![\"Russian\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/06\/russian.jpg?w=620\")
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A man with intense eyes crouches over a laptop in a darkened room, his face and hands hidden by a black ski mask and gloves. The scene is lit only by the computer screen’s eerie glow.<\/p>\n
Exaggerated portraits of malicious hackers just like this keep popping up in movies and TV, despite the best efforts of shows like Mr. Robot<\/em><\/a> to depict hackers in a more realistic way.<\/p>\n Add a cacophony of news about data breaches that have shaken the U.S. government<\/a>, taken entire hospital systems hostage<\/a>, anddefrauded the international banking system<\/a>, and hackers start to sound like omnipotent super-villains.<\/p>\n But the reality is, as usual, less dramatic. While some of the largest cyberattacks have been the work of state-sponsored hackers-the OPM data breach that affected millions of Americans last year, for example, or the Sony hack that revealed Hollywood’s intimate secrets-the vast majority of the world’s quotidian digital malice comes from garden-variety hackers.<\/p>\n And for many of those cybercriminals, hacking is as unglamorous as any other business. That’s what a group of security researchers found when they infiltrated a ring of hackers based in Russia earlier this year, and monitored its dealings over the course of five months.<\/p>\n The researchers were with Flashpoint, an American cybersecurity company that investigates threats on the dark and deep web. Their undercover operation began when they came across a post on a Russian hacker forum on the dark web-a part of the internet that’s inaccessible to regular browsers-that read very much like a get-rich-quick ad you might find on Facebook.<\/p>\n