Hacker Becomes the Most Sought Profession on the Dark Web

VIVA – Kaspersky’s Digital Footprint Intelligence team found that being a hacker is the most sought-after profession for the cybercriminal community, according to an analysis of 200,000 job ads from 2020-2022.

In addition to hackers, sought-after professions include developers and designers. According to Digital Footprint Intelligence, job qualifications include creating malware and phishing pages, compromising corporate infrastructure, hacking web and mobile applications, and a host of other roles.

The average income level offered to IT professionals varies between US$1,300 and US$4,000 per month (IDR 19.4 million to 60 million), according to Kaspersky's analysis on Wednesday, February 1, 2023.

The Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence (DFI) team reviewed job ads and resumes posted on 155 dark web forums between January 2020 and June 2022, analyzing ads that contained information about both long-term and full-time jobs.

According to the DFI service's data, a total of around 200,000 job-related ads were posted on the dark web during the analyzed period. A total of 41 percent of the ads were posted in 2020, with activity peaking in March likely due to the pandemic-induced drop in income experienced by a portion of the population.

Kaspersky experts analyzed IT jobs and selected more than 160 that explicitly mentioned salary, although dark web employers usually state a rough amount.

The highest average income can be found in ads for reverse engineering experts. The highest monthly income the expert saw was around US$20,000 for developers. The lowest fees offered were only around US$200 (IDR 3 million).

Some dark web job ads also include bonuses and commissions from successful projects, such as extortion of ransoms from compromised organizations.

Recruiters on the dark web are also looking for IT administrators, reverse engineers, analysts, testers, and other less common IT jobs such as various types of engineers and architects, support specialists, technical writers, forum moderators, and even executives to project managers.

"IT executive search (headhunters) is one of the many topics constantly discussed in the black market. Today, tracking the interests of cybercriminals and continuous analysis of their activities is crucial for companies that want to proactively respond to cyber-attacks and keep their information security at the highest level," the Security Services Analyst at Kaspersky, Polina Bochkareva said.