DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [87]
Turkey qualified as an honorary BRIC, with an economy that, when compared to Russia’s, for example, looked much more dynamic. The country’s population, at around eighty million, and its growth rates were increasing even faster than those of the acknowledged BRICs. Everyone recognised its strategic importance, nestling against the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea while bordering Bulgaria, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia: there is barely a neighbour that hasn’t experienced a major upheaval or war in the past two decades. The unpredictable has been ever present in Turkish politics but, as the millennium turned, Turkey’s burgeoning economic power and sophistication emphasised its pivotal role in several vital geo-strategic regions – the Middle East, Central Asia, the Black Sea and the Balkans.
The country had been slow to develop its Internet infrastructure in the 1990s, but in recent years it had begun to catch up rapidly. Istanbul, Turkey’s economic engine, hosted an explosion of successful start-ups along with the design, media and service companies that benefited from them.
On the downside, the size of the country, its improving infrastructure and the broadening education of the youthful middle class represented an opportunity for cybercrime. Until Bilal Sen’s unit was properly up and running in 2005, there was little to prevent crackers and hackers from operating on the Web from inside Turkey without fear of detection. The Cyber Crime Unit was beginning to make a difference, but it was an uphill struggle. If Inspector Sen were able to track down Cha0, it would be an important feather in the unit’s cap.
But just before the Inspector was due to return to Turkey from Pittsburgh in mid-March 2008, he received another alert that further complicated his investigation into Cha0. This time his Istanbul contacts provided details of a baffling interview given to a well-known news organisation, Haber 7, by a Turkish hacker named Kier, who confessed that he was a fugitive from the law.
Haber 7’s reputation was based in part on the spiritual backing it received from a huge domestic Islamist movement, called The Gülen Community, which promoted the philosophy of its leader, Fethullah Gülen, who was living in exile in the United States. As a Community news organisation, Haber 7 was broadly sympathetic to the governing AK Party, which was pro-Islamic but democratic.
The young hacker, Kier, had approached the news organisation to claim that not only did he know Cha0, but, he hinted, the person or people behind DarkMarket’s most successful mystery avatar were planning to expand his/their criminal empire. The article included a photograph of the hacker talking in an Istanbul café. The photograph was taken from the back, but some of the hacker’s profile was visible.
Bilal did not yet know that the hacker was a young man named Mert Ortaç. This odd character was thought to be an accomplice of another cyber criminal called Cryptos, who had been arrested in January 2008 for allegedly hacking into the Akbank, one of Turkey’s biggest financial institutions. In many respects, the Akbank case was a bigger deal than DarkMarket because the team had actually hacked into the bank’s main system, by means of a vulnerability in its operating system. But neither the Istanbul police nor the Anti-Organised Crime Division had the faintest idea where Ortaç had been hiding. And suddenly he popped up talking to a journalist.
Despite being under surveillance both by the Istanbul police and by a posse of intelligence agents, Ortaç told the paper that he had given them all the