Two years ago I went over there to teach about honeypots, a subject of a book I’ve written. It’s no surprise that many (if not most) of the best defense ideas and companies have come out of Israel. Not only does it have great hackers, but they are probably the best in the world I’ve met at defense. They also excel at cracking and using encryption, probably for the same reason. The Russians are great at mixing legitimate business models and frameworks with malware writing and hacking. But more impressive was the way Russian hackers looked at hacking as a business. Hackers from Bulgaria were especially good at writing malware, as were Russian hackers (surprise, surprise). That said, hackers from many other countries also excelled: the United Kingdom, Poland, and Bulgaria, to name three. Hackers from other countries were great at learning exactly what I taught them, but were not as good at finding new ways to do something or at putting previous lessons together to create a new attack chain. They learned quickly - and pushed the limits of what could be done. I can proudly say that, overall, American hackers easily outperformed those from other countries. Bear with me while I indulge in geographic stereotyping. I can tell you how well people from different countries hacked, how good they were overall, and what they excelled at. For a significant part of my career I taught hacking (at Foundstone and other computer security education companies) around the world.

spies are likely the best ones in the world - and get in and out without being discovered most of the time. Heck, even my all-time favorite computer hacking book, ' The Cuckoo’s Egg,' by Clifford Stoll, was written about a Russian KGB operative hacking way back in 1986, before the Internet was the Internet. Įverybody is spying on everyone and has been since before computers were connected to networks. government and the media’s continued warnings about who is hacking us reminds me of a womanizing cheat worried about his wife. Yes, foreign governments are attacking us. If it’s not the Russians, it’s the Chinese - or maybe the North Koreans. Be scared! The Russians are attacking us.

Online trove hacks