Hackers come buzzing in from expected, and entirely unexpected, places

WHICH countries have the cleverest hackers? In a well-guarded room near the Potomac river, north of Washington, DC—to which very few people have access (biometric scanners can prevent any unwanted human presence)—there is a laptop that is finding the answer. The little machine is a honey-trap which has detected more than 11m failed attempts to penetrate its defences since it was put in place in early June.

InZero, the web-security firm that set up the device, made it known through the shadowy world of hackers’ chat forums (a place so murky that you have to clean your computer well after going near it) that there was a document on the machine’s hard drive; and it challenged intruders to get hold of it. The results were revealing. Most would-be penetrators were polite in their self-presentation; their e-mails to the laptop had attachments which the reader was asked nicely to examine. Playing dumb, the recipients duly opened all those potentially deadly attachments, in the—so far correct—assumption that their defences would hold.

What an effort like this winkles out is a group of people known as “white-hat” hackers—people who like to gain access to well-sealed places, but are not usually bent on wrecking organisations with viruses, or on gaining surreptitious control of computers which can then be used for mass attacks on third parties. Villains with those nefarious aims—“black hats”—would hesitate to enter such a contest, for fear of breaking cover; there are other ways to detect them.

Sure enough, only 10% of the attempts on InZero’s laptop came through proxy-servers that mask their locations; in the other cases, it was easy to see where the clever coders were at work. In descending order (by number of attacks), the top countries were Ukraine, Russia and America—and with a gap, Brazil. The first three were expected; all have a rich hacking culture. That the Brazilians were ahead of the Europeans and Chinese was a surprise. But Brazil used to be a centre of excellence for the penetration of bank accounts—until banks improved their online security. Samba hackers, it seems, want a new place to show off.