Cybercriminal organizations also compete to attract talent, sometimes offering attractive remuneration and conditions. This is particularly what emerges from a study by Kaspersky, which combed through the IT job offers published on dark web forums.
IT skills are highly sought following in the labor market and the same is true in the criminal sphere. Which profiles are of most interest to malicious hacker organizations? Why do some IT specialists get tempted by illegal activities? And what monetary benefits can they derive from it? A Kaspersky study sets out to answer these different questions, giving a fairly detailed picture of the alternative job market that exists on the dark web. To do this, the company specializing in cybersecurity combed through 155 forums there, from January 2020 to June 2022, ultimately analyzing 638 job offers for cyberhackers and 229 job applications.
The lure of cybercrime
IT job postings on the dark web have several attractions for freelancers and telecommuters, notes Kaspersky. This category of professionals is inclined to appreciate the anonymity of this type of mission which, moreover, allows them to maintain the nomadic way of life that many are fond of. The Russian antivirus publisher also notes that job applications for illegal IT activities experienced an upsurge at the start of the Covid pandemic, with some specialists having lost contracts in this context and having difficulty finding new ones. jobs in the legal labor market. These individuals may have tipped over out of misunderstanding or indifference to the potential repercussions of such activity, the report’s authors suggest.
Completely professional alternative employers
Kaspersky’s study also highlights many similarities between the recruitment approaches of well-established companies and their counterparts on the dark web. The latter also appreciate highly qualified personnel and actively seek exceptional talent. Candidates are thus led to pass numerous phases of verification of their know-how, for example tests of encryption of malicious software executables or of bypassing security protections.
Dark web employers are also in competition when it comes to attracting talent and do not hesitate to try to stand out by offering attractive working conditions. Among the benefits most often cited are the possibilities of working from home (45%), full-time employment (34%) and flexible working hours (33%). The authors of the report note, however, rightly, that working remotely is in fact an obligation in this environment where anonymity is essential.
The most sought following and best paid profiles
Developers are the most sought-following IT professionals on the dark web (61% of all job openings). The “pentesters” come in second place but far behind (16%), followed by designers (10%) and admins (6%). Regarding the latter, the demand is lower than what the authors of the report imagined a priori. This result might be partly explained by the fact that cybercriminals and hacker groups are increasingly using cloud services, which are maintained by their providers.
Reverse engineers are those who, on average, can expect the highest income from cybercriminal activities, the report says (median monthly salary of $4,000). Next come pentesters ($2,500) and developers ($2,000). However, the disparities are quite significant. The highest monthly salary identified in this study was offered for a developer position, with a salary of $20,000 per month. Kaspersky also points out that some IT job postings on the dark web promise much higher than average salaries, if you add in promised bonuses or other commissions for properly completed jobs (e.g. successful extortion of a ransom or carrying out a fake website for a phishing campaign).