A team of sleuths quietly hunting cyberattack-for-hire services

Do security professionals, including government agents, really use Slack to communicate sensitive information about investigations? Do they ever give any thought to the fact that they're delegating storage and retrieval of their communications to a third party SaaS company? I still can't believe most startups use Slack, nevermind the FBI. Surely a group of professionals could setup a self hosted Mattermost or Matrix instance, and avoid the risk of compromise by Salesforce.

> Despite their constant communication, the members of Big Pipes and the FBI are careful to note that the internet services with staff members in the group don’t share their users’ private information without going through the usual legal processes of subpoenas and search warrants. Nor does the FBI share private data with Big Pipes, or blindly arrest or search people based on the group’s leads, Peterson says; the FBI investigates the defendants from scratch, treating information from Big Pipes as it would tips from any source.

If I were a defendant on trial for running a DDoS service, I would ask my lawyer to subpoena Slack for those messages. Now that they've bragged about their parallel construction, it seems fair game to open up their Slack channel to discovery, just to make sure that the FBI really is following the "usual legal process."

I'm also quite surprised that "operators start as customers"

Is it because operators are script kiddies that are "renting" someone elses software, or in effect, operators are just resellers?

This assumption is based on that, if you are someone technical that can create spftware to develop a botnet in the first place, you arent likely to buy it from someone else unless its really not worth your time.

And if indeed script kiddies are resellers of anothers software , what are the costs to rent/buy the malware? And why does the FBI not go after them?