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There's also the combination of goals and benefits: it's easy to hypothesize a drug cartel or the Russian mafia having enough money to fund something - complicated by the percentage of top-notch crypto people who wouldn't work for an illegal organization - but it's hard to come up with a scenario where they'd be going after Iran rather than, say, compromising a few million credit cards.

Industrial espionage would be similar: hard to keep secret, fairly high risk and in most cases it'd be easier and more reliable just to take your megabucks and pay someone for whatever data you want. Why spend millions funding a big R&D team when you could just pay one of your target's sysadmins a million or two to get the data for sure?



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