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."
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
'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!
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.
... 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!
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
a lot of reasons. one is that the wrong people are good at math, one is that their society pretty much collapsed.
though, just saying that they're good at math because they're russians is silly. they're good at math because they got/had good schools for that sort of thing(for some of the people). now they have system that churns out some high class computer scientists with low level understanding of the systems.. BUT NO JOBS FOR THEM!!!!
why would they turn to cybercrime? when you're hungry and can't get a decent job(or even a lousy one) and your family is going hungry as well... and getting caught from small time cybercrime would be far fetched(or you thought that the risk was still worth it).
of course they're assholes still, but there's reasons for why they're doing what they're doing. personally I'd prefer to be hit by a bit of cybercrime rather than being mugged while visiting moscow.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
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!
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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?
"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.
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.
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:-)
:-)
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.
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.