I think it's tiered. At the bottom, you find the Gift Card scammers. The next 
step up might be the password-guessers and phishers. Then comes the automatic 
server finders and ssh dictionary attackers. Etc. Somewhere near the top would 
be the cryptohackers who can execute man in the middle, 
network/audio/network/current sniffing, etc. But I think it takes a more 
sophisticated strategist to take that huge toolkit and customize "solutions".

And those "solutions engineers" require, I think, a fairly sophisticated and 
persistent infrastructure, implying a mid-sized corporation, data center, 
nation-state, etc. Although the loosely coupled guerrilla style organization 
presented in, say, Mr. Robot, sounds plausible, I think their capabilities 
would be constrained to the lower half of that tier.

On 12/17/20 10:44 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Are we talking (cyber)Soldiers of Fortune here?   Eric Prince and and
> his ilk surely have a whole string of guys much better at
> first-person-shooters and cyberhacking than actual first-person
> shooting.   I have never opened a "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, and
> even cringe when I see them, but imagine by now there is plenty of
> lure/candy for the guys (and gals) all over the world in their parent's
> basements (or small cardboard box behind the large cardboard box in the
> shanty town) lace into those rags (well, probably not literally, because
> who in that world actually touches paper?)
>> I mean the "bad guys".  A good reason to find out who did it is so that they 
>> can be offered jobs on the this side.   Perhaps part of the high status is 
>> living an utterly lawless lifestyle -- something that would be hard to match 
>> in Europe or the United States.   Spending power of $90k in VA would be easy 
>> to match I think.   People that are really good at that would make much 
>> more, I think.

-- 
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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