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I honestly believe eastern Europe and possibly Israel are years ahead of the United States when it comes to the Internet - not with regard to adaptivity, but wi

I honestly believe eastern Europe and possibly Israel are years ahead of the United States when it comes to the Internet - not with regard to adaptivity, but with regard to raw hacking ability. I have yet to understand why and I only have anecdotal evidence (including living in Ukraine), but there's something to those places that make them breed hackers.

staunch 13y ago
They can't easily get jobs that pay them well, the way most programmers in the West can. People really good at security in the US just get a job making a great salary.
- dmazin 13y ago
  This is a very believable explanation.
- skolor 13y ago
  Its also more dangerous in the US. Since the majority of major web apps are hosted in the US, if you're in the US it is easy for the app's owners to go after you legally. It gets much more complicated if you're in another country. For example, if weev had been in eastern Europe, it would make it much more difficult for ATT to go after him.
- bluedino 13y ago
  You don't even have to be 'good at security' to get a job making great salary - just a clearance and maybe a certification or two.
INTPenis 13y ago
Raw hacking ability I believe is defined loosely by a very strict early mathmetical education. I'm slavic but I was raised in Sweden, visits with family in the balkans always leave me surprised at the strict education children go through. Of course, my only perspective is from small country villages, not cities.
notphilatall 13y ago
I've always figured (at least for former soviet states) that it's a combination of: + a rigorous STEM curriculum + limited conventional job prospects + a social/business environment in which exploit-selling is a respectable profession
- agravier 13y ago
  Can you tell why you know that? Is that knowledge from personal experience?
  - oddx 13y ago
    From my personal experience I can confirm p. 1, totally disagree with p.2 (there are plenty of good and well payed jobs for IT specialists in xUSSR countries). About p.3 - exploit-selling is not a respectable profession, but in recent 20 years people have seen too many examples of people becoming rich by illegal and dirty ways and this definitely did bad influence.
2pasc 13y ago
In Israel, military service is compulsory for all men when they are 18 years old. The best hackers in the country are detected and lured into cyberwarfare positions where they need to be the best cyber attackers in the world for 3 years. You bet that these guys are among the best in the world.
- mtoddh 13y ago
  Interesting, I remember reading that the hacker (jsz) who helped Kevin Mitnick back in the day with the IP spoofing attack against Shimomura's computer was from Israel as well.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- devcpp 13y ago
  The IDF's ICT unit also has a very large budget (it's actually the only unit with an increasing budget despite a 2 billion overall budget drop), and with access to all kinds of technologies that only a government can afford. When the engineers get out of there, they know things that few people know about.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    Yep. This is why many people believe that Stuxnet was developed by Israel - it was so advanced that only a country like that could have done it.
    - sumzup 13y ago
      According to Snowden it was co-written by Israel and the US.
- crag 13y ago
  "military service is compulsory for all men when they are 18 years old." Not correct. All men (and women) except those in a Yeshiva (religious school). As I understated it, they can post-pone their enlistment indefinitely. I also understand this is a touchy subject in Israel right now.
mathattack 13y ago
Could it also be that the US hackers are just as visible? They could be quietly recruited by the government when they get caught.
waterlesscloud 13y ago
It feels like it's been that way for at least a couple of decades. In the early years of PC viruses it seemed like all the innovation was coming out of eastern Europe.
- xtracto 13y ago
  And before that, I remember that (at least in Mexico) there was the idea that the USSR had the best people in mathematics and chess.
malkia 13y ago
Speaking as bulgarian, my guess is that the eastern block countries were limited to the amount of software/hardware that could be sold in the countries due to Cocom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoCom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoCom ) and this possibly brought a whole generation of people that became good at reverse engineering, but most likely also at whole culture that thinks it's okay to reverse engineer almost everything... One of my friend's mother worked at bulgarian shop that all they did was to translate Norton Commander into russian (basically hex editing here and there), and then it was sold on the russian market. We had up to 1988-1989 a bulgarian company that was selling bootlegged games under their own name (yes I bought Karateka from them, and it worked on the bootlegged Pravetz-8C - a.k.a Apple ][/c). But it doesn't stop there - you can (or at least back in the days) find people living in the same apartment building that were able to fix your TV, car, radio, etc. without calling technician. My father regularly fixed TV sets of neighbors for no money (he's an ex military engineer - worked in radio-location) But then it was something about russian, or eastern block made hardware - you take any plane, car, tank, radio, etc. - you can open it yourself and start hacking, replace parts, etc. - e.g. even the own-made products were meant to be hackable. Now this is according to my father, who told me that it was much easier to fix russian produced military vehicles than anything else. The I-fix-it culture was really thriving, and some thanks to the "communism" (there was never such thing), but lots of kids got free education since 1st grade in computer science, hardware, rocketry, train modeling. The magazines were so cheap (and printed out on cheap paper) - that you can buy dozen of them full with models, etc. This is no longer the case (I've been living in USA since 1999, but visit my own Bulgaria almost every year). I wish some of the days are back, but I knew that it was utopia we lived.... Well take it with a grain of salt, typing this while on vacation from my lovely Bulgaria :)
- antimora 13y ago
  +1 for Karateka and Pravetz-8C which was my first computer =)
- Keyframe 13y ago
  Same reason as why demo coders from amiga, c64 and other limited systems are premier coders today. Limited financial and hardware resources make you shine in all kind of situations.
paganel 13y ago
I'm from Eastern Europe myself, and while I know it's anecdotal only, from living for one year in the same dorm-room with a guy like the ones described in the article all I can say it's that it was not about the money (at least not 14 years ago, when I was still a freshman) but more about "hey, I want to see what this piece of closed-source software is actually all about! How can I crack it?". It also "helped" that we were generally quite poor (we still are, comparetavily) and so it made "economic sense" to spend days and days tweaking with assembly code and what-have-you in order not to pay $4.99 for a crappy music player or something similar, and in the process acquiring quite a bit of knowledge (much more valuable) about how such things work. And the guy I started talking about now works for a pretty important anti-virus company , he's one of the most gifted hackers I've ever met.
z-factor 13y ago
Speaking from personal experience (Ukraine). There are plenty of job opportunities and the coders are relatively even more overpaid than in the West, so that's not the reason. The real reason I believe is that people mostly can do this with impunity. There's very little being done for prevent or prosecute credit card fraud. In Ukraine and Russia CCs are still used very little, so this fraud hurts "the West" which is mostly seen as a good thing by the general population. Rampant piracy is practically encouraged for the same reason. Of course this creates a barrier for doing legitimate business online. For example PayPal simply does not allow merchant accounts from Ukraine and Russia to reduce fraud. These countries are the safe haven for hosting illegal content etc. It would benefit local programmers to clean up the reputation of the country and to my great annoyance people just do not realize this. Crooks are accepted as keynote speakers at business conferences etc (they do make money, so what's the problem?)
smtddr 13y ago
> I have yet to understand why and I only have anecdotal evidence (including living in Ukraine), but there's something to those places that make them breed hackers. Or maybe it's just USA that's good at breeding anger and revenge-driven people all over the world. ;)
- meowface 13y ago
  Well, Eastern European cybercriminals typically go after companies worldwide; there usually isn't a particular focus on America. That's in contrast to China.
bluedino 13y ago
I've heard theories that it's as simple as they had older and slower machines, so they thought more carefully about not just the code they were writing but about the machine it was running on as well. In the end, they end up gaining a better understanding than 'spoiled' programmers in the west who could afford to compile, run, edit, compile, run... There's also the theory that they don't have as much to do, at least not as many distractions.
kayoone 13y ago
From my experience with employees who originally came from russia to germany is that they were all pretty smart... most of them were also really good at chess for example, so i guess its something about the education there...seems to be quite math heavy

staunch 13y ago

They can't easily get jobs that pay them well, the way most programmers in the West can. People really good at security in the US just get a job making a great salary.

dmazin 13y ago
This is a very believable explanation.
skolor 13y ago
Its also more dangerous in the US. Since the majority of major web apps are hosted in the US, if you're in the US it is easy for the app's owners to go after you legally. It gets much more complicated if you're in another country. For example, if weev had been in eastern Europe, it would make it much more difficult for ATT to go after him.
bluedino 13y ago
You don't even have to be 'good at security' to get a job making great salary - just a clearance and maybe a certification or two.

INTPenis 13y ago

Raw hacking ability I believe is defined loosely by a very strict early mathmetical education. I'm slavic but I was raised in Sweden, visits with family in the balkans always leave me surprised at the strict education children go through. Of course, my only perspective is from small country villages, not cities.

notphilatall 13y ago

I've always figured (at least for former soviet states) that it's a combination of: + a rigorous STEM curriculum + limited conventional job prospects + a social/business environment in which exploit-selling is a respectable profession

agravier 13y ago
Can you tell why you know that? Is that knowledge from personal experience?
- oddx 13y ago
  From my personal experience I can confirm p. 1, totally disagree with p.2 (there are plenty of good and well payed jobs for IT specialists in xUSSR countries). About p.3 - exploit-selling is not a respectable profession, but in recent 20 years people have seen too many examples of people becoming rich by illegal and dirty ways and this definitely did bad influence.

2pasc 13y ago

In Israel, military service is compulsory for all men when they are 18 years old. The best hackers in the country are detected and lured into cyberwarfare positions where they need to be the best cyber attackers in the world for 3 years. You bet that these guys are among the best in the world.

mtoddh 13y ago
Interesting, I remember reading that the hacker (jsz) who helped Kevin Mitnick back in the day with the IP spoofing attack against Shimomura's computer was from Israel as well.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
devcpp 13y ago
The IDF's ICT unit also has a very large budget (it's actually the only unit with an increasing budget despite a 2 billion overall budget drop), and with access to all kinds of technologies that only a government can afford. When the engineers get out of there, they know things that few people know about.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Yep. This is why many people believe that Stuxnet was developed by Israel - it was so advanced that only a country like that could have done it.
  - sumzup 13y ago
    According to Snowden it was co-written by Israel and the US.
crag 13y ago
"military service is compulsory for all men when they are 18 years old." Not correct. All men (and women) except those in a Yeshiva (religious school). As I understated it, they can post-pone their enlistment indefinitely. I also understand this is a touchy subject in Israel right now.

mathattack 13y ago

Could it also be that the US hackers are just as visible? They could be quietly recruited by the government when they get caught.

waterlesscloud 13y ago

It feels like it's been that way for at least a couple of decades. In the early years of PC viruses it seemed like all the innovation was coming out of eastern Europe.

xtracto 13y ago
And before that, I remember that (at least in Mexico) there was the idea that the USSR had the best people in mathematics and chess.

malkia 13y ago

Speaking as bulgarian, my guess is that the eastern block countries were limited to the amount of software/hardware that could be sold in the countries due to Cocom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoCom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoCom ) and this possibly brought a whole generation of people that became good at reverse engineering, but most likely also at whole culture that thinks it's okay to reverse engineer almost everything... One of my friend's mother worked at bulgarian shop that all they did was to translate Norton Commander into russian (basically hex editing here and there), and then it was sold on the russian market. We had up to 1988-1989 a bulgarian company that was selling bootlegged games under their own name (yes I bought Karateka from them, and it worked on the bootlegged Pravetz-8C - a.k.a Apple ][/c). But it doesn't stop there - you can (or at least back in the days) find people living in the same apartment building that were able to fix your TV, car, radio, etc. without calling technician. My father regularly fixed TV sets of neighbors for no money (he's an ex military engineer - worked in radio-location) But then it was something about russian, or eastern block made hardware - you take any plane, car, tank, radio, etc. - you can open it yourself and start hacking, replace parts, etc. - e.g. even the own-made products were meant to be hackable. Now this is according to my father, who told me that it was much easier to fix russian produced military vehicles than anything else. The I-fix-it culture was really thriving, and some thanks to the "communism" (there was never such thing), but lots of kids got free education since 1st grade in computer science, hardware, rocketry, train modeling. The magazines were so cheap (and printed out on cheap paper) - that you can buy dozen of them full with models, etc. This is no longer the case (I've been living in USA since 1999, but visit my own Bulgaria almost every year). I wish some of the days are back, but I knew that it was utopia we lived.... Well take it with a grain of salt, typing this while on vacation from my lovely Bulgaria :)

antimora 13y ago
+1 for Karateka and Pravetz-8C which was my first computer =)
Keyframe 13y ago
Same reason as why demo coders from amiga, c64 and other limited systems are premier coders today. Limited financial and hardware resources make you shine in all kind of situations.

paganel 13y ago

I'm from Eastern Europe myself, and while I know it's anecdotal only, from living for one year in the same dorm-room with a guy like the ones described in the article all I can say it's that it was not about the money (at least not 14 years ago, when I was still a freshman) but more about "hey, I want to see what this piece of closed-source software is actually all about! How can I crack it?". It also "helped" that we were generally quite poor (we still are, comparetavily) and so it made "economic sense" to spend days and days tweaking with assembly code and what-have-you in order not to pay $4.99 for a crappy music player or something similar, and in the process acquiring quite a bit of knowledge (much more valuable) about how such things work. And the guy I started talking about now works for a pretty important anti-virus company , he's one of the most gifted hackers I've ever met.

z-factor 13y ago

Speaking from personal experience (Ukraine). There are plenty of job opportunities and the coders are relatively even more overpaid than in the West, so that's not the reason. The real reason I believe is that people mostly can do this with impunity. There's very little being done for prevent or prosecute credit card fraud. In Ukraine and Russia CCs are still used very little, so this fraud hurts "the West" which is mostly seen as a good thing by the general population. Rampant piracy is practically encouraged for the same reason. Of course this creates a barrier for doing legitimate business online. For example PayPal simply does not allow merchant accounts from Ukraine and Russia to reduce fraud. These countries are the safe haven for hosting illegal content etc. It would benefit local programmers to clean up the reputation of the country and to my great annoyance people just do not realize this. Crooks are accepted as keynote speakers at business conferences etc (they do make money, so what's the problem?)

smtddr 13y ago

> I have yet to understand why and I only have anecdotal evidence (including living in Ukraine), but there's something to those places that make them breed hackers. Or maybe it's just USA that's good at breeding anger and revenge-driven people all over the world. ;)

meowface 13y ago
Well, Eastern European cybercriminals typically go after companies worldwide; there usually isn't a particular focus on America. That's in contrast to China.

bluedino 13y ago

I've heard theories that it's as simple as they had older and slower machines, so they thought more carefully about not just the code they were writing but about the machine it was running on as well. In the end, they end up gaining a better understanding than 'spoiled' programmers in the west who could afford to compile, run, edit, compile, run... There's also the theory that they don't have as much to do, at least not as many distractions.

kayoone 13y ago

From my experience with employees who originally came from russia to germany is that they were all pretty smart... most of them were also really good at chess for example, so i guess its something about the education there...seems to be quite math heavy