eMarkLee

At first glance, I thought I had read another Onion article with a title of “Romania “built our country on pirated Windows“. It is, however, a real article and a fact of life. All of those phishing emails and identity theft stories you read about probably came from Romania in some shape or form.

The reasons are pretty simple: Economics. When you can get a month’s wages from scamming fat Americans in one day, the incentive is there. Also the laws are so lax internationally, that you almost never see arrests being made. It’s especially true with Americans being hated internationally because of George Bush. Good job, Dub-ya. You see the same attacks by China, Nigeria, and Romania…but each have their own characteristics:

1. Romanians – highly technical and skilled. They are good at finding exploits and writing tools that are then sold on the Black Market to other countries.
2. Chinese – Medium technical skills but good at copycatting. Will take existing exploits and try to reproduce it everywhere. Also likes to apply brute-force attacks.
3. Nigerians – Low skill, low technical. Rudimentary 419 scams are their trademark. These Africans basically use the most basic of social engineering attacks. Basically you get the emails that say to use Western Union and wire them $10,000 and they will return the favor with $1 million. Sounds like a great deal! Unfortunately, some dumb-asses actually fall for these, keeping them in business.