DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [54]
By September 2006 the relentless attacks were driving Renu to despair. His dependency on crack cocaine was also becoming marked at this time, a dangerous development both for his own security – not to mention his health – and for the security of DarkMarket itself.
He decided to discuss the attacks on DarkMarket with Master Splyntr, who was at this time a moderator, two rungs below JiLsi, the key administrator. For a long time Master Splyntr had been arguing that JiLsi should allow him, Kaminski, to take over the servers. Kaminski argued that he had a much better security arrangement in place and, if he were to take over, it would relieve the pressure on JiLsi.
Master Splyntr was JiLsi’s reserve choice. He had asked Cha0 first but the Turk had dismissed the offer, doubtless not enthused by the thankless work involved in maintaining servers. Nobody else would commit and so JiLsi felt he had no choice but to invite Master Splyntr.
Kaminski received the call at about 11.30 in the evening in early October 2006. ‘My servers are ready, JiLsi,’ he said. JiLsi hesitated no longer, happy at last to relinquish responsibility for his vulnerable servers, ‘Okay. Let’s move!’
Perhaps anticipating their irritation, JiLsi didn’t consult his fellow administrators when handing over control of the server to Splyntr, although in the event none of them seemed to object. They were quickly convinced of its wisdom – Splyntr proved a more efficient manager of the service than JiLsi.
Kaminski was as good as his word: his servers were effective and secure. Not only that, but when anyone tried to discover where the DarkMarket servers were really located (whether fellow hackers, law-enforcement, military or intelligence services), they could not track them beyond an anonymous server in Singapore.
Master Splyntr was appointed administrator. Traffic through the site began to grow again. Every time Iceman hacked DarkMarket and destroyed its database, Master Splyntr would have it back up and running within twenty-four hours. And although Iceman was unquestionably the most gifted technician in the game, his arrogance had alienated hundreds of carders. DarkMarket grew ever stronger and nothing, it seemed, could stop its rise to the top. But Iceman still had one last throw of the dice.
18
SUSPICIOUS MINDS
Iceman’s outer calm belied his absolute fury. He had lost track of time. It might have been three in the morning; it might have been three in the afternoon. But when engaged in a major hack that can take hours and hours, it was easy to become disoriented. For the most obsessive hackers, time and place evaporate. When the fury descended on Iceman, there was no real world – only the bidding of Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, mattered.
She now appeared in several forms. The first was El Mariachi, an embittered carder whose website, The Grifters, Iceman had destroyed. El Mariachi was shouting from the digital hills that he had incontrovertible proof of Iceman’s real identity as an FBI collaborator. His accusation was echoed by Lord Cyric, El Mariachi’s lapdog, constantly yapping and growling across the carding boards. Like many others, Iceman detested Lord Cyric.
Vitriolic accusations were hurled from one carding site to the next. It was the equivalent of a war between several mafia clans except that nobody really knew who belonged to which family, who was an informer and who was a Fed. It was chaos.
But when Iceman discovered what he then believed to be the truth, he sat almost dumbfounded in his comfortable apartment in the centre of San Francisco, paid for by Jeffrey Normington and another partner, in exchange for a regular stream of stolen credit-card numbers. From here amidst the stale pizza crusts and Coke cans, Iceman would administer CardersMarket and obsessively hack other carding sites. In October