Crime Doesn't Pay After All?
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
Crime Doesn't Pay After All? Victor Sample Malware developers and website penetration testers are in high demand!
I read an interesting article this morning about a 2-year research study by Internet Security company Kaspersky. Kaspersky was researching “job openings” with malware organizations. The job postings are on “dark web” sites. There are over 227,000 malware job postings!
The terms “dark web” and “deep web” are very similar in meaning. The “deep web” refers to websites that are not known to the various search engines like Google and Bing. If you do a search for something on the deep web using Google you won’t get any results. It’s kind of like a speak-easy during the prohibition days – you had to know about it to know about it.
The “dark web” is a subset of the deep web; not only is it not indexed by search engines, the websites on the dark web usually require special software or special configurations to access the websites. While not all dark web sites are involved in illegal activity, the dark web is where a lot of illegal activity occurs.
Apparently, the job postings were very much like postings for legitimate jobs with 2 big exceptions: All of the work is remote (duh) and there are no formal contracts, benefits, etc. What I found interesting is that the salaries were pretty mundane; as a matter of fact, for skilled programmers, the salaries were very low. While some of them promised high salaries (like $10,000 / month) most were in the $2000 - $2500 / month.
Kaspersky noted that many of the requirements are just like legitimate jobs: “Teamwork skills, stable job history, no alcohol/substance addictions”. No troublemakers wanted in the malware industry!
Of course, many of the jobs promised performance bonuses – a percentage of the profits from the illegal activities.
The malware job positions do have serious drawbacks: you are working with criminals doing illegal work. You could get busted and do real prison time and/or pay heavy fines.
And – you are working for criminals; there is no guarantee you will actually get paid for any work.
While working remotely does appeal to many people and the excitement of being an outlaw might call to you, all-in-all you should probably look for a legitimate job working for a legitimate company. The pay is probably better.
Additional Notes: I just received 2 more interesting articles this morning about Cyber Criminals: * The OpenAI research team has found evidence that their ChatGPT (artificial intelligence) is being used by cybercriminals to generate phishing emails to trick you into downloading malware or to give them your information (bank accounts, SSN, etc.) * Many Tech companies are laying off employees: Googe, Microsoft, Facebook have all announced layoffs. Apparently, Cyber-criminals are experiencing the same problems. Security researchers have found that many of the cyber criminals are laying off employees. So, among all the other reasons you might not want to apply for that hacker job, getting laid off is still a prossibility.
