Brian Krebs Investigates Internet's Most Vicious Hackers–From a Secret Location
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://megalodon.jp/ref/2024-1208-1618-52/https://archive.i...
(You might have to zoom using ctrl and + and arrow keys to get the view size right. You might also need to remove some overlaping html elements but hey no javascript ;)))
Before everyone gets scared: this is mostly a US thing.
I know we all like to score free points by dunking on the US, but I'm pretty sure everyone understood that "this is mostly a US thing" already.
It saddens me to see his links posted to aggregators. Most people only know his carefully cultivated image.
And while not doxxing, I think it's relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Krebs#Allegations_of_def...
>One hint some of the accounts belonged to Waifu: He liked to use animated cats as avatars. Other aliases included Meowist, Catist and Scarlet the Meow Cat, according to court filings. “He would say meow all the time. I don’t really know what that’s about,” Krebs said.
I don't think it was Waifu. This was in Austalia after all.
Computers are particularly easy for that age group to learn about, all you really need is internet access to read articles or possibly (pirated) ebooks, and your own computer to experiment on. A lot of kids have both.
Other industries aren't like that, some require expensive and uncommon equipment (biology, chemistry, now AI), some are a lot more dangerous (electronics, DIY), some require interactions with other people to practice (law, medicine, foreign languages), and nobody treats kids seriously enough to interact with them in that way, some have legal restrictions (medicine, driving cars) etc.
It also helps that, to a clueless parent, a kid learning to code is indistinguishable from a kid using their computer to play games, and plenty of kids do that.
Society doesn't let kids get a real programming job, even if they're perfectly capable of doing so, so hacking is often the next best thing. The fact that it's "cool" and that you can do it to impress your peers doesn't help either.
Incidentally, this is also why kids are such good drug dealers.
Or to be topical, Lulzsec and Sabu.
Kids start hacking into gaming accounts...and then one person figures out how to do SIM swapping..and it escalates from there
There's a reason they're doing that and someone like Theo de Raadt is bringing us OpenSSH (and OpenBSD).
In computer security defending is much harder than attacking. It's not even comparable seen how gigantic the gap is.
(dark side) Hacking is easy (and, yes, I did it when I was late teenager/early twenty-ager). Protecting stuff is the hard part.
Defense isn't actually that difficult. 99% is keeping your software updated and configured correctly with industry standards.
Most employees at larger companies are lazy and don't want to take the extra time to make something secure.
The actually talented are few and far between.
It’s hard to do these attacks and get away with it, but actually many of these kids do not get away with it, at least if they are based in Western nations that actually try to stop it. But investigations move slowly and so there is a time gap where it looks like they did.
In other words I think the explanation is as much “young men overestimate their abilities” as it is talent for doing this type of work. Specifically their ability to get away with it.
I really hate cyber security, you would need to pay me a lot of money to work in this field.
that phrasing is odd. "cyber security" is a good thing, no?
They may also have numerous executive function impairments. Such things tend to be orthogonal to IQ.
We probably never read about the competent criminals. Or we do because they framed a "state actor".
I reckon some investigators use stylometry to deanon people.
> That September morning, Krebs didn’t take up Waifu’s chess challenge. “What am I going to do, play him at chess?” he said. “He would have just screenshot what I said and send it to his friends.”