Dark Web Becomes a Safety Net for Displaced Tech Talent
As companies automate junior roles via AI, the talent is redirected into a maturing cybercrime labor market.
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A tightening tech global job market—shaped by layoffs, prolonged hiring cycles, and deployment of AI tools that automate early-career work—is pushing young professionals toward riskier alternatives. New research from Kaspersky suggests that an increasing number of graduates and early-career technologists are turning to the dark web in search of income, only to encounter a highly competitive and structurally mature shadow labor market.
According to Kaspersky’s analysis of 2,225 job-related posts on underground forums between 2023 and mid-2025, job seekers now outnumber available dark-web vacancies 55% to 45%. Competition is further intensified by the fact that 69% of applicants express no preference for job type, signaling an openness to any paid role (legal or otherwise).
The median age of job seekers is just 24, indicating that a population of young candidates is struggling to find employment and is instead being drawn into illicit digital ecosystems.
Despite the risks, the underground market offers compensation that sometimes surpasses legal entry-level tech work. Reverse engineers on the dark web earn an average of $5,000 per month, penetration testers around $4,000, and developers roughly $2,000. These rates highlight a troubling dynamic: technical talent displaced from mainstream pathways may find the underground economy not only accessible but also financially compelling.
“The shadow job market is no longer peripheral; it’s absorbing the unemployed, the underage, and the overqualified,” says Alexandra Fedosimova, Digital Footprint Analyst at Kaspersky. Many applicants, she notes, assume the dark web operates like the legal job market—skill-based hiring, quick turnaround times, and minimal bureaucracy. “However, not many realize that working on the dark web can lead to prison.”
The broader labor context is worsening. Across the technology sector, AI-driven tools are automating junior work once crucial for skill development. Industry estimates suggest early-career roles have been cut in half in recent years, eliminating traditional entry points for young developers, analysts, and engineers. As organizations prioritize short-term cost efficiency, they risk hollowing out the future workforce.
The long-term implications extend beyond hiring pipelines. If underground cybercrime ecosystems continue to attract and train displaced junior talent, defender organizations may face a significant capability gap a decade from now when today’s senior developers and security leaders retire.
Kaspersky urges organizations to reconsider their reliance on AI as a substitute for early-career labor and to invest in sustainable workforce development as the talent pipeline gradually shifts into the shadows.
