DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [124]
RedBrigade
He has largely gone straight and is currently in Europe.
Max Vision, aka Max Butler, aka Iceman
On 12th February 2010 Max Vision was sentenced by a court in Pittsburgh to thirteen years behind bars, the longest jail term ever handed down by an American court for hacking. The prosecution calculated that his hacking resulted in credit-card losses of more than $85 million. He is now an inmate at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution Lompoc in southern California, where he is allowed no access to computers of any sort.
Vision’s hacking ability is unparalleled – he is unquestionably one of the smartest men serving time in the United States. At a closed conference in the autumn of 2010 I discussed his case with one of the most senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security to deal with cyber threats. He agreed with me that having a computer user of Vision’s ability languishing in jail was probably a misuse of the US’s human assets, but pointed out that Vision’s ego – almost as large as his intellect – had also played a major part in the affair.
Nicholas Joehle, aka Dron
Joehle has been released from prison, having served his sentence for credit-card fraud and the illegal manufacture of skimming machines.
Hakim B, aka Lord Kaisersose
Lord Kaisersose is in Marseilles still awaiting trial, but on bail. France is another country where the wheels of justice could use a spot of grease.
Cha0
Cha0 is either running his businesses in Slovenia or in jail, depending on whether the real Cha0 is Sahin or Çagatay Evyapan. The latter is on remand at one of Turkey’s highest-security facilities in Tekirdag. His trial is due to begin this year, but the prosecutor has dropped the more serious charges relating to organised crime.
Mert Ortaç, aka SLayraCkEr
Mert was on remand in an Istanbul prison facing charges relating to the Akbank case when he was released on a technicality in March 2010. He was rearrested in November 2010 and, at the time of writing, is still on remand. Of all those involved in DarkMarket, Mert was one of the most gifted, if wayward and unpredictable, characters.
Keith Mularski and Bilal Sen
They are both back out patrolling the mean streets of cyber.
Lord Cyric
Who is he? The hunt continues …
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The bulk of the information in this book is provided by roughly 200 hours of interviews which I conducted between 2009 and 2011. Leonida Krushelnycky also undertook several hours of interviews.
In addition to this, I have relied on two main documentary sources. The first are the court records from a number of trials related to the websites CarderPlanet, Shadowcrew and DarkMarket. The second are the archives of the websites themselves, in particular the former two which are readily available on the web. Unfortunately, the DarkMarket archive is less accessible. I know of only one and that is in the possession of the FBI who, for operational reasons, are not at liberty to share it.
There is a considerable amount of literature on the issues of cyber crime, cyber industrial espionage and cyber warfare, much of it found on the Internet. For thoroughness, I would highlight the work of Kevin Poulsen and his team whose blog, Threat Level, is both well-written and properly researched. I would recommend two books dealing specifically with cyber crime, Kevin Poulsen’s Kingpin and Joseph Menn’s Fatal System Error. For a broader introduction into some of the challenges emerging as a consequence of Internet technology, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It should be the first port of call.
Other blogs of real value include Krebsonsecurity by Brian Krebs; Bruce Schneier’s newsletter, Crypto-gram; the blog of F-Secure, the Finnish Computer Security company; and, finally, Dancho Danchev and Ryan Naraine’s Zero Day blog on Znet.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this book presented many challenges which I could never have met had it not been for the generous assistance I received from a number