DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [27]
Likewise, you might run a company in a competitive field where you must have access to, say, an Autodesk product. To buy the requisite software and licences for your needs from the company might weigh in at almost $20,000, but if you bought them from this Ukrainian chap on eBay, your total outlay would be $800. Let us be frank: it may be illegal, but it’s tempting!
Since the 1970s, when software started to become commercially available for the first time, manufacturers have tried in vain to develop technology that can prevent it from being copied (as they have also attempted with CDs and DVDs). No such technology has ever lasted more than a few days before being cracked by one of the tens of thousands of hackers and crackers around the world. It has proved to be one of the most quixotic branches of the high-tech industry over the past three decades.
The hackers of Eastern Europe played a particularly important role in cracking security devices placed on software. In the 1980s, before the fall of communism, the Soviet Union had tasked various allies in its trading bloc, COMECON, to develop a personal computer and a software industry – notably Bulgaria and East Germany. The defining characteristics of communist computers were common to all Eastern Bloc consumer products: they were ugly and constantly breaking down. The challenges posed to the region’s nascent computer engineers were so considerable that they developed an exceptional ingenuity in overcoming glitches and bugs.
Furthermore, the software factories that the East Europeans built in the 1980s could not compete with Silicon Valley during the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall – there was no money to invest in research or equipment. But the powerful new organised-crime syndicates that exerted such a huge influence over the economies of the former communist countries saw the factories as a genuine opportunity. First, they acquired these facilities (usually by foul means rather than fair), then they employed those talented engineers to produce counterfeit software on an industrial scale. Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia set the pace, with the Romanians not far behind.
So when Autodesk spotted that a single seller on eBay was shifting significant numbers of a counterfeited version of their product from Ukraine to buyers in the United States, they naturally felt obliged to do something about it. After some deliberation they called the FBI, who in turn alerted the US Attorney’s Office in San Jose, California. And because the fraud involved eBay, the Attorney’s Office called up one particular investigator: Greg Crabb of the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), who at the time was based in San Francisco.
There are three main American law-enforcement agencies that claim authority in cases of cybercrime: the FBI (because its job is to stop crime); the Secret Service (because its brief includes protection of the US currency and credit-card fraud); and the USPIS (because its job is to monitor any illegal activity related to the federal mail service). The last-named became involved in the cyber game primarily because scams perpetrated through eBay and similar services often involve sending goods by post (whether illegally purchased or as part of a moneylaundering scam).
Over the past fifteen years the USPIS has built up a dedicated team that investigates high-tech crime, and Greg Crabb was so successful that he eventually moved from San Francisco to head up its Global Cyber Investigations unit, out of a large anonymous building in Washington DC’s large anonymous complex called the Federal Center (remember to strike it off your ‘must do’ list when visiting the US capital).
Crabb’s Teutonic looks and slightly gravelly drawl are simultaneously attractive and intimidating. He qualified as a chartered accountant and it is hard to dispel the feeling that if he were to have a look at your finances,