The article says that that post was likely a fake post created by Toha to throw off authorities:
>It seems plausible that the BMW ad invoking Toha’s email address and the name and phone number of a Russian citizen was simply misdirection on Toha’s part — intended to confuse and throw off investigators.
A 38-year-old Russian crime gang leader arrested in ... Kyiv, Ukraine.
"The law enforcement action and resulting confusion about the identity of the detained has thrown the Russian cybercrime forum scene into disarray in recent weeks"
I'm guessing "disarray" means payments not posting? Bonus pool depleted?
> A 38-year-old Russian crime gang leader arrested in ... Kyiv, Ukraine.
That tracks. How many Russian cybercriminals can you think of who were arrested in Russia? Hence why a lot of malware checks for your keyboard's language - so the payload doesn't deploy in Russia, which _would_ actually get you arrested.
But if you're targeting people outside Russia, you're golden.
As for why he's in Kyiv? Maybe his girlfriend is from there. Maybe he prefers Kyiv to Moscow or whichever oblast he's from. Maybe he's hiding from the Russian draft?
there is a difference between "russian" and "russian speaking" that is quite important to many eastern europeans that do not wish to be part of some kreml lead lingua-nation.
Do you realize that 90% of Ukrainian names are the same as Russian? Sometimes they just spelled slightly different in Ukrainian language, but on Russian speaking websites Russian version are used.
Volodymyr - Vladimir, Anton - Anton (same spelling).
This is akin to asking if someone can tell an German name from a French name. Sure, there are some shared ones, but for most intents and purposes locals can easily tell the two apart.
Russia really isn't that similar to the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Even in language, the other Slavic languages are pretty close to one another, whereas Russian is pretty different. Same for culture etc. Russia is trying very hard to create the impression, that it's all the same, in the hopes of eventually occupying neighbors again, but it really isn't.
Russian is a Slavic language and very similar to other Slavic languages especially Ukrainian and Belarusian. Far closer than German and French. I have family across 5 different Slavic countries and hear various Slavic languages regularly. You're just spewing complete bs for political reasons apparently.
I speak most of the languages you listed on a conversational level, but sure, it's easier to cry about astroturfing than consider that you might be wrong.
Thankfully, people living on the east are completely immune to ethnic stereotypization and propaganda, like you clearly demonstrate. They even get to have their own opinions. Oh the wonders of geography and lineage.
LOL. Have you ever read what Ukrainians said in the last 35 years? Not some pretty recital from CNN, ABC, BBC, DW, but actual words said and written by actual Ukrainians?
Or, for that matter, have you ever read Reddit? I'm 100% sure that if I open any subreddit like /r/politics, in the first 10 posts there will be something like "burn all Russians", "we must nuke Russia", "Russian are subhumans and they must be eliminated from Earth". Such phrases are so pervading there that I stopped visiting reddit even for reading technical subreddits. BTW, Reddit moderators never ban users for calling to kill Russians (also, in 2022 Meta openly said it is ok to say such things openly, just to note that nazism is welcome in the West, or to be precise, it never went away and it wasn't an invention of Hitler).
Yes, people say a lot of dumb and reductive shit everywhere, I've been around. What I'm saying is that while it's entirely reasonable to get upset about it and react accordingly, you also have the option of exercising self-awareness and agency, and not swing the pendulum the other way.
Case in point, maybe the most rational action to take after reading something that strikes you as stereotypization is probably not whipping out a stereotype about "westerners" or whatever of your own. Where the dividing line between west and east moves around about as much as the dividing line between balkan and not balkan, of course.
Well, in fact part of the reason why they left Russia is to be freer from threat of law enforcement. Ukraine is a more corrupt country and also doing shady things is more socially acceptable there. Don't get me wrong, i am a big supporter of Ukraine including its war efforts (and in fact work full time on Ukrainian defence tech project of my own), but it's a country as close to the popular Western mental image of "Eastern Europe" as it gets. Russia is a more orderly place - it is uncanny, but not chaotic. If you have some bitcoin, you can get away from law enforcement in Ukraine for a lot longer than you can in Russia.
And well, the reason of why cybercriminals are so frequently Russians is not that Russians are particularly evil. It's simply because they have the best technical higher education of Eastern Europe. Atheistic, post-Communist cultures of all of those countries, save for Czech Republic maybe, have no backstops against (nonviolent) crime at all. People there won't do cybercrime because they don't have the brains or training to do it, not because they are morally against it or society prevents them from it. It may be difficult to grasp for Americans (even those who don't consider themselves religious), but there are cultures that are completely Godless even on subconscious level. These people do whatever works and whatever they can get away with.
It is just not true. The more easter you go, the more corrupt it gets - culminating in Russia. And more crime you get too, including crime committed directly by police.
Stop with this Russia is superior nonsense. It is not. It is literally the country that exports the corruption and crime.
There are old and atheistic cultures that maintain strong value systems that follow similar principles to western ideas of law and "right and wrong." Therefore the assertion that Eastern Europeans being atheistic is the reason they are more open to doing crime is an extraordinary one, and unless you can provide extraordinary evidence, your assertion should be ignored.
My assertion is that this is mainly because of Communism and the Atheism it brought in. Surely it won't happen because of historical/cultural Atheism e.g. in China. Communism has destroyed the very idea of "society" as we understand it - both due to ideology ("society as a construct put forward by the exploiter classes to keep people in check") - they originally even considered nuclear family to be such institution as well ("family as a cell of exploitation") but quickly realised that destroying the family results in depopulation and lack of muskets to fight the "capitalist pigs" and reverted on that one. For Communists, there is a state and there are people, but no "society" - it is a dangerous thing that can get in the Party's way as a quasi-organised third subject. State keeps people in check and exploits them to meet the Party's goals, people are free to do whatever they can get away with when the Party and the State are looking the other way, morally 100% free to cheat it and each other - hard power is the only thing that can stop them. Now the Party is gone, society has not formed, and the people are set free...
Society and God are about the same thing right? Something that keeps people in check without a threat of hard force. Totalitarianism destroys that because it won't tolerate anything getting in it's way.
It sounds like you have a bone to pick with Stalinism or Maoism, which is understandable, but I'm still not clear what Atheism has to do with it. I don't quite understand how you can equate society and a god as being the same thing - especially since the thing that makes them the same thing is behavior regulation without threat of "hard" force (I guess you mean physical violence?) This doesn't make sense to me for a couple reasons:
First, most societies seem to believe they maintain peace through threat of violence. Throwing someone in jail is a form of violence. Monotheistic religions threaten the same with eternal torture in hell or similar, I can't imagine a more plain form of physical violence than that!
However, the second reason this doesn't make sense to me is that in both cases this is wrong, society really maintains decorum and peace through social pressure and inherent human distaste of violence and unfairness, which may be baked into our shared psychology. Religion builds on top of this, but it's not due to the 10 commandments that people don't murder - people generally just don't want to murder, and those that murder anyway aren't stopped by knowledge of, or even faith in, the 10 commandments (they may do it in a moment of passion). Same for law - seems people just do what they feel is right, or if wrong, what they think they can get away with. Hence why severity of punishment doesn't positively correlate with reduction in crime, but likelihood of getting caught strongly correlates.
So thus my third reason: Organized religion exists to convince people to behave in opposition to their nature, against those indefinite somethings that make them feel uncomfortable with harming others. They make rules that make them do things that are odd, bizarre, or unethical, such as isolating themselves from their friends, family, and neighbors, or giving a lot of their money away to the religion. Historically, they make them go kill a lot of people from other religions, despite these people being of the same class as them and having the same problems back home (similar to how State authorities, such as Kings, did, or in the modern era, Capitalists). Without organized religion leveraging massive capital and organized labor to convince people to act against their nature, I imagine our history would have had a lot less suffering!
As for your criticism of what I take to be either Maoism or Stalinism, as it seems you're speaking of the USSR or the PRC as a single entity, I feel that's more just a criticism of authoritarianism in general that I basically agree with. Fascist states as well don't recognize people, hence why even supporters of fascism often find themselves, to their great surprise, on the wrong side of a firing line that they had supported being pointed previously at their neighbors. All to serve the State. To a far lesser extent I think liberal democracies suffer from this as well, see for example the USA's extensive interventionist activity post WWII to maintain its hegemony.
I accuse capitalism of the same thing you accuse totalitarianism of - all things, even religion, are ablated down to something marketable. Just take for example the holiday celebrating the birth of Christians' founding prophet: transformed into Coca Cola's gleeful, uninhibited, consumerist orgy - especially ironic since the prophet Jesus was by all accounts a communist! "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven," or recall his violent expulsion of bankers and salesmen from the temple, or his lesson of the post-scarcity nature of our world and how this should be leveraged to freely give food to all (the "miraculous" creation of infinite fish and bread, a clear metaphor for the endless bounty of the Earth).
I mean I rarely read that they nab anyone outside of Europe/the US. But would have assumed the middle east, south east asia, post-soviet republics. If this guy is Russian speaking why not Russia?
"An article by Krebs on 27 March 2018 on KrebsOnSecurity.com about the mining software company and script "Coinhive" where Krebs published the names of admins of the German imageboard pr0gramm, as a former admin is the inventor of the script and owner of the company, was answered by an unusual protest action by the users of that imageboard. Using the pun of "Krebs" meaning "Cancer" in German, they donated to charitable organisations fighting against those diseases, collecting more than 200,000 Euro of donations until the evening of 28 March to the Deutsche Krebshilfe charity".
The “dark web” is a journalistic (AFAICT) coinage arising from a confusion between two terms: a “darknet” (antonym: “clearnet”) is a network that traverses the Internet in such a way that the Internet’s routing infrastructure can’t see the ultimate destination (Tor, but also DN42, your work VPN, etc.); the “deep web” is the part of the web that’s not accessible to search engines and thus only really used by those who already know it exists (Tor hidden services, pirate libraries, private torrent trackers, but also every other registration-gated forum and arguably even Facebook Marketplace—the term is from a more innocent time with much fewer walled gardens).
Seems suspicious that part of the identity tracing chain is a sale to a user named "Honeypo" (honeypot).
The article says that that post was likely a fake post created by Toha to throw off authorities:
>It seems plausible that the BMW ad invoking Toha’s email address and the name and phone number of a Russian citizen was simply misdirection on Toha’s part — intended to confuse and throw off investigators.
No it’s to do with censorship of Pooh in china.
A 38-year-old Russian crime gang leader arrested in ... Kyiv, Ukraine.
"The law enforcement action and resulting confusion about the identity of the detained has thrown the Russian cybercrime forum scene into disarray in recent weeks"
I'm guessing "disarray" means payments not posting? Bonus pool depleted?
> A 38-year-old Russian crime gang leader arrested in ... Kyiv, Ukraine.
That tracks. How many Russian cybercriminals can you think of who were arrested in Russia? Hence why a lot of malware checks for your keyboard's language - so the payload doesn't deploy in Russia, which _would_ actually get you arrested.
But if you're targeting people outside Russia, you're golden.
As for why he's in Kyiv? Maybe his girlfriend is from there. Maybe he prefers Kyiv to Moscow or whichever oblast he's from. Maybe he's hiding from the Russian draft?
> Russian crime gang leader arrested in ... Kyiv,
It's funny how all Ukrainian criminals are Russians. /s
there is a difference between "russian" and "russian speaking" that is quite important to many eastern europeans that do not wish to be part of some kreml lead lingua-nation.
[dead]
> It's funny how all Ukrainian criminals are Russians. /s
I'm in Poland atm : it's funny how all criminals in Poland are Ukrainians /s
(fwiw my mom is from Ukrainian roots and has one of those family names ending in "-enko" so chill out guys)
Seriously though: lots of car theft here in Poland are cars being stolen and finding their way to Ukraine (and some to Russia).
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Do you realize that 90% of Ukrainian names are the same as Russian? Sometimes they just spelled slightly different in Ukrainian language, but on Russian speaking websites Russian version are used.
Volodymyr - Vladimir, Anton - Anton (same spelling).
This might be true of Ukraine, yet you see this across all of the Eastern Bloc, where the names are not similar, not just Ukraine.
Can you tell a Russian from Ukrainian? Can you even tell an Ukrainian name from Russian name?
There's a bunch of phonetical differences:
Different suffixes: Ukrainian surnames often have no suffixes at all (more often than in Russia): Although it doesn't say anything about a person's nationality for certain because of migrations.This is akin to asking if someone can tell an German name from a French name. Sure, there are some shared ones, but for most intents and purposes locals can easily tell the two apart.
It's more like telling a German name from an Austrian name.
Russia really isn't that similar to the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Even in language, the other Slavic languages are pretty close to one another, whereas Russian is pretty different. Same for culture etc. Russia is trying very hard to create the impression, that it's all the same, in the hopes of eventually occupying neighbors again, but it really isn't.
Russian is a Slavic language and very similar to other Slavic languages especially Ukrainian and Belarusian. Far closer than German and French. I have family across 5 different Slavic countries and hear various Slavic languages regularly. You're just spewing complete bs for political reasons apparently.
I speak most of the languages you listed on a conversational level, but sure, it's easier to cry about astroturfing than consider that you might be wrong.
Cool story bud.
Wow. Can you tell a Korean person from Chinese person? Polish name from a Czech one?
Different cultures, different languages, it's obvious to the locals.
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Thankfully, people living on the east are completely immune to ethnic stereotypization and propaganda, like you clearly demonstrate. They even get to have their own opinions. Oh the wonders of geography and lineage.
LOL. Have you ever read what Ukrainians said in the last 35 years? Not some pretty recital from CNN, ABC, BBC, DW, but actual words said and written by actual Ukrainians?
Or, for that matter, have you ever read Reddit? I'm 100% sure that if I open any subreddit like /r/politics, in the first 10 posts there will be something like "burn all Russians", "we must nuke Russia", "Russian are subhumans and they must be eliminated from Earth". Such phrases are so pervading there that I stopped visiting reddit even for reading technical subreddits. BTW, Reddit moderators never ban users for calling to kill Russians (also, in 2022 Meta openly said it is ok to say such things openly, just to note that nazism is welcome in the West, or to be precise, it never went away and it wasn't an invention of Hitler).
Yes, people say a lot of dumb and reductive shit everywhere, I've been around. What I'm saying is that while it's entirely reasonable to get upset about it and react accordingly, you also have the option of exercising self-awareness and agency, and not swing the pendulum the other way.
Case in point, maybe the most rational action to take after reading something that strikes you as stereotypization is probably not whipping out a stereotype about "westerners" or whatever of your own. Where the dividing line between west and east moves around about as much as the dividing line between balkan and not balkan, of course.
Well, in fact part of the reason why they left Russia is to be freer from threat of law enforcement. Ukraine is a more corrupt country and also doing shady things is more socially acceptable there. Don't get me wrong, i am a big supporter of Ukraine including its war efforts (and in fact work full time on Ukrainian defence tech project of my own), but it's a country as close to the popular Western mental image of "Eastern Europe" as it gets. Russia is a more orderly place - it is uncanny, but not chaotic. If you have some bitcoin, you can get away from law enforcement in Ukraine for a lot longer than you can in Russia.
And well, the reason of why cybercriminals are so frequently Russians is not that Russians are particularly evil. It's simply because they have the best technical higher education of Eastern Europe. Atheistic, post-Communist cultures of all of those countries, save for Czech Republic maybe, have no backstops against (nonviolent) crime at all. People there won't do cybercrime because they don't have the brains or training to do it, not because they are morally against it or society prevents them from it. It may be difficult to grasp for Americans (even those who don't consider themselves religious), but there are cultures that are completely Godless even on subconscious level. These people do whatever works and whatever they can get away with.
It is just not true. The more easter you go, the more corrupt it gets - culminating in Russia. And more crime you get too, including crime committed directly by police.
Stop with this Russia is superior nonsense. It is not. It is literally the country that exports the corruption and crime.
There are old and atheistic cultures that maintain strong value systems that follow similar principles to western ideas of law and "right and wrong." Therefore the assertion that Eastern Europeans being atheistic is the reason they are more open to doing crime is an extraordinary one, and unless you can provide extraordinary evidence, your assertion should be ignored.
My assertion is that this is mainly because of Communism and the Atheism it brought in. Surely it won't happen because of historical/cultural Atheism e.g. in China. Communism has destroyed the very idea of "society" as we understand it - both due to ideology ("society as a construct put forward by the exploiter classes to keep people in check") - they originally even considered nuclear family to be such institution as well ("family as a cell of exploitation") but quickly realised that destroying the family results in depopulation and lack of muskets to fight the "capitalist pigs" and reverted on that one. For Communists, there is a state and there are people, but no "society" - it is a dangerous thing that can get in the Party's way as a quasi-organised third subject. State keeps people in check and exploits them to meet the Party's goals, people are free to do whatever they can get away with when the Party and the State are looking the other way, morally 100% free to cheat it and each other - hard power is the only thing that can stop them. Now the Party is gone, society has not formed, and the people are set free...
Society and God are about the same thing right? Something that keeps people in check without a threat of hard force. Totalitarianism destroys that because it won't tolerate anything getting in it's way.
It sounds like you have a bone to pick with Stalinism or Maoism, which is understandable, but I'm still not clear what Atheism has to do with it. I don't quite understand how you can equate society and a god as being the same thing - especially since the thing that makes them the same thing is behavior regulation without threat of "hard" force (I guess you mean physical violence?) This doesn't make sense to me for a couple reasons:
First, most societies seem to believe they maintain peace through threat of violence. Throwing someone in jail is a form of violence. Monotheistic religions threaten the same with eternal torture in hell or similar, I can't imagine a more plain form of physical violence than that!
However, the second reason this doesn't make sense to me is that in both cases this is wrong, society really maintains decorum and peace through social pressure and inherent human distaste of violence and unfairness, which may be baked into our shared psychology. Religion builds on top of this, but it's not due to the 10 commandments that people don't murder - people generally just don't want to murder, and those that murder anyway aren't stopped by knowledge of, or even faith in, the 10 commandments (they may do it in a moment of passion). Same for law - seems people just do what they feel is right, or if wrong, what they think they can get away with. Hence why severity of punishment doesn't positively correlate with reduction in crime, but likelihood of getting caught strongly correlates.
So thus my third reason: Organized religion exists to convince people to behave in opposition to their nature, against those indefinite somethings that make them feel uncomfortable with harming others. They make rules that make them do things that are odd, bizarre, or unethical, such as isolating themselves from their friends, family, and neighbors, or giving a lot of their money away to the religion. Historically, they make them go kill a lot of people from other religions, despite these people being of the same class as them and having the same problems back home (similar to how State authorities, such as Kings, did, or in the modern era, Capitalists). Without organized religion leveraging massive capital and organized labor to convince people to act against their nature, I imagine our history would have had a lot less suffering!
As for your criticism of what I take to be either Maoism or Stalinism, as it seems you're speaking of the USSR or the PRC as a single entity, I feel that's more just a criticism of authoritarianism in general that I basically agree with. Fascist states as well don't recognize people, hence why even supporters of fascism often find themselves, to their great surprise, on the wrong side of a firing line that they had supported being pointed previously at their neighbors. All to serve the State. To a far lesser extent I think liberal democracies suffer from this as well, see for example the USA's extensive interventionist activity post WWII to maintain its hegemony.
I accuse capitalism of the same thing you accuse totalitarianism of - all things, even religion, are ablated down to something marketable. Just take for example the holiday celebrating the birth of Christians' founding prophet: transformed into Coca Cola's gleeful, uninhibited, consumerist orgy - especially ironic since the prophet Jesus was by all accounts a communist! "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man into heaven," or recall his violent expulsion of bankers and salesmen from the temple, or his lesson of the post-scarcity nature of our world and how this should be leveraged to freely give food to all (the "miraculous" creation of infinite fish and bread, a clear metaphor for the endless bounty of the Earth).
Ah yes, because only Russians can be criminals. And also Russians cannot be born in Eastern Europe.
Why would cyber-criminals (successful ones at least) dare living in Europe? Aren't there plenty of places out of reach for Europol and the FBI, etc.?
Or is cyber-crime so unprofitable?
I assume they just continue living where they lived before?
> Aren't there plenty of places out of reach for Europol and the FBI, etc.?
There are a few problems with this question, but lets start with
Where is "out of reach for Europol and the FBI"?
I mean I rarely read that they nab anyone outside of Europe/the US. But would have assumed the middle east, south east asia, post-soviet republics. If this guy is Russian speaking why not Russia?
... and it's 403 error from Tor. And no .onion site. LOL
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He's been a target numerous times https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Krebs#Career
Thankful he's willing to continue on the mission.
"An article by Krebs on 27 March 2018 on KrebsOnSecurity.com about the mining software company and script "Coinhive" where Krebs published the names of admins of the German imageboard pr0gramm, as a former admin is the inventor of the script and owner of the company, was answered by an unusual protest action by the users of that imageboard. Using the pun of "Krebs" meaning "Cancer" in German, they donated to charitable organisations fighting against those diseases, collecting more than 200,000 Euro of donations until the evening of 28 March to the Deutsche Krebshilfe charity".
I approve of this kind of retaliation.
> Since the Europol announcement, the XSS forum resurfaced at a new address on the deep web (reachable only via the anonymity network Tor).
Should it not rather be "the dark web"?
The “dark web” is a journalistic (AFAICT) coinage arising from a confusion between two terms: a “darknet” (antonym: “clearnet”) is a network that traverses the Internet in such a way that the Internet’s routing infrastructure can’t see the ultimate destination (Tor, but also DN42, your work VPN, etc.); the “deep web” is the part of the web that’s not accessible to search engines and thus only really used by those who already know it exists (Tor hidden services, pirate libraries, private torrent trackers, but also every other registration-gated forum and arguably even Facebook Marketplace—the term is from a more innocent time with much fewer walled gardens).