As more and more criminals have discovered how lucrative cyber crime can be, it’s causing a shortage of tech talent for the crime lords who run the digital sewer. In a fascinating article, the BBC reports that these gangs are starting to go to increasingly desperate measures in order to recruit hackers into their criminal underworlds. To a certain extent, this shouldn’t really be all that surprising. People love using technological advancements, but there are only so many people who really actually understand how the infrastructure works and more importantly to the criminals, how to get around the safeguards that companies build.
At the same time, crime is easy. Anyone can steal, getting away with it’s the hard part and with the digital transition, it creates opportunities that many two bit theives want to cash in on even though they lack the skills to do this themselves. The problem is though, like any case where demand exceeds supply, there are only so many criminals who are willing to work in the cyberslums. As a result criminal enterprises have started paying for students to get technlogy degrees and have started recruiting kids who dabble in hacking into their gangs.
While I can understand the appeal of a rebel hacker gang to teenagers, this trend is really very frightening. Criminals aren’t the sort of people who make investments in human capital and then just let them walk away. If someone is going to blow $100K on an education, you have to expect that they’re going to want to make that money back, plus a lot of profit for the risks they are taking. With cyber crime having become even more sophisticated, these recruitment efforts are a natural way for these gangs to fill their need for quality tech people. With so many legitimate opportunities out there in life, it’s sad to think that people are trapping themselves in lives of crimes just so that they can spam the internet and run con jobs. Hopefully, this trend won’t turn out to be a long term development for the tech industry because there are already enough problems trying to stop the people who don’t know what their doing, let alone the ones who get training.