DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [56]
Furthermore, silo, dystopia and c0rrupted0ne appeared very keen – perhaps too keen – for Matrix to open another file, a compressed zip file, known as an rar. Zip files were some of the most notorious carriers of trojan infections, and he was certain this one was designed by the CardersMarket crew to suck all DarkMarket’s secrets from his computer. He began to wonder whether Iceman and his cohorts were now on stage two of an audacious plan, designed by the FBI, to wipe out DarkMarket.
It was by now about a quarter-past nine on a freezing November morning in central Germany, but Matrix knew he had to act swiftly. He immediately contacted his fellow DM administrators and warned them that Iceman and his cohorts were about to denounce DM:
matrix001: I did not download the file and open it, therefore i said my rar is not working
matrix001: I bet it was a trojan
matrix001: and if you check the info they passed it’s quite bogus …
matrix001: But take a read yourself …
19
DONNIE BRASCO
Pittsburgh, October 2006
Special Agent Keith J. Mularski of the FBI’s Cyber Division was distraught, and it wasn’t just because the Steelers were having a mediocre season after the previous February’s sensational victory in the Super Bowl. As a season ticket holder at Heinz Field, the Steelers’ home stadium, Mularski had always acknowledged that football was not a matter of life and death – it was more important than that. But for once his problems were even more serious than football.
For months and months he had been working as a cyber Donnie Brasco, immersing himself in the Web’s ever-expanding pool of criminality. True, his life was never in danger the way that Agent Joe Pistone’s had been when he assumed the identity of Brasco in the lairs of New York’s toughest mafia families. But it had taken Mularski a hell of a lot of work securing his bosses’ agreement for the unprecedented operation to go undercover in cyberspace. It was expensive to mount and contained the great danger of being denounced as entrapment. So FBI chiefs were scrutinising his every move for signs of a slip-up. What had just happened was no slip-up, though. It was a head-on collision.
The timing was atrocious. He had come a long way without his cover being blown. He was on the verge of enlisting the help of several foreign law-enforcement agencies to assist in his long-term strategy of executing a spectacular series of busts around the world. He had created and then nurtured a character, chosen a name and back story, and this figment had become real for many global cyber thieves in a remarkably short space of time. Mularski was a close confidant to several of his targets.
Now, because of the carelessness of a colleague who had left a file with a trace of the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance letterhead on a computer, he was threatened with exposure and the collapse of an immensely intricate operation.
This was also the FBI’s first major foray into cybercrime. Until now the US Postal Inspection Service, but above all the US Secret Service, had dominated cyber investigations. By 2004 it was clear that cybercrime was one of the fastest growing sectors of organised criminal activity worldwide. More and more organisations, institutions and individuals were being hacked into. Credit cards were the biggest problem, because of the sheer volume being misused or stolen. But large companies were now victims of industrial espionage in which their commercial secrets were being stolen and sold on to competitors by some of the very hackers who were involved in credit-card fraud. Cisco Systems had allowed a Chinese competitor to steal and copy the plans for one of its most advanced servers – so not even supposedly computer-savvy corporations were immune.
The haphazard approach to network security, both in government and in private industry, was beginning to spook the White House, Congress and the Pentagon. Most government agencies and ministries were either unaware of their vulnerability or so overwhelmed by the number of attacks launched against