DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [61]
But Mularski was in for an even greater shock than the well-known issue of Gallic anti-Americanism. OCLCTIC, he was told, had already been working for several months with the US Secret Service on a case related to … DarkMarket. A parallel investigation was under way and he had known nothing about it. Moreover, the US Secret Service showed no inclination to share information about their investigation. A few months earlier the boss of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigation Division had testified to Congress that due to its close cooperation with ‘other federal, state and local enforcement … we are are able to provide a comprehensive network of intelligence-sharing, resource-sharing and technical expertise’. He forgot to tell that to the team investigating DarkMarket, because they refused even to share with the FBI who they were targeting. Matters were about to get complicated for cybercops and cyber thieves alike.
Most DarkMarketeers were not focusing on law enforcement at the time (except the ones collaborating with Mularski). Rather, they wanted to assert the site’s supremacy by finishing off Iceman. JiLsi took it upon himself to administer the fatal blow. If he succeeded, it would be his finest hour and his reputation would be considerably enhanced. He had also had enough of Iceman’s repeated incursions, which created endless extra work for him; and the bilious rhetoric, Iceman’s trademark, was also getting to him.
JiLsi’s plan was simple. He created an anonymous email account, which he used to send messages to Iceman’s Internet Service Provider. He warned the ISP that CardersMarket, which it hosted, was a criminal site and its owners were involved in major credit-card fraud. When Iceman discovered the account from which the denunciatory emails were being sent, he used JiLsi’s password, MSR206 (the name of the legendary credit-card cloning machine used by all good carders), and – hey presto! – it worked. Iceman discovered JiLsi was bad-mouthing him to his own ISP. This was unforgivable. JiLsi had indeed crossed a line that no (dis)honest carder should ever breach, regardless of how bad relations became: he had ratted on a member of the fraternity. Worse than that, he had been caught doing it.
Iceman disseminated the news far and wide. Before long it came to the attention of Cha0.
In the aftermath of the Iceman accusations, everyone was still feeling a little jittery. Were the Feds on the case? But more than this, if they were, ‘Who the fuck was working with them?’, as one of the DM administrators put it. Iceman, Splyntr, c0rrupted0ne or Silo from CardersMarket; Shtirlitz, the enigmatic ‘Russian’; or perhaps DarkMarket’s new moderator, Lord Cyric? Or someone else?
The two people whom nobody had hitherto accused of working for the police were Matrix001 and JiLsi. They had occasionally accused the latter of incompetence (and not without reason). But police work? Never. Iceman had long known JiLsi’s password from his hacking forays. But now everyone appeared to know it. There was some suspicion that a third party had infiltrated a trojan onto JiLsi’s beloved memory stick and that they were now monitoring every keystroke he made, thus becoming privy to DarkMarket’s deepest secrets. Or maybe JiLsi was not who he said he was … maybe he was somehow connected with the mystery company from 2000 Technology Drive – Pembrooke Associates?
A few days before Christmas 2006, JiLsi logged onto DarkMarket as usual to check out the traffic. He wasn’t on for long before heading out again to attend to his real-life affairs. That afternoon he was back. ‘Username: JiLsi,’ he typed. ‘Password: MSR206.’ In a blink, the machine returned ‘Incorrect Username or Password’. Automatically JiLsi tried again, assuming he had made a typo. The result was the same. He tried again and again.
There was no room for doubt: JiLsi, spiritual owner and chief administrator of DarkMarket, had been excluded from his own site. Panicked, he tried to log onto www.mazafaka.ru. No dice. The Vouched – another of his