Study: Cybercrime isn’t outlaw fun; it’s boring

Cybercrime has gone mainstream, according to research by Cambridge University’s Cybercrime Centre, and it has become a snooze fest.

At one time, maybe, cybercrime attracted a certain type of brainy outlaw, looking for loot in the wild world of the internet. At least that is the way cybercriminals have been portrayed.

But the reality is much different.

It turns out that maintaining a network of connected computers designed to perform nefarious tasks is not only hard work but really boring work. That’s mainly because cybercrime has become a service, one that bad people can actually hire doing bad things. And if people are hiring you for a service, and if you have competition in the same evil area, you have to give good customer service. You need to collect money and deal with customer’s technical questions, all while fending off the cops and fighting wars with other criminals.

Another thing you have to do is find people who know enough to do the low-level technical work. But, these people are in short supply, and in a legal job, your low-level techie would be making more money.

That all means costs are high, work is hard with little reward in the thrill of it, while income isn’t that great.

Might as well be legit.

In fact, the business of running computer crime is nearly the same as legitimate system administrative work. The difference is most cybercrime services are exposed to law enforcement.

One former cybercriminal quoted in the Cambridge paper said:

“And after doing [it] for almost a year, I lost all motivation, and really didn’t care anymore. So I just left and went on with life. It wasn’t challenging enough at all. Creating a (cybercrime network) is easy. Providing the power to run it is the tricky part. And when you have to put all your effort, all your attention… When you have to sit in front of a computer screen and scan, filter, then filter again over 30 amps per 4 hours it gets annoying.”