The underground market of carders. Translation of KingPIN. Chapter 14. “The Raid”

Kevin Poulsen, editor of WIRED magazine, and a blackhat hacker Dark Dante as a child, wrote a book about " one of his acquaintances ."

The book shows the path from a teenage geek (but at the same time pitching), to a seasoned cyberpowder, as well as some methods of work of special services to capture hackers and carders.

The beginning and the translation plan is here: " Kingpin: students are translating a book about hackers ."

The logic of choosing a book for working with schoolchildren is as follows:

• books about hackers in Russian are few (one and a half)
• there are no books about carding in Russian at all ( UPD was found alone )
• Kevin Poulsen - WIRED editor, not a stupid fellow, authoritative
• to involve young people in translation and creativity on Habré and to receive feedback from seniors
• work in soldering schoolchildren-students-specialists are very effective for learning and shows the importance of work
• the text is not very hardcore and accessible to a wide range, but it touches on information security, vulnerabilities of payment systems, the structure of the carding underground, the basic concepts of Internet infrastructure
• the book illustrates that “feeding” in clandestine forums ends poorly

The book has been completely translated; now we are translating articles by Paul Graham . Who wants to help - write in a personal magisterludi .

Chapter 14. “The Raid”

(thanks for the translation to habrazer Find_The_Truth and Shoohurt for the edits)

“Cool TV!” Tim said, admiring the 61-inch Sony plasma hanging on the wall. Charity, an avid reading enthusiast, hated this new display and the way it consumed the living room space in their new home. However, Max loved his gadgets, and this one was more than just a toy. This TV was a symbol of newfound financial prosperity.

Max’s friends knew that he was doing something, and not only because he no longer had to barely make ends meet. Max began to slip Tim discs with fresh exploits recorded on them, thus giving the system administrator an advantage in working to protect the fleet. In addition, there was his strange commentary at the Hunger Programmers' monthly lunch at the Chin Chin in Palo Alto. When everyone finished presenting their projects, Max could only mysteriously, with a note of envy, say: “Wow, I wish I could do something good.”

However, nobody became interested in the details of the new classes at Max. They could only hope that it would be something conditionally legal. The hacker, in turn, carefully tried not to burden friends with information about his double life, even when he finally left their circle, but only until one of his hacks brought someone to his house.

It was 6:30 in the morning, and it was still dark outside when Chris Toshok woke up at the sound of his doorbell: someone long and persistently held his finger on the button. Deciding that it was his drunken neighbor, Chris rolled over on his side and tried to sleep again. The bell rang again, this time intermittently, mimicking the busy signal on the telephone. Chris reluctantly crawled out from under the covers, pulled on his shirt and trousers and trudged down. Opening the door, Chris immediately squinted - someone shone a flashlight on his face.

- Are you Chris Toshok? - I said a woman's voice.
- Mneee, yes.
“Mr. Toshok, we're from the FBI.” We have a search warrant for your home.

The agent, a long-haired blonde, showed Chris her badge and slipped a thin stack of papers into his hand. Another agent, putting his firm hand on Chris’s shoulder, led him out into the courtyard so that he wouldn’t stop the other agents from entering the house. They woke Chris' neighbor, and then began to search the bedroom, sorting through books on the shelves and rummaging around in a closet with linen.

The blonde, accompanied by a Secret Service agent, crouched next to Chris to explain to him why they were here. Four months ago, the source code for the still-unreleased Half-Life 2 shooter was stolen from Valve Software in Bellevue, Washington. For a while, they chatted on the IRC, and then appeared on file hosting. Half-Life 2 was perhaps the most anticipated game of all time, so the appearance of the source has stirred up the game world in earnest. Valve made a statement that they would have to postpone the release of the game, and the head of the company called on fans of the Half-Life series to help track down the thief. Based on sales of the first part of the game, Valve estimated the source code at $ 250,000,000.

As the agent explained, tracking some hacker activity led the FBI straight to Toshok’s IP address, in his old home. Therefore, if Chris wants to mitigate his punishment, he will have to tell where he stores the source.

Toshok declared his innocence, although he said that he knew about the leak: his old friend, Max Vision, allegedly was with him during this whole story, and when the sources started appearing on the Internet, Chris was very excited. Mentioning the name of Max forced the agents to work at a double pace: they hastily finished the search, almost tripped over each other, and instantly went to the office to prepare a warrant for a search of Max's new home. Chris gloomily watched as agents pick up nine computers, some music CDs, and an Xbox. The blonde agent noticed the expression on his face and said: "Yes, it will not be easy for you."

Upon learning of the raid, Max realized that he was running out of time. He ran around the apartment, trying to hide equipment. He buried one hard drive in towels lying in the bathroom cabinet, the other in a box of cornflakes. Max hid one of the laptops under a sofa cushion, and the second hung out of the window in a garbage bag. Everything important on the computer was encrypted, so even if the agents found something, they could not prove his guilt. However, according to the rules of his stay at large, he did not have the right to use encryption. Moreover, allowing the FBI to his computers was, in principle, very dangerous.

Twenty feds poured into Max's apartment and crawled through it like ants. All they managed to find were some common attributes of a computer geek with hippies from San Francisco: Orwell’s 1984 bookshelf, Orson Scott Card’s classic science fiction novel Ender's Game, and several pieces by Asimov and Karl Sagan, a bicycle and a bunch of plush penguins scattered everywhere. Max loved the penguins.

The agents did not find any of Max's hastily built caches, so this time he did not have to explain anything. The feds left without receiving any evidence regarding Max’s involvement in the Valve diversion, nor evidence of the crimes he and Chris had committed. Only a pack of disks, a broken hard drive and an old Windows computer left in sight to divert attention.

But Cherity just found out what it is like to be in the world of Max Vision. Max insisted on not being involved in code theft. Probably, it was: in anticipation of the release of Half-Life 2 around at least a few shooter lovers roamed around a Valve network full of Swiss cheese, and Max was just one of them. Later, the FBI took another hacker into development: it turned out to be twenty-year-old German hacker Axl "Ago" Gömbe, who confirmed his participation in the hacking Valve network (which he himself admitted in a letter to company head Gabe Newel), but denied any involvement in the theft of the source.

Gembe was notorious for creating Agobot, an advanced computer worm that could do a little more than spread on Windows networks. When Agobot gained access to the computer, the user could notice only sudden "brakes" in the system. However, at this point, the victim's computer became part of the hacker's personal army. The worm, according to the program, automatically entered a specific IRC chat, then announced itself and prepared to receive commands transmitted by the owner right there in the chat. Thousands of computers responded to commands, forming a kind of hive - a botnet. With one line of code, a hacker could run keyloggers on remote computers, receiving passwords and credit card numbers. He could turn computers into sources of spam. But the worst part was

Initially, DDoS attacks were popular among hackers as a way to kick each other from an IRC chat. Then, in February 2000, the fifteen-year-old Canadian “MafiaBoy” Calsi experimentally set his botnet on the most visited sites that could be found. The sites CNN, Yahoo !, Amazon, eBay, Dell, E-Trade - all of them collapsed under pressure, providing newspapers with loud headlines, and security experts in the White House - an extraordinary emergency meeting. Since then, DDoS attacks have grown into one of the most monstrous Internet issues.

Gömbe bots have become the main innovation of a decade in the world of malware, opening a new era when any embittered student could easily crash part of the Internet. Recognizing the German as an invasion of Valve’s network gave the FBI a great opportunity to trap one of the most sinful innovators: the feds tried to lure Gemba to America by sending him an invitation to work from Valve itself. After months of negotiations and telephone interviews with company executives, the hacker was ready to fly to the United States, but German police intervened and arrested the hacker, sentencing him in Germany for a suspended sentence of one year.

A raid in the house shook Max, filling his head with unpleasant memories of the FBI search on suspicion of BIND attacks. Max decided that he needed a safe house in the city, where he could engage in his trade and store data in a place inaccessible to searches. For example, Chris’s home in Villa Siena.

Using a pseudonym, Chris rented a second apartment, for Max. It was a spacious penthouse in the Fillmore area, with a balcony and fireplace. Max liked to work by the fireplace: he joked that in case of danger he could always burn evidence. Max tried to visit Cherity's house every day, however, a comfortable safe shelter made the hacker disappear for several days in a row. He appeared only when his girlfriend distracted him from work by phone call: “Dude, it's time to go home. I miss you".

When the joint work of Max and Chris began to make money, distrust began to appear. Some of the hucksters in Chris’s team loved partying, and the constant presence of cocaine, ecstasy and grass in the house acted on Chris in much the same way as a long-forgotten melody coming to mind. In February, he was detained for driving while intoxicated. At that time, he began to disappear regularly in Las Vegas with his pretty co-workers, where he disappeared all weekend. During the day they were bought in stores, and in the evening Chris could sniff out a couple of tracks and take his girls to have fun in the Hard Rock Café or grumble at the VIP table in the Ghostbar spruce bar on top of Palms, where he could spend a few bucks for lunch and more as much per bottle of wine. Returning to Orange Cauinti, he hooked an eighteen-year-old girl,

All these hobbies for drugs and adultery were unpleasant to Max. But what really infuriated Max was their financial arrangements. Chris paid Max as God willingly puts: at any moment he could change the amount of payments. Max wanted a stable 50 percent of Chris’s profit. He was sure that Chris was raising real money from their joint business. Chris tried to explain the situation to Max and sent him a letter describing income and expenses. According to him, out of a hundred cards it worked, maybe about fifty, and only half of them could buy something valuable; the rest turned out to be garbage with a limit of $ 500, which was only suitable for small purchases like gasoline and food. And Chris himself had expenses: the distribution of goods required his team’s flights to remote cities, and the flights weren’t cheap. In addition, he paid for the rental of premises in Villa Siena, where his bank card factory was located.

Max was implacable: "Call me when you are not stoned." The last straw fell into Max’s patience three months after the story of Half-Life, when Chris nearly burnt down. He came to San Francisco to meet Max and buy cards at Península Shopping Center. He and his team were just settling in the neighboring rooms of the luxury W hotel in the Soma area when Chris got a call from the reception: his credit card was not accepted by the terminal. Tormented by a hangover and the flu, Chris went downstairs and pulled out another fake card from his puffy wallet. He watched the administrator roll his card - again by. Chris got another one, but she was rejected. The third card worked, but it aroused suspicion, and as soon as the elevator drove Chris to the twenty-seventh floor, the administrator immediately called the bank. Next

Handcuffing Chris, the police searched his number and car, taking his Sony laptop, MSR206 (portable magnetic card reader, translator's note) and a car that had VIN interrupted: in Las Vegas, Chris experimented with cars rented on fake cards sending cars to Mexico where they got new numbers.

Chris was sent to the county jail. His disappearance worried Max, but Chris easily got off and admitted his mistake to his partner. Fortunately for him, the police investigation did not go far. A month later, Chris was given three years probation and was barred from visiting the W Hotel. After that, he still boasted that he had become, so to speak, the beneficiary of the San Francisco justice system. About the same bullshit regularly happened to Chris' girls, so he kept a guarantor [on bail] on his salary and even allowed him to spend the night at his underground card factory at Villa Siena. But Max was furious. For a person of Chris level, letting you catch yourself in a hotel room for carding is inexcusable negligence.

Max decided that he could no longer rely on his partner. He needed a plan "B".

To be continued...