which we don't know about, that aren’t well documented, perhaps they're better at maintaining long term stability.
- stef25 5y agoProtip to the cartels - pay top dollar to some world class engineers to setup a dark web market and you'll make buckets. Most if not all markets until now have been run by geeks with limited knowledge and skills, wading in to the criminal underworld and inevitably making rookie mistakes. Both Ross and the guy in Bangkok had their personal emails tied to the markets. Some kids running a big market from Germany connected to the server on their mom's wifi. The list goes on.
- adriancr 5y agoSetting up a dark web market is something most people would want to get anywhere close to... Imagine being responsible for facilitating murder-for-hire, sex trafficking and so on...
- Chris2048 5y agoI'm sure there are plenty of people who wouldn't care. Anyone who buys diamonds has blood on their hands too.
- michaelmrose 5y agoI think there is a material difference between buying a diamond and directly facilitating the activities of the drug cartels. In theory everyone buys things that are made by people in shitty conditions because there isn't much direct visibility on the front end as to what kind of nastiness happened elsewhere in the supply chain. If you want that to change you have to make it illegal to do business with such folks not hope consumers fix it for you via the magic of the market.
- Chris2048 5y agoIt's unclear to me those shitty conditions (e.g. those of iphone manufacture) are net harmful to the poverty-stricken areas they affect - but I'm not sure that's not true of diamonds. I think it's also more jarring that diamonds are otherwise useless symbols of status. At least iphones trickle down in some way (e.g. allowing the proliferation of older gen smartphones even in poor countries).
- worik 5y agoPeople do. Lots of people. These ones, who were busted, are greedy violent thugs. They do not know who to trust because they are untrustworthy. Good riddance to bad rubbish.