It's not easy to go legit, especially in today's job market, depending on where you live in the world also.

The US is unique with its high salaries for tech work (on the lower end of those of high salaries is pure ops work like this though). If you're in a country where the average sysadmin salary is substantially lower (to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year), it's not hard to see why its tempting to go the cybercrime route.

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locknitpicker 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> to pick on Eastern Europe for a minute, you're looking at the equivalent of ~$30-35k USD/year

This is a disingenuous claim. Not only are there software engineers in rich western European countries that in absolute terms earn less than that but also your east European software engineer still earns multiple times their country's average salary.

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r_lee 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

why is this downvoted?

	▲	KellyCriterion 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		...because on HN, experiences which somehow contradict the perspective when salaries are highly varying across countries, esp. when someone decides to pick an explicit example, which, even if it shows the truth, is against the base-assumption of the reader of a comment. To put it somehow dimplomatic :-D