DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [69]
While Dron was still posting on the board, Cha0 had exploited his authority to extract the secrets of the young engineer’s trade. As soon as he and his team (for Cha0 had several accomplices) had got the knack, he shut down Dron’s membership, just as he had done with JiLsi in December 2006. Dron would no longer be able to advertise on DarkMarket, and because most of the other boards had been liquidated in the battle royal between DM and CardersMarket, the young Canadian’s marketing strategy had been severely hampered. With Dron out of the way, Cha0 meanwhile was busy attempting to establish his own near-monopoly in the sale of skimmer machines.
Because Dron had been banned from DarkMarket, his three French partners – Theeeel near Paris, and Lord Kaisersose and Kalouche in Marseilles – would not have noticed that Spencer Frizzell had taken him out of circulation. Nonetheless the Secret Service did not know when Matrix, the most prolific DarkMarket administrator, would be taken down by the German police backed by the Feds. And his surprise removal from the board would probably freak remaining DM members.
In Sweden, Recka knew straight away that law enforcement was on the march. He had been exchanging friendly messages with Matrix on a daily basis, and he didn’t buy the curious post that Matrix popped up with in early June 2007. My mother, Matrix explained, has had a serious accident and so I will be absent for a while. Any experienced cyber thief would immediately have concluded that the police had taken over his nickname (they had) and that this was just a feint.
Lord Kaisersose, Theeeel and company were different, of course – they were French. France was developing a peculiar contribution to cybercrime. French criminals were as doggedly francophone as the rest of their compatriots. France’s language policeman, the Académie française, had observed with unease the exponential growth of English as a global lingua franca during the 1990s. But it was pleased to note that in the digital world most French hackers and geeks were committed to battle against English, the primary source of linguistic impurities.
This meant two things: cybercrime in France was initially genuinely national – nothing like as cross-border as elsewhere in the world. The country had pre-empted the Internet with the roll-out in 1982 of its very effective information technology called Minitel, which transmitted text onto a video screen along conventional phone lines. As a consequence, the French were much further advanced in their understanding of information technology than most of the rest of the world. The Minitel system, through which customers could look up phone numbers, check their bank accounts, send flowers or talk dirty using the messageries roses, was notably more secure against hackers than the Internet, which partly explains why the Web is only now eclipsing Minitel in France. So the French were less vulnerable to early viral infections on the Internet. Furthermore, relatively few French hackers spent time on boards like CarderPlanet, Shadowcrew and DarkMarket.
Second, the advance of spam emails in France has been slow. The returns are far less tempting than those generated by English, Spanish and, latterly, Chinese mass spam mailouts. The market is simply too small. And until recently the eighty or so officers at OCLCTIC did not bother to monitor cyber threats originating in other countries (in contrast to the French military and intelligence communities, which have a highly advanced cyber capability). Operation Lord Kaisersose (the Marseilles crew) and Operation Hard Drive (Dron and Theeeel) went some way towards helping OCLCTIC agents spell out to their political masters why the French police had to engage more effectively with international law enforcement. Perhaps most astonishingly, when OCLCTIC made their arrests – complete with dozens of armed officers charging their way into addresses