DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [86]
In September 2007 US law-enforcement officers had finally tracked down Max Vision at his hideaway apartment in downtown San Francisco. CardersMarket had crumbled with Iceman’s demise and so, while mazafaka controlled the Russian carding scene, DarkMarket was now the unchallenged champion of English-speaking cyber criminals. Directly or indirectly the site was still generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal profits every month and it remained as popular as ever among carders and hackers.
There were now three key players on DarkMarket: Cha0, Master Splyntr and Shtirlitz. The mysterious Lord Cyric would soon join them. Cyric’s presence on the carding scene was generating enmity and adoration in equal measure among carders. Those who loathed him believed him to be the FBI plant, Mularski, although there was also a suspicion that Master Splyntr and Shtirlitz were actually working for, or with, US law enforcement. The one thing that everyone agreed upon, whether cop or hacker, was that the most serious criminal remaining on the board was Cha0.
In contrast to their bulging dossiers on his fellow DarkMarketeers, Mularski and Sen knew just two salient facts about Cha0 himself: he lived in Istanbul; and he had a thriving business selling so-called ‘skimmers,’ that essential tool of the fraudster in the Age of Plastic. But the detectives had no real name for Cha0; no physical address; no IP address and no known associates. Either Cha0 didn’t exist (not impossible) or he never made mistakes.
If it was the latter, then Cha0 would appear to have perfected a system of disguising his digital tracks so that the forensic sleuths found it impossible to home in on his location. Part of that masking system was provided by Grendel, who helped out DarkMarket (against payment) in his spare time. This was ironic as Grendel was also providing the shell system that disguised the location of Mularski’s servers. Grendel had originally been invited to provide these services to DarkMarket by JiLsi – in real life he worked for an IT security company in Germany. It was ironic, but somehow very DarkMarket, that he ended up offering security to criminals and cops alike on the website.
Despite intense efforts, Bilal Sen had failed to match Cha0’s style (or MO, as the police describe it) with any known criminals in Turkey itself. The two fundamental aspects of the Internet’s darkside seemed to coincide in his personality: he was a geek with mesmeric technical skills, but he was also a gifted criminal who attended to every last detail and left nothing to chance. It was also possible that Cha0 was the collective name of a well-organised syndicate, although linguistic analysis strongly suggested that only one person was actually formulating his posts and messages on the Internet.
So when Bilal got the message from Istanbul that Cha0 was ‘one of the big boys’, he was not only worried, but he knew that from now on he would have to tread carefully even in a country that was modernising as fast as Turkey.
After the millennium Turkey had become an increasingly attractive venue for hackers, crackers and cyber criminals. In the late 1990s much cyber criminal activity had clustered in certain regions of the so-called BRIC countries. An economist from Goldman Sachs had conferred this acronym on Brazil, Russia, India and China as the leading countries of the emerging markets, the second tier of global power after the G8 (though, politically, Russia straddles the two).
The BRICs shared important social and economic characteristics. Their economies were moving and opening after several decades of stagnation. They had large populations whose combined efforts registered huge growth rates, while a resurgence in exuberant and sometimes aggressive nationalism accompanied the transition to the status of dynamic global actor. Their education systems offered excellent basic skills. But, combined