YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas Rid

lines on the record: 66
first: 2020-07-18
most recent: 2020-07-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, absolutely, right? The days of I could grab 15,000 bank accounts, log into them, and then transfer the money out are kind of coming to an end, hopefully, right? So I think that's generally the direction these things are heading.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think what you're seeing now with the evolution of this space as more second factor authentication happens, banks are getting better about protecting their sites. We have really great consumer tools now to protect our accounts. You're seeing this pivot where they're starting to go back more to sending you threatening messages. They're doing extortion. They're kind of driving a different way.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the whole problem with cybercrime for me, like just at a very fundamental level, is that it's not necessarily a criminality issue. There are a lot of issues that it gets attributed to, and it's just not. It's ultimately at its core secrets management problem, right? Like it is about the ease at which you can steal secrets from people and then weaponize those secrets to commit fraud. If you look at the data for breaches and for security incidents, 93% of all breaches are spear phishing emails, right? 80% of those is just straight credential theft. When we were chasing down the Zeus botnets back in the day, it was just painfully obvious that a strong two-factor authentication would stop like most of them.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And while some of the underlying technology has changed in terms of Tor and other things, the actual human aspects of this, in terms of people trading and the way they trust each other on these platforms, is very much the same as it was 20 years ago. Not that much has shifted in terms of how they operate.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in some sense, I think it's surprising how little it's evolved. So we've seen obviously the technology is changing a lot. I think in terms of the responses to those technical threats, you see a lot of change in that regard as well. But on the human level, actually, the changes are not large. It's quite a slow process. And in fact, we don't see a lot of change because ultimately humans behave in very similar ways. And I think it's important to remember that cyber criminals are humans too. And so a lot of the things that they do in terms of how they run the industry, how they trust each other, how they work together, how they run a business is very, very similar to how other people run businesses and how they work together and how they trust each other. And so ultimately, we often see a kind of return to things that have happened in the past in terms of how they operate, how they organize. Like if we take the example of these sorts of marketplaces, we hear a lot now about darknet. Actually, marketplaces have been around for decades, these online marketplaces.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sorry. Not just In the security So, when we talk about this kind of anonymity and the trends in the space and on the internet overall, how is the organized structure of cybercrime evolving and changing over time?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it was a seven year process of networking, of educating myself, and across law enforcement, across the private sector and a former cyber criminals as well, shared a huge amount of knowledge with me. They also shared contacts. So in academic research, we'd call the snowball sampling, basically that when you meet some people, they can then offer you introductions to others. But there was still some sense of, I guess, paranoia, actually, not just amongst the people from criminal backgrounds, but also those in the security sector are very paranoid. So that had its limits. And even towards the end of the study, I was still just actually, to be perfectly honest, finding people on LinkedIn, the amount of information that people put online is frightening. And the final way, really, that I did this in terms of talking particularly to those from a cyber criminal background was to begin to look at those who'd actually been arrested and actually became in some ways pen pals with some people who were in prison, who as part of this research shared really some of the most valuable information and were very”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of the innovator's dilemma applied to crime, right? They got their incumbency in the rackets that they're running, and they're not really looking to expand. Cybercrime is very much a greenfield opportunity the same way that technology is, and you do see a lot of the same dynamics at play.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of sort of public comments about the Russian mafia taking over cybercrime. And I think what people really mean is Russian cyber criminals are involved in cybercrime in a big way, and that's true. But Russian mafia, there's actually like specific groups you can track this to. They have names. And if you actually drill down into those groups, they're not that commonly involved. And I've spoken to certain people with a knowledge in this space who say, actually, you know, there's some people dipping their toe, but a lot of cases, this is not their skill set. You're not going to find mafia members suddenly wanting to get heavily involved in hacking because they don't know about hacking, right? What you're going to find them doing is getting involved in technology in a way that leverages and improves their sort of existing resources and their existing ability to do the crimes that they do. And so that's the kind of crossover you're more likely to see.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference is down to who's involved. So I think there's a lot of talk about traditional organized crime groups taking over cybercrime. The search I've done, I don't think that's the case. I think they're involved in certain ways, particularly on the money side of things. That's a particular skill set that they have. But on the whole, they...”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when we talk about that kind of old world organized crime versus the new and the ways that some of it is old made new again or just carried over, are there ways in which it's not just scaling technology? Are there ways in which this sort of new world of cybercrime and the organizational structures or the way that the entire organization is working is fundamentally different?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Lineage to some extent they were. I mean, we were investigating it to try to find out who was doing it and prosecute them. And that's a little bit different than someone looking to buy malware. But basically you would look...”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the postings that they make and some of the ads that they'll advertise, they'll sort of draw hints that they're part of it. I lived less in the message boards and more in the actual code. And so what we spent a lot of time was looking at the code, looking at the artifacts and the metadata around the code, the IP addresses that it was accessing, and building kind of a profile that way.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's sort of like we have bought malware from this person for X number of years and multiple people have bought malware from this person or this organization, they will continue to sell quality malware, right? That's generally the motion that happens. And you have to remember that a lot of these folks, like it is very much a network, right? There is a lot of connectivity between these people. There's a really dense connective tissues and they talk rather frequently. And if you look at the systems, what's even more interesting, a lot of the systems that they grew up building, so the messenger boards, the websites and IRC, these chat channels, I mean, they mimic things. It's pretty much, you know, the first version of Slack, the first version of Twitter, right? So a lot of those same dynamics apply are the kind of blue check mark on your Twitter account is the same as some of these nicknames that these folks buy. And then when they do switch nicknames or they do decide to go through a rebranding exercise, it's always sort of suggested that this person has a lineage that came from this sort of organization.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean, it's pretty akin to just every other industry, right? I think it's the same sort of branding exercise that they go through. Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM, right? That same kind of inertia applies to the e-crime world.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's complicated. So sometimes you get the offline online link that there's certain people who know, and in other cases you get people who just work together online. But the key thing is when you're looking at the online space, the value of the brand, the value of the nickname is this person has a lot more to lose if they burn it because they're losing potentially years of time that they've spent accruing a good reputation and building a brand. Of course, they can still do that. And some people wait for the kind of big payoff to do that. But that's going to be a strong signal to people that the longer you've been around for, the stronger the brand. And so you know what you're in for if you do business with this person.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what is the trust role of the brand there when you've got the vendor? Are you assuming that the trust piece between the front man and the coder is existing offline or that they understand, you know, that the nickname and the brand is continuous”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If not decades, then certainly at least one decade. Because ultimately for this person, the reputation associated with that name is just essential to who they are and who they are online. And valuable, but on the other extreme, you get certain cyber criminals who will change their names very regularly. So you might see this particularly around very high level Russian-speaking malware coders. So people who are really the top layer of the industry, obviously I think they're relatively cautious and they're doing this as a strategic move, but they don't need to deal with that many people in terms of the business that they run. What they need to do is code really good malware that then can be sold. And so the problem becomes more for someone who's, say, the vendor of this particular product. So those people on particular marketplaces, they actually need to hold the brand. They need to hold a nickname for long periods of time because they're the ones that you know you buy that product from. And so what they're doing, this particular person who's the vendor, is basically by agreeing to sell this malware, they're taking on the risk, right? So that's what they're doing by...”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So ultimately it's down to different players in the industry approach this problem in a different way. So I've encountered one case actually that I talked about in the book of a particular former cyber criminal who's never changed his nickname online. He's basically held the same name, the same nickname over the course of his entire cyber criminal career, and he even holds it now that he's left the business for legitimate industry in”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, what it is. And really, they want good brands. So they want to hold these brands. They don't want to throw them away. They don't want to waste them. But at the same time, there's a great risk there for cyber criminals, which is the longer you hold one of these brands, the longer you hold one of these nicknames, the more you're tied to them. And this is a problem when you start being investigated by law enforcement. And this is a problem when maybe you've ripped some people off in the underworld.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody does want to be found out. And in a way, it's why the book is called Industry of Anonymity, because ultimately that, to me, is what defines what cybercrime is all about, which is how do you stay under the radar? How do you stay safe? Which is really what a lot of cybercriminals are interested in. That's in some sense what defines who they are. How do you do that while also operating businesses that are increasingly successful, increasingly sophisticated, and large, right? And you get these two sort of competing tensions. For cyber criminals, the only way they can be identified online is through nicknames that they use. And actually, this plays a very important role in terms of the reputation, in terms of the brands that they can build. So you want to have a nickname that you use for a long period of time because then people know they can come to you if they want this particular good.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become a traditional criminal. They want to make money. All right, so how does the very nature of a criminal organization, which especially on this scale, by definition, requires an enormous amount of coordination, how do you deal with anonymity on a basic level in this context?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a cyber criminal now, or I'm going to stop being a cyber criminal and become a traditional criminal. They want to make money. And so they use what's available to them. And if that takes them into a space that we regard as being cyber, then they're cyber criminals. But actually, in reality, I think they're just criminals who use technology.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to sort of add another example of kind of what's old is new again, right? You're seeing instances and I think there was one recently in Canada where a bunch of armed folks kind of stormed into a cryptocurrency exchange and held everyone at gunpoint and tried to get the private key to steal their Bitcoin. This is the direction things are heading, right? It's sort of the blending of these two worlds will become pretty seamless as software eats the world, right? Like it's going to bleed together. And so you're going to start to see these things converge.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Absolutely. And so what they're doing is really leveraging that offline structure, the trust networks that they already have. And this actually gives them a strong base to then be able to run the scams online. Nigeria is another place where many, many of the offenders in Nigeria are known to each other and they come from sort of close links. And if we think about the evolution of that type of fraud, this evolved out of actually letter writing campaign that occurred earlier, where the same type of fraud was attempted just using pen and paper, and what happens is you have the internet coming along, you have these sort of cyber cafes coming into existence, and this offers a way to really maximize the number of victims that they can reach. So instead of doing it manually, they now start to do it using these new technologies and still leveraging the existing kind of relationships that they have amongst the people that they know.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the people actually carrying out the scams are based in Romania, and a lot of these people know each other in person, and they've grown up in some cases with each other, or they've come from the same community or the same school or even the same universities.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about this as a local phenomenon is actually a great way of doing this because it absolutely is fundamental, I think, to understanding how cybercrime works because rather than it being this broad field of cybercrime, which largely exists online in this kind of mysterious sort of cyberspace, right? Actually, what we're seeing more is people from different localities getting involved and using technology to do what they do. And so if we go back to the Romania example, that's a very good case about how important the offline is and how important the local is. These people often know each other in person who are behind these scams. So the scam is happening online. They're duping victims in the”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fraud pimp thing and the whole kind of like offline to online evolution, when you think about this sort of becoming part of now this level of sophistication where we're taking online cybercrime that it's trickling into offline real world as well, what are some of the other interesting ways that you see that this cyber criminal organized world touching now again sort of the real world in that kind of loop?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some fundamental level, right? Like all cybercrime is local. So whatever the organization is doing locally, it takes an online flavor to that. Like you see several gangs in the United States that are doing similar schemes where they take stolen credit cards and then sign up as Uber drivers and run credit cards through Uber or through Lyft or through various other sort of sharing economy type services. And it's really just about the physical kind of criminal infrastructure in the local place in which you're operating kind of leveraging that online capability. And then as you look out across the world, if you look at sort of the North Koreans and what they've been doing in terms of the SWIFT transfer thefts and those sorts of things, that takes on very much its own special flavor, right? It's very much kind of a regional variance.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would send out the women instead of turning tricks, would send them out with some credit cards that they'd bought the data on Liner in a marketplace of one kind or another, they'd then sort of manufactured counterfeit credit cards, and then given it to these women to go and make purchases with these cards. And so you see really, just in that cash-out illustration, that there's not really a profile, it could be anyone, there's just a huge, huge variation in terms of who's involved.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually not that different from other people with an entrepreneurial spirit. These are again people who are intelligent, who are educated, and they're very good at organizing. They're good at management. That's their skill set. They probably have some technical knowledge, but they don't necessarily need to be the elite codo. They can also draw on others around them who are quite frankly just better at coding than they are at managing or organizing. And then you see a whole range who, you know, can just be anybody who's just looking for a bit of extra money, a bit of work. Or you can see people being drawn into cash out schemes who come from drug user communities. I've seen cases of people who are involved in other types of criminality, who are then brought into this. One of the most interesting ones, I think, I encountered was examples of street gangs in LA who basically were traditionally running prostitution operations. But what they would do was from time to time convert these operations into a cashing out scheme. So they would call the leader of this the fraud pimp, and the fraud pimp basically.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the short answer is there's no profile of a cyber criminal because really due to the high levels of specialization, we're not talking about one group of people. We're actually talking about many, many groups of people across the world and across different specialties. And so as a result of that, we see a lot of different backgrounds coming into this. So on the technical end, particularly those who are operating in, say, Eastern Europe, the profile looks very much like someone who's working in the legitimate sector. So moonlighting on the side. Or if you look at it this way, they're trying to make a living by the best means that they have. And sometimes that means doing legitimate white work, so to speak, and sometimes that means taking on more darker criminal jobs. And so those people, the profile is generally, these are educated people. Many of them have university degrees. Some of them have higher level degrees. They don't have to because obviously we see this profile in the West and elsewhere of people being exceptionally good coders who don't have a university background. But the profile is quite similar. The profile of the entrepreneurs, I think.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go back to demographically who we're talking about here. Who are these people from the coders who don't maybe know what they're doing all the way up to the multimillionaire tech entrepreneur with links, maybe shady links? Is that kind of a classic spectrum there”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one case, I found someone who was a famous pop star. So there's this sort of interesting angles to this whole issue in terms of how you create the space for these types of people to operate and what gives them the kind of confidence to do what they do.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roman Seliznev, who is a, well, I guess now you could say a former Russian cyber criminal. He's in prison in the US. See, he was on holidays in the Maldives with his family, and he was arrested by U.S. law enforcement agents and then extradited to the US. And so he's a very interesting case because he and his group had made tens of millions of dollars out of credit card fraud. He's a very, very well known carder. And for all intents and purposes, he looks like a businessman, and he's gone on holidays with his family, he's gone to a place that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US. But little does he know that an arrangement was worked out that he was being effectively tracked by US law enforcement over this time. They're waiting for an opportunity to pick him up. He's an interesting case, I think, because his father is actually a member of Russian parliament, but found actually more than a handful of people who were involved in cybercrime in parts of Eastern Europe actually had parents who were very influential people, whether they were law enforcement agents, whether they're political figures”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I loved this portrait that you opened the book with this multimillionaire criminal tech entrepreneur, you called him. And that description alone was such an eye-opener to me. Can you describe who this man was and what that portrait looks like today?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You actually saw a lot of the ringleaders of these groups become the pillars of their society earn tremendous amounts of money and get a lot of legitimacy. There were rumors that several members of the Ukrainian parliament, for example, had”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incentives for going into cybercrime are particularly strong in certain parts of the world because there are simply not that many options. I think one of the biggest problems in this area is really if we think about somewhere like Eastern Europe particularly former Soviet bloc, what we're seeing is a massive pool of very, very talented people who are highly educated actually have an excellent university system. These are people with degrees in maths, science, technology, engineering. And what's happening is they're coming out and they don't actually have the opportunities following that like you do in Silicon Valley, for instance, to have a startup. They don't have capital. This is a big limitation on what is a very intelligent group of people who just can't make that transition. So what they look at instead is instead of creating a legitimate business is to create a criminal business because you don't require the capital to get you going in the first place.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shift so that we don't have such a supply of people actually going into the cybercrime business in the first place. In terms of having a talent pool that's now putting their sort of intelligence and ability to positive things.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're getting a better understanding of motivations and you gain a better understanding of how some of these organizations function. And so I think for those who are thinking about potential disruption, then that offers some pinch points in terms of the economics of how this works. And you can think about, well, if this is a business operation, what is going to limit the sort of profits of this business? Because ultimately, I think for me, arrests are a very important tool in the fight against cybercrime. But there's also limitations in how far arrests can go in terms of the transnational nature of this, in terms of difficulties, whether it's to do with international cooperation, whether it relates to corruption. There are limitations on how far arrests can go. And this is something you'll hear from people with a law enforcement background as well. So I think once you start thinking about the economics of this and the business aspects of this, it offers a new kind of suite of alternatives. And one of the ones that I'm very interested in is actually how can we”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I bet. So if you're saying basically now in appearance this looks a lot like legitimate industry in terms of size, but also different businesses and goods and services and operational structures, what shifts when you start thinking about it that way?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And interestingly enough, there has been more than one malware author that was arrested, and actually it turned out that they were working for an antivirus or anti-malware company. It's really common to find people kind of on both sides of that fence.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends. I mean, you could argue in some cases that they should know what they're doing But what it basically is there might be a particular programming job that's required. It might be something that's quite a small part of a broader operation. And it's not always clear exactly what the end goal is. So they might be willfully turning a blind eye, but they also might just be doing some sort of niche thing. It might not even be part of the kind of criminal aspects, just part of the sort of broader running of things. And so we see that same issue at the technical end as well with the sort of just broad advertisements to people who might otherwise not know any better”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting is on the technical end, you actually see quite a similar process, which is some of the coders and the programmers involved in this know exactly what they're doing, but others are also just actually responding to advertisements on various forums or other sites.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or just even just acting as a go between, right? They would set themselves up as an intermediary to get business supplies to this local office. And lo and behold, you know, they'd run out like $250,000 worth of bad checks and the FBI would come and visit them.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the telephone pole. They were actually the flyers. You'd go talk to these folks that had cashed some hot checks or had moved money in a way that was against the law. And they legitimately thought they were doing work at home for a small to medium-sized business that was having inventory management. Some knives or something.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, one of the really interesting moments was probably sometime in the mid 2000s when you started to see a lot of postings for work-at-home opportunities, the sort of like, you know, sit at home, do some work, earn $2,000 a week. In reality, that was those cash out experts, right?”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things they've done is branching out from what was originally selling cars on eBay. Then they start selling other things. They then move platforms and one of the things they do today is rent out apartments that don't exist. Anything that doesn't exist, that's kind of their business model.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. They started with a kind of original scam type, but when they see opportunity, they adapt. And also when their existing ways of doing business might find some resistance in terms of the enforcement efforts or in terms of how companies adapt, they look for newly. They pivot.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Branched out into other types of fraud as well, like business email compromise, which is sort of one of the ways in which you can impersonate someone in an organization to try and get an invoice or something else paid out where it shouldn't be paid to. And we see Romania is also known for particular types of fraud, which is particularly online auction fraud, which is basically selling things that don't exist. It's a very simple fraud, but it's actually quite sophisticated on the organizational level.”
2020-07-18 · a16z Podcast · Cybercrime, Incorporated · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source