“Half of our country is made up of hackers, why would we be afraid of the Americans? When we are the ones stealing their products and their software.”

The Russian police’s cybercrime division named 'Department K' has warned many times that Russian hackers are the strongest in the world. And it’s extremely hard to catch a hacker red-handed.

“I was arrested, taken to three prisons in three weeks,” said Dmitry Sklyarov, programmer from Moscow.

“Then I was let out on bail and couldn’t return to Russia for six months because of the American justice system."

Dmitry Sklyarov’s arrest several years ago exploded into a frenzy of outrage among the public, both in the US and abroad.

At a computer conference in America several years ago, Dmitry showed how easy it is to break through the PDF format and was arrested by the FBI. He became a symbol of the fight for programmers’ freedom, and was soon released from an American prison.

Dmitry is now an IT professor at a prestigious Russian computer science university.

The pro says he has never carried out any criminal activity using his knowledge.

“Thankfully, no one ever came to me and said ‘help us commit this crime or else,” said Sklyarov.

But Dmitry says, if he had, it would have been impossible to catch him.

Human lives in hackers’ hands

Nikita Sinitsyn, Editor-in-Chief of “Hacker” magazine – a how-to Russian publication – says it’s not true all hackers are criminals. He explained to RT the scale of what a hacker can do.

“The scariest thing about what a hacker can do is not money loss, but human lives,” he said.

“Hypothetically, if a hacker broke into a system of satellite control, made satellites crash into each other and fall to Earth, let’s say, in Los Angeles, that's scary. Systems containg state secrets being broken into by hackers – maybe that’s not such a bad thing. This doesn’t influence individual human lives. That’s something that states and corporations should worry about”.