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Survey: Average Successful Hack Nets Less Than $15,000 (csoonline.com)
itwbennett writes: According to a Ponemon Institute survey, hackers make less than $15,000 per successful attack and net, on average, less than $29,000 a year. The average attacker conducts eight attacks per year, of which less than half are successful. Among the findings that will be of particular interest to defenders: Hackers prefer easy targets and will call off an attack if it is taking too long. According to the survey, 13 percent quit after a delay of five hours. A delay of 10 hours causes 24 percent to quit, a delay of 20 hours causes 36 to quit, and a majority of 60 percent will give up if an attack takes 40 additional hours. 'If you can delay them by two days, you can deter 60 percent of attacks,' said Scott Simkin, senior threat intelligence manager at Palo Alto Networks, which sponsored the study.
On one hand, it's not a lot of money. A decent job pays more.
On the other, apparently it's $29,000 for like two days of work.
I quit playing the stock market because it was hard. I averaged 1% per day on 3-5 day holdings (swing trading; day trading would be attractive if I had a large portfolio), but that was with 18 hours per day of research, waking at 4am to examine news and foreign markets, with loads of analysis of technicals and some fundamentals. It was technically sustainable, if I didn't go insane first.
Those two days of work for a hacker are followed by months or years of worrying which of the 40 odd jobs the FBI is investigating. I'd imagine an honest job provides a more enjoyable income than one in which you spend the following 7 years hoping the SWAT team doesn't boot your door in.
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They probably converted currencies and didn't bother with significant digits across the conversion. That creates oddly specific numbers even when the source number is rough.
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