DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [6]
So the core of the story lies in the personalities involved and their actions. This testimony is of course largely based on their personal memories stretching back over a decade. Beneath the well-established fallibility of recall, all players involved were pursuing their own agendas, seeking to highlight some parts of their DarkMarket activity and conceal others. In this they were assisted by the duplicitous nature of communication over the Internet, by a culture in which there are few sanctions against lying and dissembling.
My attempts to assess when an interviewee was lying, embellishing or fantasising and when an interviewee was earnestly telling the truth were only partially successful. Everybody I interviewed was brimming with intelligence, even if some lacked the firm hand on the moral rudder necessary to negotiate the troubled waters of cyber criminality. But as I delved deeper and deeper into DarkMarket’s weird world, I realised that the different versions of the same stories at the heart of the website’s history were contradictory and unreconcilable. It has been impossible to establish fully what was really going on between the players, and with whom they were ultimately working.
The Internet has generated unfathomable stores of data and information, a large percentage of which is valueless, a large percentage of which remains uninterpreted, and a small percentage of which is dangerous in its falsity. Our growing dependence on networked systems and the interconnectedness that sees highly specialised groups like hackers and intelligence agents migrate between crime, industrial espionage and cyber warfare means that documenting and trying to understand the history of phenomena like DarkMarket has become a vital intellectual and social exercise, even if the evidence is partial, tendentious and scattered both in the virtual and the real world.
BOOK ONE
Part I
1
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
Yorkshire, England, March 2008
The Reverend Andrew Arun John was in a minor state of shock one morning in early March 2008. Hard to blame him. Not only had he just survived the long journey from Delhi in cattle class, but it was two weeks before the opening of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, and the world’s busiest international airport was exploring new standards in passenger misery. His flight had left India around three o’clock in the morning and, after negotiating passport control and the baggage mayhem, he still had to face a four-hour drive north to Yorkshire.
Switching on his mobile phone, Reverend John saw he had an inordinate number of missed calls from his wife. And before he’d had time to call back to ask her what the fuss was about, she was ringing again. She told him that the police had telephoned several times and were desperate to get in touch with him.
Taken aback and confused, the Reverend replied sharply to his wife, saying that she was talking nonsense – though he regretted his tone almost immediately.
His wife, happily, chose to ignore his grumpiness. Clearly and calmly, she explained that the police had wanted to alert him to the fact that somebody had broken into his bank account, that this was a matter of urgency and that he should ring the number she had for the officer in charge as soon as possible.
His wife’s call unsettled the Reverend still further and his weary brain went into overdrive. ‘Who has broken into my account?’ he wondered. ‘What account? My Barclays here?’ he speculated. ‘My Standard Bank account in South Africa? Or my ICICI one in India? Or maybe all three?’ Even more puzzling: what did she actually mean? ‘How have they broken into my account?’
Coming so soon after his exhausting flight, the whole affair made the Reverend