Fergie's Tech Blog

Russian Hackers: On The Right Side of Soft Laws

Clifford J. Levy writes in The International Herald Tribune:

The motive for most wrongdoing, though, tends to be greed. In 2005, Russians broke into the State of Rhode Island Web site and then brazenly proclaimed that they had swiped credit card information from 53,000 transactions. Officials acknowledged the theft, though they said the scope was smaller.

The perpetrators in these affairs are rarely caught, if ever, but it is not hard to deduce their backgrounds. Russia has long had a strong system of math and science education, and until the relatively recent upturn in the economy, the multitudes of whiz kids who graduated from its schools had poor job prospects.

At the same time, they were entering a society that for decades had built up a deep skepticism about the virtues of following the rules. Under communism, the thicket of strictures that governed almost every aspect of life was considered so inane that only fools were thought to abide by them.

posted by Fergie @ 10/21/2007 08:30:00 AM