Slashdot Mirror
Why So Many Top Hackers Come From Russia (krebsonsecurity.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader tsu doh nimh writes:
Brian Krebs has an interesting piece this week on one reason that so many talented hackers (malicious and benign) seem to come from Russia and the former Soviet States: It's the education, stupid. Krebs's report doesn't look at the socioeconomic reasons, but instead compares how the U.S. and Russia educate students from K-12 in subjects which lend themselves to a mastery in coding and computers -- most notably computer science. The story shows that the Russians have for the past 30 years been teaching kids about computer science and then testing them on it starting in elementary school and through high school. The piece also looks at how kids in the U.S. vs. Russia are tested on what they are supposed to have learned.
Fossbytes also reports that Russia claimed the top spot in this year's Computer Programming Olympics -- their fourth win in six years -- adding that "the top 9 positions out of 14 were occupied by Russian or Chinese schools." The only two U.S. schools in the top 20 were the University of Central Florida (#13) and MIT (#20).
Fossbytes also reports that Russia claimed the top spot in this year's Computer Programming Olympics -- their fourth win in six years -- adding that "the top 9 positions out of 14 were occupied by Russian or Chinese schools." The only two U.S. schools in the top 20 were the University of Central Florida (#13) and MIT (#20).
If only we had decent hackers in the US. Then maybe they could release the Russian hooker piss-tapes to Wikileaks. I love watersports.
I've been watching a lot of Russian language media lately, because I have been trying to restore my language skills. Hackers in Russian movies are much more realistic than in American ones.
One gets asked whether he can get in a secure system? He does not boast, he answers "I will certainly try."
He does not mash the keyboard while he is getting a blowjob, he deploys an arsenal from 'Flashka' or from a alphabetical soup URL.
He examining an air-gapped system, looking for a way to get at the hardware, and mumbling about which patches seems not to have been applies.
He gets asked to get some video records? He asks "Do I have an hour and a half"?
Etc... And that is from police shows, where the staff hackers are not necessarily named characters, and definitely not the focus of the series.
This tells me that that the population at large has some idea about IT... you would not make a movie in the US where the driver will shift three times while driving backwards, would you? I mean... Uh, you get the point.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Maybe the Russians aren't wasting time trying to figure out what bathroom a student should be allowed to use or letting some precious snowflake change the language because he doesn't like to be called "he"?
Maybe the Russians tell the violent kids they're fucking violent and kick their asses out of school, and don't care how it might correlate with racial statistics?
Maybe the Russians have an education system that isn't run by a union intent on playing politics with every damn thing?
leaked piss-tapes...HAHAHAHAHAHA!
In the US, there is an extreme risk-averse culture. Not risk-averse as in "start a company and it might fail" but as in "don't even think about trying to beat the system, someone might sue you for it". So the very thing that causes many of the most succesfull companies to be founded in the US is actively suppressed when it comes to hacking skills.
This aricle is about the education system in Russia, not Capitalism vs (failed) Communism. Also, don't you realize that you Amerikanos have Google due to Russia/Soviet Union?
So the title should have read:
Why So Many Well-Known Top Hackers Come From Russia
Really good hackers don't get caught, and don't even leave a clue that they were there at all.
The really interesting top technical hackers . . . well, we haven't heard of them yet, and probably never will, if they are that good.
Wherever they are . . . or, better said, "are not" . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Has been going on for a little more than 30 years. How many "person on the street" interviews have you seen where young adults, heck, even some older adults Can't find their own state on a map, can't tell you who the president is, can't tell you which side won the civil war and on and on. Is it any wonder the government (both R&D's) have been able to strip away rights, bloat the government, encroach on your every waking minute?
My wife grew up in the Soviet school system. She told me all about math training there. People from the former Soviet Union are sought out everywhere as math tutors. American schools just flop around when it comes to math and send students up a grade even if they don't have the skills.
I worked with a Russian-born testing theorist: she and they were really really good and worked insanely hard at anything that was amenable to an academic approach.
--dave (hey, Safia!) c-b
davecb@spamcop.net
The ones with the most newspaper clippings? Or the ones who never get exposed?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Education has value. The schools teach. People want to learn.
Exams are passed on merit to get into a really great university.
So the math skills are created.
Also consider a long history of maths and science. Computer access and later faster network access.
Other nations tried to do the same over the years. What did Russia get right and so many other nations totally fail at?
The UK had its BBC Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for education and a lot of very poor people all around the UK got so see and use a computer.
Given the funding and early access to computers the UK should have been a very advanced computer nation?
If it was only about hardware the early attempts at computer education would have allowed the UK to advance.
The USA educated generations in science after the 1950's with more funding. That provided a good selection of very good US teachers for the next generations.
The USA filled some of its schools with new computer labs, books, networks, educational software, robot kits and teachers who could teach. A lot of equipment and books got offered to different schools all over the USA.
Some parts of the USA got vast amounts of new funding for very poor students, per student. Did any of it help or change results? Not as much as expected per generation per student when tested given all the new spending.
If it was only about computer access, the best teachers and funding the USA on average would be very advanced given the amount of funding per student in some US states and cities..
What was the difference?
Passing exams, staying with real merit advancement. In Russia getting good grades and knowing things is seen as a good thing.
A culture of math, science, art, languages, music, sport, faith and education is encouraged and supported.
A pride in culture, art, engineering, maths, Russia is passed to each generation who want to learn and study.
For people in the USA trying to get a wide picture of history try Gymnasium (school) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not much on Russia but it shows a different way of approaching education that has shaped different nations.
On Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The key is the exams and the need to pass on merit. The USA and UK selected very different educational systems over the last decades and per student funding.
The results of such very different failed methods show decades later over entire nations.
Too much social promotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in some nations and not enough low cost passing tests only on merit.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Another good indicator is how many so called "geeks" on Slashdot vehemently oppose teaching computer science before university or even high school.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Cool story. The answer is still no, Dave. Stop calling me.
Are you talking about Sergey Brin, half of the duo who started Google, or how Russian scientists were involved in the mathematics behind eigenvalues, which is the underlying fundament for Google's pagerank algorithms?
what's been happening is we've let more and more people partake of higher education. Partially to keep them out of the job market since we don't really need them. Most of them don't make it past year of college. A few get liberal arts degrees. On a whole the increase in education still makes society a better place since they've got better critical thinking skills than they otherwise would have.
Recently folks have been hard at work to reverse that trend. Religious leaders don't like that the kids with all that education mellow out religiously. The rich don't like paying the taxes for them and would prefer to just import cheap foreign labor (think H1-Bs). And nobody likes to have to pay for somebody else's kids to go to college.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Most youth do not have avenues to put their talent to productive use. Coupled with a high standards of education in maths and sciences, it is not difficult to see why young Russians end up with such options of last resort that still challenge their intellectual creativity. I would think the lure of money is secondary. These are troubling signs of a society in decay.
And most kids will learn that in the US, if you follow a STEM education, you're learning and putting yourself in debt to be replaced by some H1B. Much better to learn for a medical doctor or lawyer instead, they make sure they won't be replaced by regulating their professions. In Russia (or most other eastern European countries) you can get education more or less for free if you're smart enough because they understand that they need educated people to get their economies further.
There are plenty of companies that pay good money for red team exercises, and even have their own red teams (Microsoft has a very highly rated one for example). So if breaking in to systems and networks is what interests you, you can do it legitimately, make good money doing it, and even get sponsored training doing it. SANS has a whole track of courses for red team training.
Thing is, you don't get called a hacker in popular media when you do that since the term "hacker" is used to mean someone breaking the law with computer related things. You are an Information Assurance/Information Security professional. Your skills are the same as what they call a hacker, even your methods, the difference is you have been hired.
Now combine that with the fact that the US has more functional law enforcement than Russia and does at least make some attempt to squash cyber crime and is it any surprise we don't see as many in the US?
In much of the West, crime doesn't pay, or at least pay well. Your average street thug probably makes less than minimum wage. Sure, there are a few that make a lot of money, but it's like trying to make a money as a rock band. Only the 0.1% make a middle-class income, and only the 0.001% make the money you see in movies. Plus, you're likely to wind up dead or in jail.
Consequently, for the most part, only the badly educated or stupid become criminals. There's the odd smart criminal, but having a legit job (if that's available) is simply superior in every way.
And then you have the former Soviet Union, with a ton of really smart, very well-educated, very talented engineers, with virtually no decent job prospects at all, but still fairly good virtual contact with the West.
And suddenly, given a lack of options, you have smart criminals.
And that is a recipe for total disaster.
As a matter of survival of the Western world, we need to open immigration from Russia so that these smart, talented engineers can find decent jobs that benefit us before they find ill-paying jobs that cost us terribly.
(Many of my most capable co-workers have been Russians who were able to leave, and man, we their talent working for us, rather than against us, for both our sakes.)
You can thank the absolute bullshit like common core for screwing things up as well. The ye olde by rote system we learned oddly ~30 years ago worked just fine, then they decided to start fucking around with it. And...scores dropped, then they screwed around more, and more. Welcome to the present. The US isn't the only case either, this is what's happening in Canada as well. Though we're only ~15 years behind the US in following this.
It actually get's a bit worse up here because they've also pushed the entire curriculum to be "female friendly" and those changes over the last 12 years have dropped male scores between 1.40pts and 3.80pts(ratings are on a 10pts scale the provincial average is 6.1/10 - some districts have seen male students as low as 2.20pts while female in the same school are 7.18pts) depending on the school district. You can read about the absolute shitshow going on here if you want. And it is a shitshow, one so bad that a province once known for having some of the top students in north america for math have lost it in a decade.
Om, nomnomnom...
Countries with such systems have less educated people - as they consign people to drudgery if they dont test well or had a bad day.
In contrast, the US educates about everybody and does well once you factor out admission systems.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
To teach K-12 in the US, you need a degree in 'Education' which is for the most part a cultural indoctrination.
Yes, because the extreme minority of transsexuals is the deciding factor here, not the fact that America denies basic science and shifts all the money towards useless managers.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
US education was about funding and profit. Some schools got computers. Some states got text books and a brand of calculator that had supported related questions.
New computers would have been disruptive to that selling of textbooks and calculators.
The BBC Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... showed what a nation could do with computers and networks for more students.
Did the UK then become a global computer super power with an early decade of computer education?
A lot of US schools now spend a lot per student in very poor areas. Are people doing any better on average after all that spending, new computers and more teachers?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It is true that Russia places a much greater emphasis on teaching math, physics, and CS than the West. However, it is only possible because of Russian culture puts more value on knowledge of those subjects. Their knowledge means both more social prestige and better prospect of finding a well-paid job.
BTW, many Russians tend to preserve this attitude to math even when they emigrate to the US. As result, their children do better in math on average than American kids. For example, Sergey Brin has never attended any education institution in the Soviet Union, but he was successful in math and CS. Similar, many Asian kids do well in math, because of their parents.
Anyway, Russia has a large pool of young well-educated people, but Russia does not develop as much software as it could given human resources that it has. As result many young people cannot find a legal well-paid job, and some of them get attracted to the dark economy. Usually Russian authorities will not go after them as long as they choose their targets abroad.
Are you saying that the US system doesn't produce "evil people that commit crimes and make the world worse?" Because I'm pretty sure the rest of the world disagrees.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If "they understand that they need educated people to get their economies further," then why is the Russian economy (and that of most other eastern European economies) so sickly all the time? Perhaps (and that is granting the point without any proof) the Russians do a decent job of educating their populace or encouraging STEM or whatever, but they sure can't put all these skilled citizens to any useful purpose, otherwise Russia's economy would be bigger than one half that of California and not be completely dependent on world oil prices. There is obviously 'something' they don't understand about getting their economies further along. And as far as the USA's system goes, anyone checked lately on the strength of the US dollar compared to the Euro, Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, British pound, etc? Maybe all those so-called faults in the USA's system come with accompanying advantages.
Momentum. Cultural and historical momentum. The US has not always been on top. Nor will it remain on top forever. You are just lucky that you don't think outside your own generation's timeframe.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
they want money in a shitty country
they don't really care if they offend any morale bounds because they are 17 in suicide rates.
they know their present justice system won't care if it's abroad.
CYKA BLYAT MUDAK IDI NA HUI isn't a thing? I could swear CS:GO was full of crying Russians.
As a former-soviet-state citizen, I think it's because of "deficit". A very well known word for soviet people. You couldn't get anything. Food, clothes, household items. Everything was in deficit. And it came in batches, so you needed to go on hunting trips around town to find some new item in a shop. So naturally, computers were a deficit when I grew up (20-30 years ago). You didn't go to a shop to buy new one. You got an old one from an institution and made do. You got bits and pieces and hacked something together. Software: obviously piracy. Who pays for software!? With piracy comes lots of little hacks and cracks, you get to know and learn the systems. You don't have a support line which caters everything on a silver platter. I don't know. It just feels like this hacking and cracking mentality is coming from that.
"Compared to the United States there are quite a few more high school students in Russia who choose to specialize in information technology subjects."
Because of the jobs. When you see people being showed the door because their IT job is being filled by H1B Visa holders, you tend not to want to gravitate to their professions.
It has nothing, repeat nothing to do with education. It's about choice about professional career and right now IT is being ravaged by H1B Visa holders. So why on earth would you pursue it.
FYI a Microsoft sponsored study does not ad weight to your argument.
Thanks for censoring the word 'fuck', my dignity and my fragile mind was at stake.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Do you argue over real points as well, or just shit you make up in your head?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Russian education system - great at making hackers, not so great at making people who resent living in a kleptocratic autocracy.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
how Russian scientists were involved in the mathematics behind eigenvalues, which is the underlying fundament for Google's pagerank algorithms?
I think that's a little far-fetched. While some Russians were involved, the whole "eigen" prefix should provide a hint towards Western Europe. ("Eigen" is German for "own" as in "my own car".)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Russia hasn't been Communist for now 25 years
Prominent OS in Russia? Isn't it ReactOS? At any rate, I've noticed a few Russians in the dev list for TrueOS
And most kids will learn that in the US, if you follow a STEM education, you're learning and putting yourself in debt to be replaced by some H1B. Much better to learn for a medical doctor or lawyer instead, they make sure they won't be replaced by regulating their professions. In Russia (or most other eastern European countries) you can get education more or less for free if you're smart enough because they understand that they need educated people to get their economies further.
I've been hearing this shit for year and still, nothing. Hell, this is no different from people who told me almost 30 years ago not to go into CS because AI would write its own software and crap.
Seriously, how the fuck does a Biologist or a Nuclear Engineer gets replaced by a H1B? Or even how does a solid software engineer gets replaced under that program? The only jobs that get replaced are IT ditch digging and boilerplate coding. If you are worth a damn at your profession, you simply do not get offshored in general, and in the rare case you do, you simply bounce back.
I am a product of post-soviet education of past 20-30 years, from a reasonably large city, and I can tell you that my generation (from which a lot of those hackers seem to come) was not "taught" any computer science, or tested on it, not on highschool, and certainly not in elementary school. Whatever my friends and I have learned was from playing with things on our own. The educational system, however, did provide us with very solid math foundation, geared towards multi-step problem solving, logic, and at least some critical thinking. In my opinion, the abundance of russian hackers is due two a combination of lack of consequences and lack of other as-lucrative economic opportunities. In US, one could easily end up in a world of legal trouble for experimenting with hacking. In post-soviet space, the worst that can happen is one would have to share profits with some thugs (from the government or otherwise).
I'm sure you are right, they are certainly spending mountains of time covering everything not leak-worthy he is doing and trying to spin it as much as possible. They were always biased but the overt level of bias, spin, and falsehood on CNN and friends is on par with Fox News these days.
They spent days trying to spin a tweet by Trump that Comey better hope there aren't any tapes of their conversations as some kind of threat when any sane person can fill in from context "because they'd prove you are lying and told me I wasn't under investigation."
Hell, Putin said the most sane thing yet in any of this, the only evidence of Russian hacking are Russian IP's, a child can spoof their IP. No Russian state hacker is going to show up in your logs with a Russian IP, they aren't incompetent. Who cares if Russia wanted to influence our elections? Are we bringing back the conversative anti-Russian nonsense and propaganda from McCarthy and the cold war? The material revealed showed active collusion between the DNC and Clinton campaign against sanders and that domestic corruption is a much much more serious issue.
Yep, and yet liberals have no hesitation claiming that the media has to "hold things back" in order to "protect their sources." Meanwhile anyone who doesn't have their head up their own ass knows that the media, if they had anything at all substantive, would do anything and everything within their power (legal or not) to use it to disrupt the current admin - sources be damned.
Did you just seriously say "who cares if they influence our election"?
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
Those words are common enough they are likely spoken by hundred(s) million more people than the rest of the Russian language =P
"Yes, because the extreme minority of transsexuals is the deciding factor here, not the fact that America denies basic science and shifts all the money towards useless managers."
I think the issue is that transsexuals and all things concerning them is an issue that impacts few enough people to effectively amount to statistical noise and those in power keep us so busy talking about issues like this and dumbing down our education.
If they didn't keep us divided and uneducated someone might realize that almost all of the problems shared by 99.99% of our population could be solved or improved by exercising imminent domain on the half of nations wealth being siphoned off by just 0.01% of our population. Best of all the group negatively impacted is smaller with a much smaller individual impact than the disruptions caused by that group each day. It's the easiest lesser of evils decisions you will ever make and the best choice both for personal and community interests for 99.99% of us. Hell, the worst you are doing to any of them is making a handful of people who have had every advantage in terms of education get jobs and join the working class.
I think more resources are being wasted on scaring people that transsexuals are going to rape their daughters in bathrooms or whatever made up threat they use to distract the unwashed masses while they steal money from us.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
No, he sys, "who cares if they wanted to influence our elections?" And he's right, this controversy is old hat, and has been happening to every country that had access to the internet for as long as they've had that access. And before that, they used low tech methods.
Speaking realistically though, American oligarchs are far more effective than Russian oligarchs, and the American oligarchs have more conflicts of interest with the American people.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
For Russians there is: look up i.e. Yandex.ru's properties and products.
And it is a shitshow, one so bad that a province once known for having some of the top students in north america for math have lost it in a decade.
They claim in the article that reading scores are improving while math scores decline, but if that article is any indication, writing scores are also a total shitshow. It repeatedly plagiarizes sentences from scientists word for word, then proceeds to repeat the exact same sentence, but attributes it as a quote the second time. It natters on about correlation and causation, while attributing the old saw to "good math teachers". Its attempt to embed a hyperlink is laughably bad, with line breaks on both sides of it, leaving a comma dangling. And it manages to misspell "minister" in the second to last paragraph.
Standards are falling everywhere I guess.
If there's an answer, it's not with the education system. It's with the law.
Given that tests do not control for admission criteria (US having tierless secondary/tertiary, Russia/China having highly rigid tiering), there can be no comparison on educational systems.
They could try again when they factor that and population size out, but it will favor the US a bit too much for them.
A more likely case is that Russia & China have lax enforcement - especially on foreign targets. Another factor is the law of large numbers, something also not in the US's favor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"Did you just seriously say "who cares if they influence our election"?"
Yes, yes I did. What difference does it make if the people who provided the information that swayed your vote are American, Chinese, Russian, etc? The information matters not the source. Would you shoot yourself in the foot with a shotgun if Putin was trying to convince you not to?
If the Russians were the only reason we saw the accurate information which swayed us in the polls they did us a favor, their reason for doing so is beside the point. Accurate information is knowledge, knowledge is power, providing information to sway our voters is also empowering them.