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By Root 325 0

name into English from Russian, hence the extra ‘h’)? Was he an agent for the KGB too? Or perhaps a double agent, working for the Feds or the Secret Service? Or was he a master carder? One member of CarderPlanet who had met him described him as being ‘Aryan-looking and in his late twenties’. He regularly purchased counterfeit passports and at one point lived in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. On CarderPlanet he was described as ‘a good guy and reliable’, but later on other carders began to suspect that he may have emulated his fictional role model by morphing into one of America’s most experienced law enforcement officials.

Whatever his true goals as one of DarkMarket’s senior members, he was omnipresent but silent, logging relatively little activity. Likewise, a latecomer to the administration of the board, Lord Cyric appeared not to be involved in buying or selling at all. Each was too busy keeping everything afloat, while basking in their status as legends among the fraternity.

Equally, though, each harboured his own secrets, and some were not at all what they seemed.

Ironically, the one who took his personal security most seriously was in some respects the most transparent. This was Cha0. The Turkish criminal had come to the carding boards relatively late in the day. Unlike the rest, he was not a veteran of Shadowcrew or IAACA, but appeared out of nowhere in early 2006 as the owner of a board called crimeenforcers.com, an elegantly designed site that offered aspiring cyber criminals all manner of back-up services. It was especially notable for its animated tutorial lessons featuring a cartoon version of Cha0, walking the viewer through the finer points of carding.

Cha0 used DarkMarket to promote crimeenforcers (paid advertising was an important revenue stream for the boards) and his ubiquitous presence and relentless business transactions were soon translated into real influence. He joined DarkMarket in February 2006 and within seven months was appointed one of the bosses.

Unlike his colleagues, he was that rare breed, a geek with a brilliant criminal mind. His motivation for accepting the top role was simple – he could use it to advance his enterprise as a distributor of the accessories needed to perpetrate economic crime, such as ‘skimmers’ – machines that could read, store and transmit a victim’s credit-card data.

But, as with the other leading figures on DarkMarket, Cha0’s story eventually turned out to be more byzantine than that – appropriately enough, for a resident of Istanbul.

Leaving aside the anomaly of Cha0, the most successful thieves on DarkMarket did not help manage the site. They were men like Freddybb and Recka, the carders from Scunthorpe and Sweden, who just dropped in now and then to conduct business and then disappeared for days, weeks and even months. Law enforcement across the world has arrested a much higher proportion of geeks than it has hardened criminals in its cyber operations.

As they slaved away at their PCs, the four senior managers were collectively responsible for four main tasks. Protecting the website’s servers and general maintenance were the responsibility of Master Splyntr and Matrix001. The quotidian threats to the site came not from law enforcement, but from DarkMarket’s rivals and enemies elsewhere in criminal cyberspace, such as Iceman. Splyntr, Matrix and JiLsi would sigh whenever there was a dust-up between members. Splyntr became accustomed to a pattern, if a little weary of it. One carder would accuse another of some transgression, possibly baseless, possibly true. The accused would throw his toys out of the pram and before long the injured party had marshalled a botnet in order to launch a DDoS attack. Tens of thousands of computers under a single Command and Control machine would request access to DarkMarket and the site would go down. If it had been in the physical world, Splyntr muttered to himself, you’d just go beat the bastard up. But in cyberspace you have little choice except to close the site down, wait for the attacker to calm down or negotiate