DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [58]
The smog no longer hangs over the city, and Pittsburgh is now regarded as one of the most desirable places to live in the entire United States. The sun shines brightly and, after fifteen years of poverty and decline, the city quietly refashioned itself during the 1990s as an East Coast centre of the high-tech industry.
Mularski was one of those who fled the city in the 1980s after graduating in history from Duquesne University. At the time, there was nothing left. His father could have been the reincarnation of Willy Loman. One of the first to suffer the downturn in the stumbling giant’s fortunes, Mularski senior was laid off from his sales job in the 1970s and had been unable to find another post. The family lived precariously off the earnings of Keith’s mother, an executive assistant.
Pittsburgh’s population had shrunk by one-third in young Keith’s lifetime. He had no intention of watching it waste away any further, so he moved with his new wife to Washington DC. Taken on by a large furniture retailer that operated countrywide, Mularski demonstrated real skills in management and sales. At first glance, the work of a sales manager appeared to have little in common with cybercrime, but the techniques he learned with the company provided firm foundations for his work as a cybercop with the FBI.
‘Social engineering’ – the art of persuading somebody to do something that is objectively not in their interest – lies at the heart of cybercrime. How, the crook ponders, can I persuade my target to give up their password? To open an email with a trojan hidden within its code? Even to turn a computer on?
There are some obvious options available to the cyber thief. The two tried-and-tested methods are free music downloads and pornography. The sexual drive is one of the most powerful of all – it has to be, because in evolutionary terms finding a mate has often proved a hazardous business. We are prepared to take huge risks to satisfy our sexual desires, and computer-virus manufacturers were swift to grasp this. The promise of a pair of breasts is often all that is needed to tempt an unsuspecting user to press on a hyperlink that will download a destructive piece of malware onto his machine. If he’s lucky, he’ll actually be redirected to the picture, although that’s scant compensation for handing over all the secrets on his desktop to a faceless controller far away. Not by chance was one of the most successful viruses spread via email with the subject line ‘I Love You’.
While sales managers tend not to spread viruses, they are, like cyber thieves, accomplished engineers of the human soul. Their job is to convince potential customers to invest in items that are either unwanted or unnecessary. ‘To sell something you have to someone who wants it – that’s not business,’ the mobster king, Meyer Lansky once remarked. ‘But to sell something you don’t have to someone else who doesn’t want it – that is business.’ At the very least, sales managers can persuade customers to buy more expensive items. So when the recently minted Agent Keith Mularski was accepted into the infant Cyber Division of the FBI, he brought with him a prized asset – the ability to cajole, josh, empathise, exhort, inveigle and entice. For a cop, he was a very convincing criminal.
By the year 2000 Pittsburgh had been transformed. It had always benefited from huge philanthropic bequests. Stamped everywhere around town are the marks of Carnegie, Heinz and Mellon, collosi of America’s industrial surge on either side of the turn of the twentieth century. Part of the city’s reinvention after the collapse of manufacturing lay in its investment in computer science and technology at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), rated as one of the world’s top twenty higher-education establishments.
Founded by the towering Scottish-born industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, the university began as a technical school and merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research