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The World's Top Cybercriminals
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek profiles four individuals identified by law enforcement as the world's foremost online criminals. They're accused of crimes ranging from re-shipping rings to credit card theft and email fraud -- '...all are Russian. Strong technical universities, comparatively low incomes, and an unstable legal system make the former Soviet Union an ideal breeding ground for cyberscams. Also, tense political relations sometimes complicate efforts to obtain cooperation with local law enforcement.'"
If you needed a reason, there's a big one. Why deal with them if you don't have to?
would you like me to show you how incredibly easy it is to set up a webserver in pretty much any country on the planet?
a webserver that could then be used for phishing scams and stuff. it could easily report all the data back to me in my home country.
you're going to have to think a little harder about the problem.
This issue is similar to the (existing) problem with Russian nuclear scientists taking their know-how with them to rogue states and terror groups. We need to get Russia to fix its economy, so that Russian programmers can get enough money legally. I think it's in everyone's interest to have them programing games, for example, than cracking systems and writing viruses.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
By definition, the world's top cybercriminals will never be identified.
we're never going to convince Putin that what he really wants to do is crack down on people who are bringing a lot of money into the economy and who pose no threat at all to him. Trying to fight this through any kind of court just won't work for this reason. The only way we can really hope to stop this kind of thing is to do more lessons in schools about how pretty much every e-mail which isn't from someone you know is a scam. I don't really know what your education was like in IT in American schools but I know that for the first 3 years of secondary school (UK) I had a teacher who couldn't adequately use windows explorer to find files - we always got told to open the "package" (sic) and then go file -> open... not once did they even mention security. In my last 2 years it changed round a bit and there was some information (although a frighteningly inadequate amount) about security best practices and what have you.
If we want to keep people from getting spam scammed then education is the best way
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
It's Ukraine.Well, the second worst spammer (BadCow is third) is Michael Lindsay, of iMedia Networks, California.
Its not surprising that they're Russian (and Ukrainian) if you choose to ignore the Americans.
Yeah, that is just what the world needs, a digital version of the military-industrial complex. How depressing.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
"In my opinion, this hurts local small businesses immensely."
More to the point, it hurts the CITIZENS immensely.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
For a moment there I though you were talking about India.
What's a crime, depends on where you are. Alcohol was illegal once in this country, and tobacco's plenty addictive (and cold-turkey from caffeine is no fun either). Suppose that Spain passed a law against anti-personnel land mines; you got any problem with extraditing the CEOs of US companies that produce these abominations to Spain for trial?
Evidence, evidence, evidence. Organized crime is brilliant at insulating those at the top from the orders they give those at the bottom. Even in countries where what they're doing is illegal (often not the case with spammers) you still need to tie that person to something through evidence.
RICO is nice in that you can nab higher-ups if you can get two predicate acts on an underling, but a) they tend to shelve said underling after he's busted, because they have lawyers too, and b) most of these acts are against people they've intimidated, cowed, blackmailed, or are criminals themselves, which means we get a missing person and not a murder rap.
You're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to get these guys, essentially you run detectives around looking into what they did, looking for the small screwup that lets them open an investigation and start searching places. It's long and it's tough. Like I said before, "everyone knows he's doing it" isn't evidence.
Um, wasn't the internet (as well as numerous other advances in digital technology) spawned by the military-industrial complex?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
This is an example of what economists refer to as the "broken window fallacy."
The fallacy goes something like this: "On the whole, it's a good thing for people to go around randomly breaking windows. It creates jobs for the window installers and people who work in glass factories, and even helps to create new markets for shatter-proof windows!"
Although at first glance this appears to help the economy, it's an illusion; all the money that goes toward replacing the broken window is wasted money that could have been spent on actually improving economic infrastructure, rather than simply maintaining it. Perhaps new and improved shatter-resistant windows will be developed, but if there was enough demand to justify their development then it would have happened anyway.
Similarly, every dollar that people have to spend on things like antivirus software is a dollar that they weren't able to spend on improving their products, or hiring more employees of their own, or offering people cheaper prices. All this only benefits you if you are carefully placed within the market to take advantage of it. So yes, computer crime is good for you if you happen to work for a security company, but on the whole it's bad for society and the economy.