Inside Look At Eastern European Vs. East Asian Hackers 63
wiredmikey writes with a snippet from Security Week: "Much of the talk about cybercrime remains focused on East Asia. But according to a new report, it is hackers in Eastern Europe that have actually emerged as more sophisticated. In a report entitled 'Peter the Great vs. Sun Tzu' ... compared hackers from the two regions. His conclusion — the Eastern Europeans are far more insidious and strategic. While East Asian groups tend to work for other organizations interested in their skills, hackers from Eastern Europe generally operate in small, independent units, and are focused on profit. Their infrastructure tends to be developed by them specifically for their own use in attacks. 'They [Eastern European groups] tend to want to be in control of their entire infrastructure and will routinely set up their own servers for use in attacks, develop their own DNS servers to route traffic and create sophisticated traffic directional systems used in their attacks,' according to the report. 'If they do go outside, they will carefully select bulletproof hosts to support their infrastructure. It is their hallmark to maintain control of the whole stack similar to the business models pioneered by Apple.'"
Makes sense to me (Score:4, Insightful)
If the east Asian hackers are anything like the Indian and Chinese programmers I've worked with in the past, that sounds about right. They more often produce lazy, sloppy, jerry-rigged code--and work purely as guns for hire, in-and-out (usually leaving the rest of us to clean up the mess after some company realizes that their great money-saving outsourcing initiative just left them with unusable shit code). Give me a conscientious western programmer any day over that. At least the average American/European programmer can follow basic instructions and won't play dumb and ask for more money when you point out his code doesn't even work.
Analogy overload (Score:5, Insightful)
"It is their hallmark to maintain control of the whole stack similar to the business models pioneered by Apple."
This statement is so absurd.
Why not compare to the Apollo space program or the DeBeers diamond monopoly... these comparisons just as absurd. Or, here's a fun analogy: the Soviet Union.
We get it, how the hackers work. You can get really fun with the analogies by getting political: say their organization methods resemble the organization methods of Al Qaeda or FARC or Wikileaks or Anonymous. See how the absurd analogy is formed from, and can be used to form, silly prejudices and bias?
Reaching for the absurd sort of analogy, like with Apple, tells us more about the author's hangups and obsessions or agenda: comparing and contrasting things and finding parallels in things which are superficial and uninformative.
People don't know the meaning of the word "hacker" (Score:4, Insightful)