Insurance For Cybercriminals, or Giant Sting? 72
tsu doh nimh writes "Brian Krebs follows up on a recent Slashdot discussion about a cybercrime gang that is recruiting botmasters to help with concerted heists against U.S. financial institutions. The story looks at the underground's skeptical response to this campaign, which is being led by a criminal hacker named vorVzakone ('thief in law'), who has released a series of videos about himself. vorVzakone also is offering a service called 'insurance from criminal prosecution,' in which miscreants can purchase protection from goons who specialize in bribing or intimidating Russian/Eastern European police into scuttling cybercrime investigations. For $100,000, the service also claims to have people willing to go to jail in place of the insured. Many in the criminal underground view the entire scheme as an elaborate police sting operation."
Mystery solved! (Score:2)
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Thanks for playing the pedant game, you win the championship! What has he won, Johnny?
"Why, he's won lifetime of I'M RIGHT AND YOU'RE NOT pride on the internet! Congratulations!"
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There may not be correct and incorrect sentences, but there are sentences that make sense and sentences that make no sense. Mindlessly repeating that a preposition is a word you should never end a sentence with may not be entirely correct, but ending a sentence with a preposition clearly shows a lack of understanding what words mean.
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Well, sure, for simple ideas like that you can get slack, but if you have something more intricate to say then you need to pay attention to what words mean. It's a lot easier to keep yourself sharp if you use language correctly all the time.
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It's a lot easier to keep yourself sharp if you use language correctly all the time.
Again, you make it sound as if there were a prescriptive grammar of English preserved and refined by some language governing body [wikipedia.org] given official stamp by the government. Unless there one for English, there's nothing to talk about. [ <-- oh gosh, a stranded preposition! Fix it, smarty pants. ;-) ] Language is what people use to communicate, and people learn a language by imitating other people, not by cramming some rulebooks. Want a proof? Languages ultimately evolve - even French! - which would be imposs
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It has multiple errors in it, but is likely to be spoken by a native speaker and is unambiguous
The latter part of your sentence makes your definition of "errors" into something completely useless.
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"I ain't gonna git no mo' schoolin" is error-free
It is, that's the whole point.
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"ending a sentence with a preposition clearly shows a lack of understanding what words mean."
Really? How? I just don't see it.
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Changing the words used will give you more correct options than his "more correct" option
"Correct" and "not correct" are still used in linguistics for "m
Catholic Schools (Score:2)
...But no, there is no grammar police that will whack you in the knee caps with a baseball bat if you use a word wrong.
... Unless you go to Catholic school, in which case the nuns may well whack you in the knuckles with a ruler if you use a word wrong^Wincorrectly.
:-P
Cheers,
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Only half right. (Score:2)
"To whom does the license plate belong?" (more correct) or "Who does that license plate belong to?" (less correct)
Two 'to's is one to too many.
Your second example is incorrect -- since "who" is the indirect object of the preposition "to", even if that "to" comes at the end of the sentence, it would again have to be "whom" to be correct:
"Whom does that license plate belong to?"
Cheers,
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Pedantry (Score:2)
I thought the whole point of this sub-thread was pedantry? :) If so, linguistic conservativism is more the rule than vernacular use.
As a simple rule of thumb for who / whom, consider he / him or they / them. This may sound a bit tortured in question syntax such as in the corrected example in my previous post, but it still provides a useful and quick-and-easy guide to when to put the "m" on the end of "whom".
Pedantry aside, yes, in the daily vernacular, many (most?) Americans that I've spoken with don't co
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Being in NZ/OZ regularly, I'll attest to the fact that it isn't much better (if any) in terms of proper usage of whom. Though I haven't seen the use of "they" to refer to a single person of unknown gender as much outside the US.
Interesting, thank you. I wonder if that particular usage of "they" has to do with the feminism and political correctness movements in the US, and the resulting social focus on gender in language. Given the lack of any neuter third-person singular pronoun in English other than the overly impersonal "it", "they" seems to have been pressed into service instead.
Cheers,
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And you are correct that "they" was the attempt to co-opt a gender neutral pronoun for an unknown singular person. Most languages with gender direct the usage of masculine for that case. The other solution was an aversion to pronouns. But news reports take forever.
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As a quick PS, I think the British use of plurals for organizations comes from the idea (logical enough, I suppose) that an organization comprises a plurality of people. Personally, I think it sounds about as off as saying "the group have done something", rather than treating the collective noun "group" (or rather the organization name itself) as a singular noun in its own right, where "the group has done something" would be more correct.
Cheers,
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Personally, I think it sounds about as off as saying "the group have done something", rather than treating the collective noun "group" (or rather the organization name itself) as a singular noun in its own right, where "the group has done something" would be more correct.
That's a difference in how people think, and is handed down from parents, and picked up when young. "The Microsoft corporation have released Windows 8" is how I'd expect it to be said in NZ/OZ. Groups of people are almost always plural, even if the group name is singular. I haven't picked up anything on group nouns. "The Parliament have/has done something" "The herd have gone to the water hole." Or is it just for names of organizations not explicitly singlular? "Microsoft have done something" The Mi
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Yeah, I learned it as a pondian difference -- UK uses the plural noun form for organization names and usually for collective nouns (though suddenly I'm thinking maybe I misunderstood about collective nouns? Organizations are definitely treated as plurals, as is easily confirmed in media headlines...), US uses the singular forms for organization names and usually for collective nouns. Part of it too might be where the semantic emphasis lies -- whether one is talking about a collective as a whole, or as a bu
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Or somebodyes ego inflating until it bursts... (Score:3)
Would not be the first time. Even the public self exposure could be amply explained by stupidity. Let us hope law-enforcement is a bit less incompetent for this guy than they usually are with regards to all things Internet.
progress (Score:3, Funny)
Aw, how cute, they're forming a business services community! What's next, conferences?
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This is fucking retarded on so many levels. (Score:1)
I see a lot of scams in what I do now and I can tell you that this is one of them.
First of all, I am highly dubious that this is in fact an elaborate police sting. If it were, all they'd get is the moronic bottom feeding small fish. Not worth the time and money in court costs to prosecute. Cops go after big fish to take out the spider controlling the web or some high profile crook to put the fear of god into other crooks.(See IRS [USA] strategy)
Is this for real? I don't think so because we wouldn't be seei
Insurance for without ticket (Score:3, Interesting)
Game-changer (Score:2)
Methinks the law enforcement agencies which investigate cybercrime have realized that they are incapable of hiring qualified computer experts who can find the culprits of such crimes, so they decided to get back to the basics. Instead of trying to catch them in cyberspace, where they excel at their trade, they decided to bring the criminals into the police domain, setting up a sting.
I am interested to see if it actually works.
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Methinks the law enforcement agencies which investigate cybercrime have realized that they are incapable of hiring qualified computer experts who can find the culprits of such crimes, so they decided to get back to the basics.
That's not why the FBI is ineffective in this area. Their manpower allocation on the computer side is 50% "national security", 40% kiddie porn, and 9% investigating fraud complaints from citizens.
Sting operation (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't a sting operation. Law enforcement would not be that obvious; They prefer to infiltrate, get close to the people at the top, gather intelligence, and then orchestrate mass-busts shortly after extracting their operatives. The whole point of undercover work is to not get noticed in the wrong way -- making stupid and risky suggestions for criminal enterprise could get them hurt or killed before they gathered the intelligence they were sent in to acquire.
No, fortunately for us, this is most likely stupidity on a grand and delusional scale. The person behind this is most likely in his 20s, single, male, above-average intelligence, spend his childhood poor, regular access to computers and public education, an interest in engineering/programming, and has some idea about "getting it all back" either for himself or his family. He may have started out with smaller crimes -- credit card theft, fraud, etc. He probably has a juvenile record from learning the ropes, and that record brought him into contact with more experienced adults. He smartened up and graduated to computer crime.
There, he honed his programming and engineering skills somewhat (self-taught), and channeled his anger over perceived societal injustice from his teenage years into scams and computer fraud; "They hurt me, I hurt them back ten times worse!" Given his poor track record with crime before, and his sudden 'success' at it now, he quickly developed an exaggerated sense of his abilities and like many young males, now considers himself 'invulnerable'. This latest example simply underscores the extent of his delusional thinking -- and others who are more cautious and experienced don't see that, instead misattributing it to "the police", due to healthy levels of paranoia that permeate the criminal underground.
Anyway, these types of criminals usually self-destruct within a few years of reaching this critical mass of delusional thinking. If he's "lucky" (I use the word lightly; Obviously, it would be better if he were caught and got help) and isn't caught, he'll take the rejection from his criminal peers as further evidence that the world hates him, and become further isolated as he continues what has now in his mind become a one man crusade against the evil empire. The core attributes of this person is a sense of persecution, intelligence, creativity, and he may be schizo-affective, the key trait here being blunted affect (his emotions seem subdued externally, but may have a very rich internal fantasy world to compensate).
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Okay, I RTFA after writing this; Some confirmations. "27-year-old Oleg Vsevolodovich Tolstykh from Moscow". Recently purchased a new vehicle, but not something too ostenacious -- suggests he's recently come into some money, especially given his mentioning his "cars, house, and face." The ordering here isn't random -- he's putting status symbols first, which again underscores that he likely came from poverty. The article doesn't say whether the message from the hacker was translated or if he wrote it as-is.
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Analysis of your post: Misunderstanding of Russian outlook on manhood, misunderstanding of the social situation there and how wealth is relative, obvious lack of paranoia, a really good car and a friend in the background (http://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/vorvnsdyt.png).
If this was a honeypot post, you got me. I am bound to be a criminal, book me, Sigmund Holmes from Precrime.
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I think your analysis would make a lot of sense in the Western context. In the Russian/E. European context the cultural differences are enough to make it useless.
Basically it comes down to this: you don't have to be a weirdo to do this kind of thing over there.
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If only I were a stupid uneducated rich boy in either my teens, or at least 30s watching TV instead of hacking, and not caring about social justice. Maybe I would start on the good path then. -_-
Same guys?!?! (Score:2)
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Are these the same guys that sold me that darn bridge in new york?
Glad I found you... Could you do something about that bridge of yours? The road surface is a disgrace and the whole thing needs a coat of paint.
Pay someone to go to jail for you? (Score:2)
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Jury? as if. Nobody goes in front of a jury anymore.
More likely the prosecutor will sit there, pile on 10 different charges, each of which could land him in jail, then will offer him a much lighter sentance (either jail or parole) if he just confesses.
Most people, even innocent ones, will take that deal. In fact, its been shown that the standard techniques used by police and prosecutors can get confessions up to 90% of the time, regardless of real innocense or guilt.
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Why do you think a wealthy person couldn't bribe a cop to plant some evidence (seems drugs would be easiest) and arrest and jail anyone they like (or, rather, don't like) now? And given the state's courts will take the cop's word over their victim's, they wouldn't even need to bribe a judge; and the jury would baa right along.
That is slightly different only because of the types of crimes that wealthy people tend to go to prison for. Take Bernie Madoff, for example. Planting drugs on some other person would not have been very useful as his charges had nothing to do with drugs - really, planting evidence in any of the traditional ways would not have likely been effective.
However, if he wanted to give some random person $400k to sit in jail on his behalf for a few years, a lot of people would take that offer. Even worse a l
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However, if he wanted to give some random person $400k to sit in jail on his behalf for a few years, a lot of people would take that offer. Even worse a lot of politicians and pundits would applaud it.
You God Damned Liberals, always interfering with the right of a private person to enter business arrangements with others.
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Nothing new here. This is just what some of the more reputable gangs have done for YEARS now. A FOAF was recently actually talking with someone in one of these gangs (the more traditional kind, mexican actually).
If what the person told him was true, his business is garaunteed. if he gets busted, other gang members take over, and pay his family dividends from the business, when he gets out, the business is his again.
Of course, this is a form of insurance, but, it makes sense, because its also insurance for t
Thief in Law (Score:2)
...Sounds like bank officials.
Goldman Sacks vs. vorVzakone? (Score:2)
The best way to avoid a cyberheist (Score:2)
Or don't use Microsoft Windows