Read Online A Billion Ways to Die by Chris Knopf - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chris Knopf
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way others horde material things, whether mere trash or valuable collectibles. It isn’t so much the intrinsic value of their possessions, it’s the possessing itself that drives the behavior. So it’s possible you could read about some gross breach of security at a credit card company, wherein thousands of card numbers had been stolen, and yet not a single piece of merchandise was illegally purchased with the ill-gotten information.
These hoarders worked alone, hacking the card companies themselves, or trading with others in their cohort. While common hackers were nearly always caught by counterforces at the banks or in government, collectors were more likely to be betrayed by their compulsions, or the irresistible urge to brag about their exploits.
So they were people I generally avoided, for that exact reason. I could ill afford the possibility of getting swept up in some other outlaw’s clumsy transaction. There was one, however, who had been in operation as long as I’d been researching credit card fraud as a component of identity theft, which I was hired to do nearly ten years before.
I once traded with him when I had something worth trading for. Now, I didn’t have much in the way of leverage but for the simple fact that I knew how to find him, and that was likely the most potent leverage of all.
It wasn’t an easy or immediate form of communication. I couldn’t just type in an e-mail address and that was that. It started with a search of websites and discussion groups focused on the wildly perilous pursuit of stolen credit card data. These sites were always somewhere between formation, obliteration and reconstitution. So there was spadework even in identifying the authentic gathering places.
Next I had to search through long rows of comments, using an application to isolate key words or phrases my target frequently used. It wasn’t inconceivable that another commentator, on either side of the law, had intentionally adopted his signature style as a way to entice or entrap data trollers. For that I hoped my usual precautions were good to the task, but there was no way to be sure.
Even with the software assist, I had to read hundreds of lines of commentary, most coarse or banal, at best, before I thought I had a match. It was a feeling, a gut reaction no algorithm had yet learned to emulate.
The commentator’s handle was Strider, further support for the hunch. The Tolkien character was a brave loner, a seeker of the key that could thwart the evil power. It fit my amateur psych-op of the elusive, arrogant data thief.
Things went much faster after that. I merely had to find a site where Strider was engaged in an active discussion. I took off as fast as the keyboard and mouse would let me. If search programs were bloodhounds, I would have been baying down the trail.
An hour later I saw a comment from Strider appear in close to real time. I jumped on the response: “I know where you are,” I wrote, signing on as Spanky, a handle he would likely remember.
A few minutes later, he wrote, “Same box?”
He meant the message service we’d used in past transactions, one that claimed to destroy all record of your exchange five seconds after it was concluded. Again, no way to know if that was really true, or if my address hadn’t been compromised along the way. I had to risk it, and I hoped Strider felt the same way.
“Yes,” I wrote, and switched over to the service. Ten minutes later he was there.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I need something,” I wrote, and waited through the two minutes delay.
“Don’t we all. You want pro quo, I need a few quid. You want tit, I need a little tat. I love writing that.”
“We dealt successfully in the past. And honorably.”
“Yeah, yeah, true enough.”
“I need a doorway,” I wrote. “Just one and I’ll leave you alone.”
I sent him the routing number for the general’s bank. Strider would know what that meant.
“That’s a pretty big
These hoarders worked alone, hacking the card companies themselves, or trading with others in their cohort. While common hackers were nearly always caught by counterforces at the banks or in government, collectors were more likely to be betrayed by their compulsions, or the irresistible urge to brag about their exploits.
So they were people I generally avoided, for that exact reason. I could ill afford the possibility of getting swept up in some other outlaw’s clumsy transaction. There was one, however, who had been in operation as long as I’d been researching credit card fraud as a component of identity theft, which I was hired to do nearly ten years before.
I once traded with him when I had something worth trading for. Now, I didn’t have much in the way of leverage but for the simple fact that I knew how to find him, and that was likely the most potent leverage of all.
It wasn’t an easy or immediate form of communication. I couldn’t just type in an e-mail address and that was that. It started with a search of websites and discussion groups focused on the wildly perilous pursuit of stolen credit card data. These sites were always somewhere between formation, obliteration and reconstitution. So there was spadework even in identifying the authentic gathering places.
Next I had to search through long rows of comments, using an application to isolate key words or phrases my target frequently used. It wasn’t inconceivable that another commentator, on either side of the law, had intentionally adopted his signature style as a way to entice or entrap data trollers. For that I hoped my usual precautions were good to the task, but there was no way to be sure.
Even with the software assist, I had to read hundreds of lines of commentary, most coarse or banal, at best, before I thought I had a match. It was a feeling, a gut reaction no algorithm had yet learned to emulate.
The commentator’s handle was Strider, further support for the hunch. The Tolkien character was a brave loner, a seeker of the key that could thwart the evil power. It fit my amateur psych-op of the elusive, arrogant data thief.
Things went much faster after that. I merely had to find a site where Strider was engaged in an active discussion. I took off as fast as the keyboard and mouse would let me. If search programs were bloodhounds, I would have been baying down the trail.
An hour later I saw a comment from Strider appear in close to real time. I jumped on the response: “I know where you are,” I wrote, signing on as Spanky, a handle he would likely remember.
A few minutes later, he wrote, “Same box?”
He meant the message service we’d used in past transactions, one that claimed to destroy all record of your exchange five seconds after it was concluded. Again, no way to know if that was really true, or if my address hadn’t been compromised along the way. I had to risk it, and I hoped Strider felt the same way.
“Yes,” I wrote, and switched over to the service. Ten minutes later he was there.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I need something,” I wrote, and waited through the two minutes delay.
“Don’t we all. You want pro quo, I need a few quid. You want tit, I need a little tat. I love writing that.”
“We dealt successfully in the past. And honorably.”
“Yeah, yeah, true enough.”
“I need a doorway,” I wrote. “Just one and I’ll leave you alone.”
I sent him the routing number for the general’s bank. Strider would know what that meant.
“That’s a pretty big
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