How skilled are organised cyber criminals?

Lucasium

Do they have a mastery of computer science or do they just have basic coding skills?

Reply 1

driftawaay

Original post by Lucasium

Do they have a mastery of computer science or do they just have basic coding skills?

depends what kind of cyber criminal you are talking about.

idk ask Anonymous

Original post by driftawaay

depends what kind of cyber criminal you are talking about.

http://fortune.com/2015/05/01/how-cyber-attacks-became-more-profitable-than-the-drug-trade/

This type

Reply 4

username1799249

Original post by Lucasium

Do they have a mastery of computer science or do they just have basic coding skills?

There are groups of people who live and breath computing. "Computer Science" is a label I am sure most would scoff at. It suggest something that is defined and finite. The world of hacking is infinite and anything goes. Ironically, about 80% of what we might call online fraud doesn't target computer systems. It targets humans and their willingness to trust someone in authority.

Reply 5

Cascadess

Original post by Lucasium

http://fortune.com/2015/05/01/how-cyber-attacks-became-more-profitable-than-the-drug-trade/

This type

It would partly depend on what you define as "basic coding skills" and "mastery of computer science". I doubt there is anyone in the world know knows every algorithm that has ever been thought up, so "mastery" is hard to sum up. I guess in these term, by mastery you meant knowing the ins and outs of almost all aspects of the coding language(s) they are using, and also the complete understanding of how the system they are hacking is going to try stop them from getting inside.

I am not and expert on this, but I would say that the companies that are hiring security companies or personnel obviously want something kept safe. The only way to keep something safe is to come up with a method of locking out from the public, that people find incredibly hard to get past.

On the hackers side, they either need to find a flaw in the system that has been put in place (I have already established this will be very hard if done well.) otherwise they might be able to find another way around the problem, which would require being able to read through a lot of code, understand it all, and then find a weakness in it.

All in all, I think after decades of cyber attacks, defence companies have become good enough at what they do to be able to stop most cyber attacks from people who picked up coding last week, and their only real threat is people who know the systems they are hacking and are using to hack very well.

However if you are talking about other sorts of attacks, other than getting critical information, like trying to take down a server, then it might be a whole lot easier. From what I understand (I dont look too much into hacking) DDos attacks which bring down servers basically work by sending out a virus to lots of computers without them knowing... then all at once sending thousand and millions of requests for data to a single server, which in turn causes the server to crash.

Hope this helped, if there was anything wrong in my post, please correct me superior nerds :P