It is not only the catering, transport or medicine sectors that are hiring. The dark web professions are also looking for manpower and for a wide variety of jobs. Developers, testers or hackers: more than 200,000 job offers published between January 2020 and June 2022 were analyzed by the specialized site Kaspersky to understand what the job market was like on the dark web.
Every semester between 15,000 and 20,000 new job offers are published in this dark market. There was also a spike in March 2020, during the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with some workers seeking additional income.
Salary up to $20,000 per month
Among the most sought after trades, we find developers at the top. 61% of the job offers analyzed offered this type of work. Cyber attack specialists or designers are also in high demand.
On the salary side, the figures are quite variable. For a hacker, the average monthly salary is around $2,500. Developers are paid an average of $2,000. Reverse engineering jobs (which involves studying a system to understand its inner workings) earn the most per month on average, with a salary of $4,000. But some offers can sometimes be even more attractive. A job offer to be a programmer offered, for example, $20,000 a month.
Flexible working conditions
In addition to the salary, the working conditions of the dark web workers are also very flexible. 45% of job postings analyzed offered potential employees to work 100% from home. 34% offered full-time work and 33% flexible hours. Most dark web companies also allow their employees to choose to take as many days off as they want, most of them are freelancers.
Job interviews also look exactly like interviews in the traditional world of work. It is possible that a series of tests are requested to be carried out to assess the candidate’s skills, in addition to the CV and the portfolio that are usually sent. Only one small difference: a trial period can sometimes be paid for in bitcoin.
significant risks
However, Kaspersky rightly points out that these job offers lead to illegal or semi-illegal activities. And the number of job offers for developers or hackers may especially suggest that the number of cyberattacks is likely to increase in the future.
And the associated risks can be far-reaching, with legal action leading to prison terms. Keep in mind that going to the dark web is not harmful. But from the moment illegal trades or actions are carried out, the penal code can be applied to many situations.
Source: BFM TV
