DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [51]
Apart from its location in the shadow of the inchoate Wembley Stadium, there was one other peculiarity about the Java Bean. Usually the computers in Internet cafés are equipped with only limited protection from external attack. Viruses, trojans and other digital bacteria lie around these places, rather as their organic equivalents infest hospitals with lax cleaning regimes.
But Renu took his security seriously and persuaded the Java Bean’s manager to install a special program on the café’s systems called Deep Freeze. This restored the hard disks to an earlier configuration, which ensured that the network was no longer able to ‘see’ any malware it might have downloaded during the day, thus rendering the bad stuff ineffective and enhancing Renu’s protection.
If the Java Bean was Renu’s office space, then the filing cabinet that contained the secrets of DarkMarket consisted of a tiny memory stick. Renu usually kept this portable hard drive literally close to his heart. When he arrived at his office, he would plug the memory stick into one of the computer terminals and start working on DarkMarket.
Once logged in, Renu donned his pirate’s mask to become JiLsi, one of eight administrators that ran DarkMarket during the site’s three-year existence. Never more than four-strong at any one time, this team was one of the most influential units on the global carding scene. This most senior post did not bring them much in the way of extra revenue, but it was a privileged position that generated considerable respect among hackers and crackers. They also enjoyed access to great stores of information and held the key to virtual life or death – the power to exclude members for real or perceived transgressions.
There were two major drawbacks to attaining the exalted position of administrator. First, it was very hard work, regularly involving fifteen to seventeen hours of keyboard-hammering a day. There were no holidays for these people – they were expected to be on permanent call, every day of the year. Master Splyntr, for example, always carried a cellphone that alerted him when one of his fellow DarkMarketeers needed him and he would respond whenever it rang. JiLsi complained that he would log on at nine in the morning and would still be sat there at ten in the evening. Much of the work was drudgery: monitoring posts to check that the members were abiding by the forum’s rules and that they were posting messages in the right section. Much of the time it was mere bureaucracy, mostly trivial and mind-numbing.
Second, the admin team was forever accessing the inner workings of the criminal websites. The digital trail it left behind on the Web was potentially much more visible than that identifying ordinary members, making them the primary target for cybercops.
This was paradoxical as it was ‘ordinary’ members who routinely made the most money from DarkMarket: the administrators would often assume the greatest risk for the least financial reward. Over a three-year period JiLsi and Matrix made a paltry amount of money, while Master Splyntr only charged for the upkeep of the servers, focusing elsewhere on his spamming empire.
Then there was the intriguing character Shtirlitz, who was there almost from the beginning. The nickname referred to the fictional Max Otto von Stirlitz. In the novels of Julian Semyonov, Stirlitz was a senior Nazi officer spying for Moscow during the Second World War. Characterised as the Soviet James Bond, Stirlitz became entrenched in Russian consciousness thanks to a series of popular films based on the books in the 1970s. Quiet, but with devastating good looks, Stirlitz remains a powerful patriotic symbol in post-communist Russia for his immense courage, intelligence and unswerving commitment to the motherland.
So we know Stirlitz the Soviet spy, but who was Shtirlitz the carder (who transliterated his