Inside 'Hackerville,' Romania's Infamous Cyber Crime Hub [video]

Social engineering is also a hacking technique

This time has nothing to do with journalism, this is just a Norton campaign[0].

I think they present these scammers as "hackers" (or cyber criminals) only to scare some people, hoping they will buy (their) antivirus.

[0] http://www.mostdangeroustown.com

In fact even the 'notorious' hacker Guccifer wasn't really that much skilled. As per Wikipedia he hacked email accounts by making guesses at security questions.

Heh, at least it's better than them happily typing away at keyboards while wearing ski-masks in a dimly lit room.

I thought Vice was 'good' journalism, turns out they pretty much sensationalise everything :(

This fits in nicely with the general narrative. At one point they portray this guy who they say cost the NASA JPL half a million dollars, whereas he said he merely hacked their email server and asked for a job. My suspicion is that hacking damages are stated in "cop dollars", a wildly arbitrary unit of non-currency. Worth mentioning in this context is also the guy who complains about sitting in a max sec prison for hacking Hillary Clinton's email account, a judicial measure the reporters justify by claiming the damage was so great it plagues Clinton still in the 2016 presidential campaign.

I think this is mostly a social failure. You have this group of moderately skilled young people who do this basically to make ends meet. The majority of them would probably rather take job offers from the companies they compromise.

However, the film also details a lot of low-skill, traditional wire fraud like eBay scamming - which is tangentially related because it's also computer-enabled crime, but happens on an entirely different level that has nothing to do with hacking at all.

The most obnoxious part of the film for me were the priest's soundbites, especially the thing with the bees. Less than nothing was accomplished by adding these weird religious statements to something that is apparently supposed to be a documentary.

Because most of them are just crackers. They use exploits found by real hackers.

There's enough fear going around to power a couple of wars. Fear is such a bad emotion to give in to. Unit testing and agile are definitely not enough for mission critical systems like power grids and other infrastructure and airgapping certainly helps (but we've already seen that it is no guarantee for absolute security).

Why secure designs would be automatically 'expensive' is something I don't understand.

Terrorism is all about using fear for purposes of political pressure, simply don't give in to the fear and you've already won the battle, stay calm and clearheaded.

If terrorists really wanted to destabilize society they could easily do so but it would defeat their purpose, the one thing terrorists want you to be able to do is to continue to communicate and consume media, that's their platform.

> how much do journalists care about the truth vs selling a story?

Not much. And it's the same the world over.

It's weird, I feel like Eastern Europe always gets that kind of lighting when I see something about them in the news or like this.

This is anything but a documentary. It's a repackaged story about things happening 4-5 years ago. I never heard the term "hackerville" in romanian mass-media and I read it daily. If you google it you will see that it's a term coined by journalists to re-sell the same old story: ex-communist slums, "hackers" with russian accent, cyber-crime, dangers everywhere. It started with Wired in 2011, France24 in 2012 and now this..