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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).
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...
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.
To be fair, I suspect that if you did this (i.e. conducted an experiment that polled random people on the street about such topics) you'd find that the overwhelming majority could answer perfectly fine. If however, you're running an entertainment program or a news show (which is kind of an entertainment program now-a-days anyhow) you probably toss out all of the correct results and only show the clips from the people who get it wrong or act like complete duffusses for the camera. If you only actively highlight the stupidest people you can find, of course things seem worse than they are.
I'm not terribly worried about poor schooling as IQ scores have been trending upwards over the past century since we started measuring intelligence. People will succeed and figure things out despite shortcomings in the educational system, just like people largely manage to overcome shitty or sub-optimal parenting and turn out to be decent. People tend to look back at the old days through a rose colored lens and focus on the good without looking at the bad. Somewhat recently I was talking with a relation of mine who recounted his years in high school and how much of a joke it was as one of the teachers was a drunk and taught them next to nothing and another would pass anyone on an athletic team no matter how poorly they did.
If today's world seems so horrible it's only because we have access to news media from all around the world. I can spend all day reading about bad things happening from half way around the world, whereas 30 years ago that was practically impossible even for government intelligence agencies. Once again, if you only put the worst on display, it leads one to make incorrect assumptions. Things in general are getting so much better, maybe not as quickly as everyone would like, but the trend line is moving in a positive direction overall.
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?
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.)
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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.