I reckon a huge proportion of blackhats in the scene are working for the feds.
Some kid with no record gets thrown in a van by men with guns, and the full force of police psychological manipulation is brought to bear on them. They get told they're irrevocably destined for a lifetime of being brutally raped in the showers.
Is it any surprise that these young men with no experience of foul-play or maliciousness outside of the virtual world fold and turn informer with such regularity?
If I were an active blackhat, I wouldn't talk to anyone, ever. I wouldn't even invent a pseudonym, that's the first step to ending up on fox news.
Groups allow information trading. It is basically essential if you want to cash for your hacking activities, such as carding and 0-day selling. I am not totally familiar with "the scene", but I'm pretty sure there are plenty of incentives for hackers to regroup
The most successful ones work for the feds while squirreling away the proceeds. The feds don't mind cultivating crime if it's increasing their numbers.
Actually, criminal copyright infringement is a $250k fine, 5 year felony, in the US. Pretty amazing. You are vastly more likely to be prosecuted criminally if you're part of a group, and especially if you focus on 0-days. Even more likely if you sell things, charge for advertising on your site, etc.
DMCA still makes some 0-day exploit research not totally safe, either. https://www.eff.org/wp/unintended-consequences-under-dmca I don't know if anyone has been successfully convicted, but a lot of prosecutions have come up, and that's enough to deter many people.
DarkMarket was an English-speaking internet cybercrime forum created by Renukanth Subramaniam in London that was shut down in 2008 after FBI agent J. Keith Mularski infiltrated it using the alias Master Splyntr, leading to more than 60 arrests worldwide. Subramaniam, who used the alias JiLsi, admitted conspiracy to defraud and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison in February 2010.
The website allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and conduct criminal enterprise in an entrepreneurial, peer-reviewed environment. It had 2,500 users at its peak.
That reminds me of Albert Gonzales and The Great Cyberheist (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?p...) - awesome story. Gonzales was broken by FBI and became their agent - but then he got somehow bored by the cooperation and returned back to his underground activities while still working for FBI.
I also think that a lot of black hats are working for the feds. But I think it has more to do with their lack of integrity and morals rather than threats and intimidation.
Legal advice is a big part of black hat literature, so I don't think any of them can claim ignorance.
There's also the ones that actually have morality and integrity and thus find honor in serving one's country.
This doesn't mean that everything the Government does is beneficial to society, but people seem to forget that many government employees have good intentions.
Not to mention, they wouldn't typically have met their co-conspirators face-to-face. It is much easier to turn on an anonymous handle on the computer screen than a human face.
Some kid with no record gets thrown in a van by men with guns, and the full force of police psychological manipulation is brought to bear on them. They get told they're irrevocably destined for a lifetime of being brutally raped in the showers.
Is it any surprise that these young men with no experience of foul-play or maliciousness outside of the virtual world fold and turn informer with such regularity?
If I were an active blackhat, I wouldn't talk to anyone, ever. I wouldn't even invent a pseudonym, that's the first step to ending up on fox news.
EDIT: Eric Corley, publisher of 2600, thinks it's one in four: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/06/us-hackers-...