I started to write a comment about how low they probably were able to bribe people for but found this article [0] which put the number higher than I expected:

> One of the core LAPSUS$ members who used the nicknames “Oklaqq” and “WhiteDoxbin” posted recruitment messages to Reddit last year, offering employees at AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon up to $20,000 a week to perform “inside jobs.”

That said, this is but one instance and I'd imagine that on the whole they are able to bribe people at much lower numbers. See also: how little it takes to bribe some government officials.

[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/a-closer-look-at-the-lap...

And because it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between 'oops' and 'malice' a lot of the actual perps get away with it too, as long as they limit their involvement. In-house threats are an under appreciated - and somewhat uncomfortable - topic for many companies, they don't have the funds to do things by the book but they do have outsized responsibilities and pray that they can trust their employees.

> they can afford to simply buy your software dependencies, or to offer one of your employees some retirement money in exchange for making a "mistake".

Orthogonal, but in similar spirits: the FAANG part of big tech paying less, doing massive layoffs, and putting enormous pressure on their remaining engineers might have this effect too in a less directly malicious way.

Big tech does layoffs, asks engineers to do "more". This creates a lot of mess, tech debt, difficult to maintain or SRE services. Difficult to migrate and undo, difficult to be nimble.

These same engineers can then leave for startups or more nimble pastures and eat the cake of the large enterprise struggling to KTLO or steer the ship of the given product area.

Keep in mind, the billionaires seem to think they can crash all this into the ground, and some how survive by buying their own miltaries.

The scale of how society works is lost on the greedy