Job offers to join dark web professions have been multiplying for several months. But the many advantages of these offers should not overshadow the risks incurred by these illegal activities.
It’s not just the catering, transport or medical sectors that are recruiting. The dark web professions are also looking for labor, 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 looked like on the dark web.
Each semester, 15,000 to 20,000 new job offers are thus published on this obscure market. A peak was also recorded in March 2020, during the first confinement with the COVID-19 pandemic, with some workers looking for 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 median monthly salary is around $2,500. Developers are paid an average of $2,000. The jobs of reverse engineering (which consists of studying a system to understand its internal functioning) are those which bring in the most per month on average, with a salary of 4000 dollars. But some offers can sometimes be even more attractive. A job offer to be a coder offered, for example, 20,000 dollars per month.
Flexible working conditions
Apart from the salary, the working conditions of dark web workers are also very flexible. 45% of the job offers analyzed offered potential employees to work 100% from home. 34% offered full-time work and 33% a flexible schedule. Most dark web companies also let their employees choose to take as many days off as they want, most of them being freelancers.
Job interviews also look exactly like interviews in the traditional world of work. A series of tests to be done may be requested to assess the candidate’s skills, in addition to the CV and portfolio usually sent. Only small difference: a trial period can sometimes be paid 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 can especially suggest that the number of cyberattacks is likely to increase in the future.
“It is important to note that the risks associated with working on the dark web always outweigh the benefits. The absence of a legally enforced employment contract absolves employers of any liability. A worker might not be paid or be involved in a fraudulent scheme”, indicates the specialized site.
And the associated risks can be far-reaching, with legal action leading to prison sentences. Note that going to the dark web is not harmful. But from the moment when illicit trades or actions are carried out, the penal code can apply to many situations.
