On the consumer side it's definitely global, but on the productive side it's somewhat unique. Eastern Europe had an odd combination of having a lot of cracked p

On the consumer side it's definitely global, but on the productive side it's somewhat unique. Eastern Europe had an odd combination of having a lot of cracked programmers and scientific culture combined with really crappy economics, so you had a lot of illicit, hacky solutions at a surprisingly high and professional level. Take Sci-Hub for example. That you have a Soviet Kazakh girl who had been coding from ten years old start a platform like this because she was broke and it's still going is a very stereotypical EE story. Places in the USSR or adjacent Soviet sphere, like Bulgaria, which had a very strong computer industry and technical culture but also were isolated from the West had this weird combination of high tech, communist or academic ethos and improvised solutions, that didn't really happen in a lot of other places. Probably accounts for the concentration of pretty sophisticated cybercrime in the region these days too.