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They are occasionally targeted. There’s a growing scam where a coordinated group will hack in, carefully watch company email for a few months, and then when it looks like a big deal might be going through they bust out some targeted social engineering. For example, they might email and text the CEOs secretary with a panicked tone about needing to make a wire transfer ASAP, they have email control and maybe spoofed a SIM, it looks legit and some poor employee actually wires away millions.
But there are a few brakes here. One, sometimes the English or social engineering skills are actually medium rare, and you need a specific set of skills to make the whole thing work. Believe it or not, but the supply of well organized foreign hackers is actually moderately constrained. Second, there’s the discoverability problem. These companies, they also are small enough that many even would-be legitimate employees don’t know about them until they post on Indeed. How is a foreign hacker supposed to find them if job seekers sometimes even can’t?
I would argue that the US actually sees a remarkably low level of internal hacking all things considered. You’re right, if you were malicious you probably could make some money. Part of it is the FBI actually is somewhat effective (Anonymous for example was absolutely picked apart, and US jurisdiction and subpoenas and such are relatively easy and effective compared to international stuff). Part of it is if you have the skills you can earn more money for much less risk working a legit job. All this leads to a less favorable risk-reward. There’s also maybe morals coming into play?
But finally, smaller and smaller companies are targeted each year. You may have noticed for example that smaller regional hospital systems get occasionally hacked. Also some corporations especially smaller ones don’t ever admit when they are hacked, or if they do you don’t hear about it. Smart hackers of course tend to avoid hacking hospitals because it draws US federal attention, which does sometimes successfully strike back.
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