DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [5]
How could Google resist a strategic asset like Corey Louie? Well, they couldn’t. And how could Louie resist a strategic career move to Google – the balmy weather of the United States’ southern Pacific rim versus DC’s humidity, the winter freeze and just one week of cherry blossom; the West Coast’s casual dress code or the stiff collars of the Beltway; the money and the sense that you were involved in a dynamic project or US government service? Hardly a fair fight, really.
As you drive down Freeway 101 from San Francisco, Google is not the only cyber icon that you pass – Sun Microsystems, Yahoo! and McAfee are among the many famous names whose headquarters drift past the window as you head south. The more companies you visit to discuss security, the more ex-government agents you meet from the FBI, the US SS, the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the US Postal Inspection Service. An entire phalanx of erstwhile spooks and undercover cops have migrated from the clinical surroundings of DC to live the good life in Silicon Valley, attracted by the same gorgeous conditions that lured the movies to Hollywood.
This flow from state agencies into the private sector results in a distinct disadvantage for the government. The Treasury ploughs money into educating cyber investigators who, with a few years’ experience under their belt, then leave for more pleasant climes. Yet the investment is not entirely dead because this has led to the consolidation of powerful links between the public and private sectors. Google is not just a private corporation; it is a strategic national asset, in the eyes of the White House. The message from DC is quite clear – attack Google and you are attacking the US. Within that context, the ability of somebody like Corey Louie to pick up the phone and chat to his old pals at the Secret Service, alerting them, say, to a major attack on gmail, makes the critical cooperation between public and private sector in Internet security a lot easier.
I don’t know, but I’ll wager Corey’s standard of living has improved since he headed out west, but then he has to work extremely hard for it. Google is among the two largest depositories of data in the world – the other being Facebook. This is what makes them lucrative businesses (advertisers are happy to pay for the secrets about personal habits that this data reveals) and it is what makes them the holy grail for hackers working on behalf of themselves, of the underground, of industry and of rival states.
Towards the end of my conversation with Corey, he told me about a friend, a cop, who had invested much time in developing friendships with hackers. He had been so successful that he had taken over the administration of a vast criminal website. ‘He’ll probably be happy to talk to you,’ he said. ‘He ran a site called DarkMarket.’ It was the first time I had ever heard either of the website or the name of the FBI Special Agent Keith J. Mularski. It was the beginning of a strange journey.
I set out to meet and interview as many of the central characters in DarkMarket’s history as I could, spread out in a dozen countries: thieves, cops, double agents, lawyers, hackers, crackers and more prosaic criminals. I also consulted a large volume of court documents relating to DarkMarket and those involved in it. Former and current cyber criminals and police officers supplied me with additional documents and information. I was never able to access a full archive of the website itself, but managed to forage for significant chunks of it. Agent Mularski, with an almost full archive of DarkMarket, is the only person involved that I met who had complete documentary oversight.
Beyond the elusive archive, some of the documentary evidence – while helpful – was inaccurate; this especially relates to material that prosecutors presented at many of the trials. In my assessment, these inaccuracies