Aside from that though, I wonder if we'll be seeing increasing criminal activity like this or if it'll stay as an occasional source of funny headlines.
On the one hand the resources and knowledge of how to compromise a server are more accessible all the time.
On the other, exploited vulnerabilities are patched and the walls stay a bit higher than the cheap ladders. This will pretty much ensure that there is almost always at least a non-trivial amount of learning that needs to be done in order to profitably compromise equipment for practical purposes.
I'm thinking that the prevalence of basic technical savvy (roughly "has strong google-fu in the service of troubleshooting" or better) is going to be the largest influence on whether hacking-augmented crime increases or not.
My logic here is that it would happen more if more criminals knew how to go about learning how to hack since that gap between pre-built tools and practical application is always going to be there, but it's certainly bridgeable with some curiosity.
More technically savvy population, more cybercrime. It makes sense, but it can also be used as a kind of fluency metric. I thereby propose the frequency of computer-aided criminal activity as a fraction of all criminal activity to be a target metric for US technology education, higher is better.
Hackers (err, "crackers") can sell their services to others. A small group of tech savvy people can enable a lot of tech illiterate people to commit cybercrime. This messes up your math.
We already live in a world where you don't need to own a botnet to DDoS somebody. You just rent someone else's botnet by the minute. The pirates in the story are amateurs now, but soon somebody might rise among their ranks as the go-to guy for computer stuff. Just pay him a few ringgits and you don't even need to know about Google. The only thing you need to know is who to call.
All depends on who you define as a pirate, hacker, etc. if you consider social engineering hacking and stealing goods in transit, then using the two together is as good as written history.
Aside from that though, I wonder if we'll be seeing increasing criminal activity like this or if it'll stay as an occasional source of funny headlines.
On the one hand the resources and knowledge of how to compromise a server are more accessible all the time.
On the other, exploited vulnerabilities are patched and the walls stay a bit higher than the cheap ladders. This will pretty much ensure that there is almost always at least a non-trivial amount of learning that needs to be done in order to profitably compromise equipment for practical purposes.
I'm thinking that the prevalence of basic technical savvy (roughly "has strong google-fu in the service of troubleshooting" or better) is going to be the largest influence on whether hacking-augmented crime increases or not.
My logic here is that it would happen more if more criminals knew how to go about learning how to hack since that gap between pre-built tools and practical application is always going to be there, but it's certainly bridgeable with some curiosity.
More technically savvy population, more cybercrime. It makes sense, but it can also be used as a kind of fluency metric. I thereby propose the frequency of computer-aided criminal activity as a fraction of all criminal activity to be a target metric for US technology education, higher is better.