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Comment by ackbar03 | Hacker News Reader

There's actually quite a large Indian hacker community on platforms like hackerone, and when you look at their Twitter profiles, it seems like quite a lot of them are from these remote village type places, which I think is fascinating. This is the first time I've read about mercenary hacker for hire groups from India but I guess it's not surprising.

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I think it's covered in the Dark Basin episode of Darknet Diaries, but India apparently has a reputation for especially aggressive private investigators, who were historically used to dig up dirt on families before committing to marriage pacts, but in the modern era are used regularly for PR and corporate blackmail. Apparently this practice is ingrained enough into the culture that digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/79/

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/06/dark-basin-uncovering-a-massiv...

"digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts."

Well, digging up dirt is also legal in the west, the question is what "any means necessary" is. I cannot believe that it is legal to hack someone for example.

(knowing almost nothing about indian culture) The boundary between what's legal and what's culturally accepted can be pretty broad. Just two days ago a coworker was describing his friend getting arrested for flipping off a cop, and when I pointed out that precedent going back hundreds of years clearly shows the cop abusing their authority to violate the constitution with almost no exceptions (proportionally), they still responded that their friend deserved it and should have known that flipping off a cop wouldn't have any positive outcomes. Culturally, a substantive chunk of the country is totally fine with clamping down on offensiveness, especially if it's directed at people risking their lives to make the country better, despite that not being a part of our legal framework in the slightest.

Similarly, I wouldn't be shocked if "by any means necessary" is also illegal in India but is culturally accepted.

On some level it's no different from the stop-sign culture in California. Almost nobody stops, ever, including the police force, and it results in dozens of deaths annually just in my community. The act is blatantly illegal for good reason, but it still happens out in the open, and it's "not illegal" in the sense that if a person blows a stop sign and the police witness it or are sent a video of the act then there's approximately a 0% chance of any negative repercussions for the perpetrator.

It's interesting, because India is also a hub for these "hacker scams" where so-called hackers on Whatsapp will promise to change your grade, see if your partner is cheating, or get you a pay raise and then run off with your money. I wonder how one is able to tell the difference between actual hacking services and scams claiming to offer the same.

> how one is able to tell the difference...

Easy, you just hire a another hacker/PI to investigate them first...

This seems bizarre to me. Under what context would would it be legitimate for any of those things to occur? A pay raise maybe. But, why would someone (crucial part, here, being someone you don’t know) be negotiating it for you?

I think they are saying they will hack your company and change it, not that they talk to your boss.

There are some good hackers in India, no doubt. But having managed a few bug bounty programs, the majority of submissions from that part of the world are spam. People run vulnerability scanners, count on ignorance on behalf of the company triage teams, or just plain count on being able to badger someone into paying small amounts.

That's interesting. Which country would you say you see/saw the highest signal to noise from?

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