Russian hackers best in the world

The Russian mathematical school is known as one of the best in the whole world

Spokesmen for the RF Interior Ministry officially admit that Russian hackers are the world's
best ones. It has become a popular tradition for Russian hackers to form transnational groups with
their foreign colleagues for stealing information, blackmailing and extortion.

The issue of Russian hackers was touched upon at the recent e-Crimes Congress in London. Head
of the RF Interior Ministry's department for special technical activities Lieutenant-general Boris
Miroshnikov spoke at the congress. He said, the police provided reliable data proving that Russian
hackers are better than their foreign "colleagues." This is quite understandable, he says, because
the Russian mathematics school is known as one of the world's best schools; today programmers from
Russia successfully work all over the world. This is the reason why Russian hackers perform so
wonderfully.

The Interior Ministry is anxious over the increasing number of hackers in this country. In the
mid-1990s, hackers were just mere net hooligans who cracked websites of banks or informational
systems of governmental structures just for fun. But today, hackers form virtual gangs and earn much
money cracking important websites.

In 2000, hackers committed 584 crimes classified as illegal access to computer data. Next
year, the number of cracking increased three times to 1567. And every year, the number of such
crimes is increasing even more (eight thousand of e-crimes were registered in 2004). The same
statistics is typical of making computer viruses and dangerous programs. In 2000, the police
instituted just 170 criminal cases on the basis of the RF Penal Code clause #273 (production and
usage of dangerous computer programs), while in 2004, the number of such criminal cases made up over
one thousand. Unfortunately, today makers of computer viruses and dangerous programs manage to evade
responsibility.

At the same time, Russian programmers are currently holding weaker positions. On the one hand,
Russian IT-experts are welcome all over the world. Israel, now one of the world leaders in computer
technologies, has become the home for many talented programmers from Russia. On the other side, at
the recent students programming championship, students of the Moscow State University and the
St.Petersburg Fine Mechanics and Optics Institute yielded the palm to the Chinese team for the first
time over the past years. Experts state this failure means IT-education urgently needs governmental
support. However, governmental support is not always an effective measure, as talented graduates
often go abroad.

The Russian Union of Businessmen and Industrialists reports that over 150 thousand of
programmers emigrated from Russia over the past years. Unfortunately, today Russia cannot offer
enough vacancies to IT specialists. This is another reason why talented programmers get involved
into illegal cracking of websites.

Read the original in Russian: http://news.pravda.ru/soft_hard/2005/04/13/74678.html
(Translated by: Maria Gousseva)

Pravda.Ru