You can go down a really dark rabbit hole if you really dig deep into some of these groups within The Com.
This is where the worst of the worst spend all their time.
The way Krebs uses this first makes it sound like The Com is the name of a specific gang, but when I dig into the details the definition gets really fuzzy and starts to read like it literally just means "English speaking cybercriminals".
If it's the latter, I'm not sure why we need a name for it.
It's just what people who investigate call these crime communities because it easier to just have a general name for all of them then to name each and every one of them because their are literally hundreds of them and members move between them so a single member of "The Com" can be part of many communities within "Com"
It's also distinct in the type of crimes. Sextortion involving young kids/creation and sharing of CSAM merging with extreme political beliefs and encouraging those beliefs, with a specific focus to target young kids particularly those vulnerable enough to not have parents immediately notice. The criminals are often also on the younger side, like 19 year olds leading sex cults[1].
"The Com" goes by other names due to these groups being in a lot of different regions under different monikers and subgroups. 764 network, cvlt network, harm nation, etc. All the same general type of crime and target groups.
Here's some resources warning people about them:
https://rcmp.ca/en/news/2024/08/rcmp-reminds-canadians-about...
https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
[1] https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/sextortion-coms-inside-a-vile...
"The Com" is computer hacking like carding, Kerbs puts them as distinct "crime-focused chat communities" as others have posted - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/the-dark-nexus-between-h...
Kerbs had to go to effort to find overlap between the harm groups and "The Com"
There are groups that attack children and there are groups that attack these groups in "The Com", if you define "The Com" at a higher level.
764 kinda stared in Minecraft, call it the Minecraft community to be safe?
Whatever it is no one from the cybercrime community is suggesting the "The Com" from the article has anything to do with the harm groups.
764 also splintered from a nazi group 09V. Don’t downplay them.
Side note, you might want to reassess some of your views that have you pushing the same sort of propaganda that these groups do.
The part where it would matter.
The "race realist" i.e. racist right likes to point out that there is a lot of overlap between certain racial groups and the criminal underclass. Statistically this is sort of true. Trying to use it to reason about any individual is logically known as the fallacy of division or ecological fallacy and colloquially known as "Nazi stuff". You may want to reassess your views that have you employing the same sort of guilt by association tactics that these groups do.
I am not a DOGE fan particularly and I am certainly very interested in whether this guy was a sextortionist or carder, but I'm not very interested in whether he was in a general scene with them.
> What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?
All of this to say that generations judging each other are rarely objective and very prone to both confirmation bias and broad generalization.
But if are going to generalize, how about this, transgression is part of a healthy growth for most young people (we all test limits by crossing lines one time or an other, some more than others), and most old people (conveniently) forget that they were doing exactly the same with the tools they had at the time. Let's take a step back and appreciate that societies around the world tend to become less violent and less criminal... when these trends might reverse we can start talking again about the decadence of young people and it's consequences.
Also the group is so varied you can’t generalize of what the age group is about. If I think of young person I think of mrbeast or the kids who sit on the road to block the traffic cause they care immensly. I always thought the youth of today just hustle and influence and try to build it themselves and totally lack the ability to chill out. Happy to know there lurks some nihilists somewhere.
Even if it wasn't made up it, it would not be all that relevant IMO because it would not have to mean that "adults have always complained about youth but they always turn out fine", it could also mean "the quality of a society goes up and down over the centuries, in cycles, and both we and Plato/Socrates are/were on a downturn when things started going worse".
And also that "ceteris paribus sic stantibus" might be indispensable for growing scientific approaches, but irreconcilable gaps in world perception between generations is better taken as an anthropological constant across time than a minor insignificant detail.
"There is no single metric" translates pretty much into "there is no objective meaning of life that can be proven".
In most discussions certain things are implied about shared values. E.g., fascism is bad and democracy good (plenty of people seem to disagree with this these days, but much written discussion, e.g. on HN, assume shared values anyway).
I heard a story yesterday from someone who's job involves dynamite. He had a vocational student tag along for a couple of weeks that would constantly stare at his phone and not pay any attention, causing some dangerous or at least inconvenient situations.
If you step enough back, who can say it is "bad" to get yourself blown up to pieces because you are too TikTok addicted to look around you? In everyday language we assume enough shared values to say this is "bad" though.
That seems a rather robust baseline, if "objective" means something like "absolute certainty on which we can practically leverage on to reach absolute understanding of everything we might have to deal with". That is, it’s one thing to admit there are some universal truths, it’s an other very different faith step to believe any human can ever be able to construct anything close to the latter.
>fascism is bad and democracy good (plenty of people seem to disagree with this these days, but much written discussion, e.g. on HN, assume shared values anyway).
I’m afraid that I observe the very same tendency in values evolution (I live in France for some context). Though contrary to what this threads focus on, I’m far more concerned with the extreme views that the oldest people in my acquaintances are moving to. No Tiktok on that side, but TV rolling news channel are not that much better. Probably my own HN addiction could be pointed at me just as well.
>In everyday language we assume enough shared values to say this is "bad" though.
Sure we agree here, but just because we assume something, it doesn’t make us correct and accurate.
The seedier parts of the internet (“dark web”) are surprisingly easy to access. It’s just about equivalent to knowing about torrents. (Not safe for life warning)
Oh no, Musk hired someone from "The Com"!
From Europol:
> Violent online groups are targeting and manipulating vulnerable children and young people across widely accessible online platforms. There are multiple groups, associations and evolving subgroups that make up the online network known as The Com – short for community. The Com is a virtual community of groups and individuals who conduct illicit activities that glorify serious violence, cruelty, and gore.
> Elements of The Com network are known to have extreme ideological views and victimise children, coercing them to commit violent acts. Predators groom their victims through different methods – one approach is establishing friendships based on trust or romantic relationships. Another technique involves the use of power or coercive tactics with one goal – taking control over the victims, while getting them to engage in serious violence, self-harm, or other gruesome. It’s a vicious cycle - the predators in this network influence children or young people into conducting acts that increasingly shame, incriminate, or isolate them, this in turn makes them more vulnerable to further exploitation.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/law-...
> “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said during an April 2022 (talking of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025)
> “I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said in the opening moments of his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. “That’s out there. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.”
it's not one coherent group but a mix of them, sometimes overlapping but often not. they hangout in the same spaces, sometimes, but also not.
The mob mentality of rule following software engineers on here who are throwing out the accusation that these are all hardened criminals that want to burn down society here are a testament to the fact that hackernews is a cesspool of careerists. If you haven't ventured down these, I would even argue that you've no idea how the internet actually functions outside of your usual entertainment holes.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Com
Maybe Urban Dictionary is also populated by people who misunderstand the community, or maybe you weren't as deep as you thought.
I would tend to expect that if OP is right that there's more nuance to Coms and it's not primarily about crime, there would be at least one alternate definition, because, as you note, anyone can make a definition there, and it's emphatically not a site dominated by the HN bubble.
That there is no alternate says that the crime-centric understanding of Coms is the primary one on at least one other site that doesn't match OP's stereotype.
Do you really think that anything would meaningfully change in the world if these little niche communities disappeared tomorrow? They’re a rounding error on the internet.
https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/the-dark-nexus-between-h...
and some of it is some real depraved shit: https://www.maargentino.com/the-pillars-of-the-com-network/
Some of us are old enough to know that none of this is new.
No one is saying these are "hardened" criminals, but none of them care about the consequences of what they are participating in and that is just as disqualifying for public service.
Why do you assume that they have to be smart to commit cyber crimes? As a general rule, most criminals are as dumb if not dumber than most regular people. Cyber crime is no different. Consider that cyber crime is not (just) hacking, it includes things like calling someone's grandma to convince her she needs to wire you $40k now or someone might go to prison for a car accident. Or at least texting this over WhatsApp.