DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [23]
While theft, spamming and other forms of electronic malfeasance played a very important role, these were by no means the only activities attracting Russian speakers to land on the Planet and make their home there. The average user was gifted with a fascination for electronics, computing, games, network systems and hacking as sport.
These were not mere criminals who identified CarderPlanet as a vehicle through which they might ply their trade. Instead, they created a community of men largely in their teens and early twenties who were struggling to get by in a chaotic, ruthless historical moment and who possessed unique abilities. In Odessa, everybody was compelled to behave in a certain criminal fashion as a matter of course. But most were naturally confined by their location. The Planeteers armed themselves with the survivor’s logic, from an Odessa in political and economic turmoil, and replicated these behavioural patterns in cyberspace. They were not natural-born killers, but natural-born survivors.
The new site was divided into categories, each devoted to a specific aspect of Internet crime or hacking. The first time one of Odessa’s young hackers logged onto CarderPlanet, he was overwhelmed. ‘I swear it was the same feeling that Ali Baba must have experienced when he first opened the cave and saw it stuffed full of treasure. Each section had heaps of information, which you could use to make yourself stinking rich without ever getting up from your computer!’
In the first year, hundreds upon hundreds of Russian-speaking hackers began exploring the site, attracted by its entertaining graphics and efficient organisation. The visual logo for CarderPlanet was a cigar-smoking gent with a twinkle in his eye – a dead ringer for Flash Harry, the cheeky spiv played by George Cole in Britain’s post-war comedy classic, The Belles of St Trinian’s.
‘For innocent lads from the provinces like me who could at best expect to earn one hundred dollars a month,’ the young Odessa hacker continued, ‘the financial promise of this unknown language – including words like Dumps, Drops, Wires, COBs – was mesmerising.’
The website was not open to all-comers. To access its walled-off areas one had to become a member, and that meant being vetted by the administrators. Along with Script, four others assumed this privileged role in the first year of CP’s activity, including Script’s most influential collaborator, Boa.
Among other tasks, the administrators’ job was to decide who should be granted membership and who not. In the first instance, these security measures were designed to ward off the interest of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies from around the globe. The US Secret Service and Britain’s MI6 were well acquainted with CP’s predecessors, carder.org and carder.ru. Script was determined to keep them at bay this time round. He was confident that the local Ukrainian police would present no great threat to the website. ‘They’re equipped with nothing, neither personnel nor resources,’ he argued. ‘No one in the Ukrainian agencies has fluent English and they hardly understand anything in any case. So even if they do get information from the “enemy”, i.e. from us, they’re not going to read it (and they don’t get funds for it), so, essentially, they have nothing to read at all.’
More assiduous than the Ukrainian police were their Russian counterparts in Department R of the Interior Ministry, which was later reorganised, eventually re-emerging as Department K, dealing with all high-tech crime. CarderPlanet was penetrated and compromised by the Russian Secret Police almost as soon as it was set up. But as the Belorussian carder, Police Dog, has pointed out, ‘If we didn’t make a mess on our own doorstop then our local cops and intelligence services didn’t have a problem with us.’ Why would the KGB waste resources on investigating networks