Slashdot Mirror
Russians Claim Their Hackers the Best In the World
Ant writes "ZDNet UK reports that Russians who once hacked for fun are now teaming up to get rich through cybercrime, according to police. The Russian cybercrime division, known as Department K, has warned that Russian hackers are the best in the world. From the article: 'Everyone knows that Russians are good at math...Our software writers are the best in the world, that's why our hackers are the best in the world.'"
...they lost the ACM contest to the Chinese.
I guess by "best" they mean "second best."
In the post-9/11 world, Soviet Russians hack you! Sorry.
This story should be flagged -1 flamebait.
I mean, seriously... back in the days of Soviet Russia (must resist), there used to be propaganda that claimed that a Russian invented the lightbulb, and other stuff like that.
This is no better than American Patroitism. As an American, let me say that we are NOT the best country in the world, and that any time we say that we are, we sound as silly as the russians here.
Anyway, I'd loooove to hear what the Chinese hackers have to say about this.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
...why does their economy suck so much ass?
I belong to the ______ generation.
crackers?
'our hackers are the best in the world.'
A lot of script kiddies claim that..
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
And the Russian police is the best in the world, in corrupcy !
Oh, sure, their economy's in the crapper, crime is out of control, Chechen terrorists attack Moscow every now and again, the political scene is split between nationalist authoritarians and communist authoritarians, poverty's no better than under Soviet conditions, and AIDS is ballooning in the nation, but damn it, their hackers are top notch!
It's a common scheme of blackmailing a site that you DDOS. You offer to call off the bots if they pay. A lot of companies are having problems with this these days.
Yeah ok, I think not enough of your have witnessed the glory of Goldeneye. As Borris clearly demonstrated, "I am inveincible!" And so it is.
All they need is an IBM computer with 14.400 bps modem 2x cd-rom and and a lot of cigarettes. That's it!
No no.. I know. You say, what about babe.. but no. The 2x cd-rom is what made it magic.
In school you couldn't hack mathematics.
In Soviet Russia, mathematicians hack YOU!
(apologies, but it's been a while since anyone observed proper form for Soviet Russia-jokes :-)
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
... Russian Mafia-driven identity/credit card fraud against Americans and citizens of other perceived (note I said "perceived") well to do nations.
:(
These Russian hackers will get the top dollar from the Russian mob, and second to them will be the foreign call/data center workers who have access to foreign outsourced financial/medical data. The hackers will be much more reliable foot soldiers than call/data center workers.
Look to the Russian mafia and their hacker flunkies to be in competition with US criminals and Al Qaeda archetypes as the primary causes of global cybercrime.
BTW this isn't meant to be a troll against Russians, Russians as a whole are no more or less cool than the rest of the world... but the Soviet Union did fall apart and their ultra high tech stuff did scatter to the 4 winds, at least 2 of those winds being the Russian Mob...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
-1 meme-bait.
I bet that article will read "CHINESE hackers best in the world" in a coupla hours :)
And yet, the editors got exactly what they wanted from you:
1.) You clicked "Read More" and gave them an ad-view.
2.) You posted to the article, increasing the discussion size and therefore the general activity of the article, which lets them charge higher rates for advertisers.
Do you think these kinds of flamebait articles are posted because it's "Stuff That Matters?"
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/edu_mat_lit
1. Japan 557
2. Korea, South 547
3. New Zealand 537
4. Finland 536
5. Australia 533
6. Canada 533
7. Switzerland 529
8. United Kingdom 529
9. Belgium 520
10. France 517
11. Austria 515
12. Iceland 514
13. Denmark 514
14. Sweden 510
15. Ireland 503
16. Norway 499
17. Czech Republic 498
18. United States 493
19. Germany 490
20. Hungary 488
The geek version of penis envy.
you pick a shady operation operated by a shady person who doesn't look to be too computer literate.
typically you would pick an illegal investment schemes site(internet is FULL of these - there's so many that you wouldn't believe all equally illegal and equally shady and equally based on the ponzi principle of paying the first from money the people who came in later 'invested'). then you dos it for a day and ask for small enough sum that they will pay(say, 1000$ or whatever). when they're shady enough they won't even go the cops.
do it once a week and you could live like a king in russia.
also, probably a lot of non-russian hackers use russian proxies to cover their tracks.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This is Russian law enforcement, that marvel of the 21st century, speaking.
Their logic is probably that because the Russian Police are so good, the fact that there are so many uncaught Russian hackers must mean that the Russian hackers are the best!
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
This is a result of "former-superforce" sympthom. We were strong (and ugly) and everyone was scared of us. And now nobody gives a damn. It is sometimes scary to see, how many people in Russia think that the main thing for us is too kick the world's ass again (and totally forget about such "small" things as broken economy, personal wealth and Putin's regime). I'm Russian myself, but sometimes I'm so ashamed of beeing one :-(
And some facts
1. Majority of best russian programmers / hackers now work abroad (mostly in US and Europe).
2. Quality of Russian education degraded terribly in the past 5-8 years, so there will be no NEW good programmers.
Go figure...
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
Opposition in Russia don't have any chance to get into TV, and Internet is the only media space they have. So Russian authorities say, "Look, these hackers are going to steal your money !!! We have to conrol as much as we can to stop this !!!". Nothing new, as for me.
PS. AFAIK (and I am Ukrainian), professional level of Russian ( and Ukrainian) programmers/hackers/crackers isn't differ too much from world's average. Claiming than "We are the best" is so silly ...
In your face Germany and Hungary! USA! USA!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
.. that said that 90% of programmers think that their programming skills are in the 1% top percent compared to others.
;)
Cleary the russian don't lack such a hybris
That's, no offense, bullshit. I can tell you first hand that the whole soviet block had a school system which is, sad to say, head and shoulder above anything the western world has to offer.
Their society had many faults, and their model didn't work in the long run. But it did stuff people with knowledge, and most importantly it motivated them to learn instead of just being the cool dumb jock or the skinny airhead.
1. Their whole school system was not an exercise in "let's have it at a level where everyone can understand it without effort." The whole school system was a merciless exercise in stuffing people with knowledge that maybe 10% fully understood in any particular subject, and noone could be good in all.
The eastern block school system had in effect, the same function as speed-binning CPUs in a factory has. They kept cranking up the level to see at which point you break. It was a filter to determine how much each can learn.
E.g., they never had a watered-down "science class" at any level. They started in elementary school with real physics and chemistry. By the last year of high school, they'd do quantum physics and advanced organic chemistry. And in maths you'd be surprised how early they got dragged into differentials, integrals and matrices.
Their inter-school contests, called "olympics" for some reason, were supposed to further filter the best of the best. Preparing for a physics "olympics" in high school involved physics manuals from Berkeley and other western universities. Again, they learned that in _high_ _school_.
2. More importantly, they had a helluva lot of incentive to actually learn.
See, your place in society was determined by your grades. E.g., at the end of university they'd be sorted by grades and have a go at selecting where they want to work, from a big list of available jobs nation-wide. I.e., if you did well, you could pick a job anywhere you wanted, while if you barely had passed, you'd pretty much be guaranteed to get a job in some forgotten village at the far end of the map.
Finding a job by personal networking and family friends was a lot harder than in the west. And it was regarded as the blatant corruption and nepotism that it really is. You needed really important friends to pull that kinda thing. (Being drinking pals with a low level team leader didn't even start to count as as a chance. Being a relative of a director or party official, maybe.)
Also wages were planned by the state, and pretty much determined by how much learning was involved in getting that job. E.g., an electronics engineer or doctor would get a lot better paid than a plumber.
3. The whole message society gave their students is "being smart is _good_". Being able to do well in that school system was a thing of pride, not a reason to be ridiculed as a nerd.
And you know why? Precisely because of the above. _Everyone_, including your cool classmates or your girlfriend _knew_ that grades translate directly into salary. The cool jock or the cool prom-queen airhead were cool and all, but everyone knew that they're gonna be the ones who barely scrape a living. (Unless, see above, they happened to be relatives of someone _really_ important. Not many had their luck.) So they had a helluva lot fewer admirers.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Isn't most hacking more to do with 'social engineering' and thinking your way around obsticles than actual hardcore programming or math?
Programmers are common, im sure given enough info any well matured programmer could write an exploitative piece of code...it's finding the holes that's the real skill...no?
Don't worry, I'm sure GP meant "corrupcy" as a corruption of the word corruption. Or something ...
Anyways, reminds me of a joke that was doing the rounds during the Cold War in India. An American, Russian and Indian cop meet up at an international police conference. They get to bragging about their respective police forces.
"Y'know, back home in Texas, if a man commits a crime, he'll be safely in custody by the next day. We're that good."
The Russian laughs, and says, "Next day?? Comrade, in Soviet Russia, the KGB track everybody so well, that if somebody commits a crime we know who, what and why, and have arrested the criminal that very day itself!"
Not to be outdone, the Indian cop laughs in turn. "I can't believe how lazy you are in the First World", he says, "In India, the police are paid to hush up a crime WEEKS in advance!"
The best band since the beatles. Yeah, rrright.
We did. When those who made the calculations published them, they were variously shot/imprisoned/starved to death.
"American kids in my opinion are often more well rounded at youth" That would be the steady stream of Big Macs and chocolate they consume. =P
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
Note that this survey only includes OECD member countries, of which there are 31. Notice the suspicious absense of China, India, Russia, none of which are OECD members. There are 271 recognised administrative divisions in the world, not 31. Think about this intuitively.
As soon as I saw the word Russia in the title, I knew it was an inevitability. If you didn't do it, someone else would have.
Therefore, in Soviet Russia, forgiveness for the corny post finds you (!)
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
At least they have the best online music store in the world. That's got to count for something.
Some of the best comp sci people Ive ever worked with came from Romania and Russia (I am Austrian btw. have been groing up in the west).
I guess one reason for that is, the prolongued, we have to code lots of stuff in assembler period, which was way over in 1990 in our countries, most of them had to wait until 1995 until the situation was at the point they could afford better stuff.
The other thing is, that unlike the west, who has been celebrating half criminal business people and even more criminal laywers as heroes and basically has been slamming technical people since the mid eighties as freaks, nerds and whatever, in the old soviet union (which was until 1990) mathematicians and technical people were very highly regarded and it was a good career path (my current girlfriend had a father who worked in nuklear research and a mother who basically was a computer technitian) for both genders.
Things have changed by now as well, but that those things are still sort of a aftermath of those years. The reason why the SU never took off technically was because of the communists who basically had the researchers but lacked the mentality and the funds to give them a breeding ground for ideas, also my personal guess is that many of them were thrown into jail as well once they started to criticize the system, which always happens with intelligent people (one of the reasons why a downgoing society starts to beat the bright ones, who usually dont have the mentality to fight back, because they scare the ones in power).
Over here we have different problems, and it sort of is a wonder that we came that far, because the treatment the techies have been given generally is not that good, we probably will see the aftermaths of the current, we dont develop anything we just buy the stuff period in a few years, when the first corporations will crumble because they have become obsolete brands which will be slowly replaced by once outsourcing companies.
(I hear the Klingon translation is also quite good.)
Just an aside, as i have no direct experience of Soviet school systems (though for the top streams i think you are pretty close) . .
:) and those who really couldn't absorb the pressure and were carried along - very effectively - by the overall educational strength of the place. You couldn't be there and not learn, I assure you.
.
:-)
:-)
I was taught at a school here in the UK which effectively speed binned students. You VERY quickly got a layer cake of aptitudes and attitudes.
Speed binning (I like that phrase you coined for education) is incredibly efficient IF all you want is to showw off with stars. It also creates some very complex characters. We also bombed through high level math very fast, e.g., had fantastic teachers who owere intense, and actually enjoyed it. But you had three distinct strata (gross simplification) - those who absorbed the strain and were pushed more and more until they lacked any social skill at all, those who cruised and tried to game the system (i was one of those, huh, so that's why i read Slashdot
But i characterise this as the difference between Intelligent, Smart and Proto-Genius. In the last caategory, when 4 "A Levels" were normal, friends of mine took on as many as twelve in the same period. And passed (pass for this place was 85% and above), and thought it quite the regular thing.
But when it boils down to whether my school prepared anyone for anything outside its walls, I am less sure. That's being diplomatic. I was intimately involved with some of the fallout from that pressure . .
Speed Binning people leads to people being in the bin.
If he wasn't snoring I'd say that to the Russian engineer asleep on my couch right now - a confused casualty i believe of the same approach when he was in school. Well, if you call ending up in advertising a punishment
To the abovev poster, NO grades do not translate directly into salary. Maybe they do if you exist within a confined and structured path from Grade School through Colledge and recruitment . . . maybe. My experience - some of the "dumbest" (N.B. quotes) guys i went to school with haul salaries that put the Proto-Genii in shame. Sorry, no direct correlation, because you assume all is C.P. Pressure changes characters. The secret to any educational system is to provide the social structure wherein the talented can work together over a long period of time. THAT is crucial to the sucess of the Soviet system - engineers who worked together, lived together, studied together. At least in my brief life i do not think there is such a structure available today. Communism removed many of the barriers to organising such intellectual labor, by removing marketplace constraints and the disruption of commerce on talented employees.
I think you lack somee understanding of the processes involved, particularly in the Soviet planning system, and maybe should look closer too at how things are where you are. I sincerely hope you can drive a truck through my quickly worded comments, but in my defense this si an area which has touched me and fascinated me, not least because i saw the casualties of speed binning young talent up close, and became fascinated not to make the same mistakes with my kids.
p.s. just a unfounded thought, but nerds are nerds the world around. i do however have a fairly decent amount of (often anecdotal) evidence that Soviet education created a lot more female (and pretty) nerds than did the UK or US systems. Education is about growing, and that's a LOT easier when you have abunch of chicks you can talk to
(sorry too lazy to fix typos)
Government official: "Russia has the ${SUPERLATIVE} ${SKILL}ers in the world! Now, please to be watchink while we're going to collectively ignore this wonderful asset, and instead of introducing initiatives to aide the growth in this area, we're going to stuff our pockets with free money while bickering with our opponents."
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
The US has a great deal of anti-intellectualism. In Eastern Europe, you can be proud to study math. People respect it. In China, working hard is seen for what it is: a way to the top.
In the US, a math PhD is an egghead, and someone who studies too much is a workaholic and a nerd.
We start to move beyond this backwards line of thought, maybe a tiny bit, when we're older - particularly when we're among intelligent people. But generally adults are nearly as silly and superficial as adolescents, and less changes than you'd like: By the time you're 18, you've already been socialized with society's values.
Americans respect beer and money. What would happen if insted we respected thought?
When all the western world installed Windows 3.0 on their shiny new 386's, most soviet programmers had to stick with EC-1840, a stolen version of the 8086. :).
If you wanted your program to run at all on that 4.7Mhz machine, you had to write it in assembly.
Programmers at state-owned, bankrupt companies would organize contests among themselves: who writes the most destructive virus in 3 hours, wins a bottle of vodka.
No wonder they are good hackers...
Who would refuse a bottle of good vodka if all you have to do is code a couple hundred lines in assembly
Some of the most fun games of recent times come from old soviet countries while america got EA games.
Most spam and popups are for american products while the best serials and no-cd sites are in russia.
Saying that russia has the best hackers is pure flamebait BUT it is not entirely without reason. It reminds me a lot of the argument wich space program was/is best. The americans beat themselves on the chest with the fact they went to the moon and the space shuttle can carry a lot of people while Mir was falling apart. Any sensible person will remark that the moon missions have stopped, that the space shuttle is also the most lethal space vehicle if not the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series and that Mir for all its creakiness stayed up for years and years and never killed anyone.
A lot of cybercrime comes from countries were the law enforces got better things to worry about then some rich foreigners getting ripped off. Are russians better at it then anyone else? Maybe but that is hardly something to boast about.
On the other hand we the supposed better west are only hurting ourselves when we laugh of these russian claims. Russian space program is still beating the west even with their ruined economy (how many russians been killed in space since the collapse of the soviet union vs american casualities? Who is currently keeping the international space station up and running?). A whole country whose goverment has no motivation to stop cybercrime is a big threath to the west that want to turn the internet into a big part of their economy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If they were really "the best", they'd be getting rich on legit contracts. The legit economy is much bigger than the criminal one (excluding the military/oil biz, but that's bait for a different TrollMod thread ;). Russian cost of living is very low compared to their global competitors, except for India and China. And their infrastructure, at least in European cities, is better. If they were that good, their productivity would be high enough to draw contracts from the rest of the world, yet they are not the first choice of global outsourcers.
;). The Soviet empire was a mafia state, and much of that mafia just privatized with its collapse. The Russian economy hasn't improved much (again, those persistently "irrelevant" exceptions ;), except in the crime sector. So the actual talent, though not necessarily "the best", has little legit markets for its labor organized within Russia. Programmers work where managers organize buyers for their labor, and Russian management for programmers can be found largely in organized crime. Such an inaccurate statement as the Department K "victory" claim reflects the Russian government's inability to even officially recognize their economic failures, which of course perpetuates the problem. And cybercops claiming their criminals are the toughest serves to increase cop budgets, and excuse their failures - drawing resources away from investment in the legit economy that would attract these good programmers instead. They believe their own cover story, and there's no way out of their trap. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to live with their crime, too, and without the global productivity we'd get if they went straight.
The real difference is that Russia has the biggest, most sophisticated mafia in the world (except see disclaimer above
--
make install -not war
Russia has top notch schools cranking out top notch programmers, and no jobs for them. At all. A frightening level of Russia's wealth is concentrated in the Mafia
That's interesting. Look, I'm a graduate of arguably the best university here in Russia, CS dept (I leave judging my worth as a programmer to others). I had a job before I graduated, and I had no problems finding a new job since then. I met my classmates at a reunion party recently, and everyone seemed well-to-do, working a nice clean job home or abroad; I've heard no stories of anyone turning to the dark side. There is actually a shortage of good software engineers here. Inferior schools and small/remote cities may be another story, as indicated by the bust of those two students who were lured in US by FBI. I believe most of those gangs' members are script kiddies with incomplete to none formal programming education.
As for the much-dreaded Russian Mafia, I can't confirm or deny its wealth or influence, because I, just as you I believe, only read about it and never met it face to face.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Talent (mathematical, artistic, etc) is rare and a good education system should make sure that no talent is lost, no matter how humble the origin of talented people is. In order to promote all talent a good education system should
1) Be equally accessible to the rich and the poor. That is, free education including college and graduate school. No prep schools for rich (but often stupid) people. Subjective admission systems, based on examining the files of the candidates should be prohibited. There should be written examinations only and the exam papers should have the the names of the candidates hidden (sealed) in order to avoid corruption. If an examiner grades papers with sealed names he/she cannot give a higher grades to the stupid sons/daughters of rich/powerful people. Oral examinations should be prohibited in order to preserve the anonimity of the candidates and to avoid corruption.
2. The parents, media, etc, should encourage education not because college graduates have higher salaries and make more money but because knowledge is fun and fascinating. Stupid money is not everything in life,creativity, knowledge and understanding are much better than money.
The US education is just the opposite of such a system. There are no written examinations in order to open a backdoor and make it possible to admit stupid children of rich people who make big donations to the universities. Think of it, how many janitor's or cleaner's children graduate from Harvard or Yale?. The big education fees are also a barrier which makes it impossible for talented but poor people to enter good schools. Because of all these barriers in the US the education is a (partially) hereditary thing, the children of rich people tend to have a good education while the the children of poor people tend to have no education. There are of course exceptions, but they are mere curiosities, as if they were miracles. (think of Abraham Lincoln)
In contrast, the education systems in former Socialist East European countries were close to the ideal system described before. They were not perfect, but much better than the US system. One thing is sure, talent was encouraged to flourish, whether you were rich or poor. Check out the biographies of Soviet scientists, many of them had very humble origins and everntually managed to became members of the Academy and even got the Nobel Prize. In the US system most of them would have had humble jobs and no education.
My story. I am a 53 year old theoretical physicist. I grew up and got my education in an Eastern European country (I wont say which one). My parents were both peasants with no education. They were both hard working, honest people which grew up before communism. They both wanted to stay in school and further their education (especially my mom). They had however no choice, for economic reasons had to leave school after the seventh grade. I had the opportunity to grow up under communism. I was very interested in physics and mathematics and managed to enter a high school for gifted people and eventually I got my PhD from the best university in my country. Now I work for a very good US university. Had I been born in the US I would have become a framer, a cleaner or a janitor.
Once peolpe get a right, it very hard to take it away. The World Bank pressures my old country to make their education system 'more efficient' and introduce mandatory education fees for college and graduate school. The government was about to do it, but people revolted, there were big demonstrations, etc., and high education is still free.
When I tell Americans about the possibility of free college and graduate school education they are all against it, because it will be baid from their taxes. So what? that this is why taxes are for, support projects for the good of the society. Is it better to waste mathematical or artistic talent in janitorial jobs?
BTW. Under the old regime, in my old country we did not pay any income tax. The only income source were the salaries, and all salaries
Granted we have seen many so called 'hackers' come out of Russia. But all the best work I've seen has either been from Europe or the U.S. I don't know why someone would say the Russians are so 'good at math' when their education system is one of the worst in the world. Of course they have their champions but I think they should really consider the real reason why the Russian hackers are so prevelent. Russian hackers and crackers have nothing to fear from authorities. They don't have the best in the world, they have a handful of decent guys that work unrestrained. ...at least thats what my mail order bride says.