Read Online Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground by Kevin Poulsen - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Kevin Poulsen
Tags: United States, General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Computers, True Crime, Criminology, Criminals & Outlaws, Case studies, Technology & Engineering, security, Computer Hackers, Computer crimes, Engineering (General), Commercial criminals - United States, Commercial criminals, Butler; Max, Computer crimes - United States, Computer hackers - United States
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charged twenty-year-oldJason “Shadow Knight” Diekman of California with cracking NASA and university systems for fun, andsixteen-year-old Jonathan James, known as “C0mrade,” received a six-month sentence forhis recreational intrusions into Pentagon and NASA computers—the first term of confinement ever handed down in a juvenile hacking case.
To all appearances, federal law enforcement now had firm control of the computer intrusions that had for so long struck fear into corporate America and government officials. In truth, all these victories were battles in yesterday’s cyberwar against bedroom hackers, a dying breed. Even as Max copped his plea in a San Jose courtroom, the FBI was discovering a twenty-first-century threat gathering five thousand miles away—one intimately entwined with Max Vision’s future.
Welcome to America
he two Russians made themselves at home in the small office in Seattle. Alexey Ivanov, twenty, typed on a computer keyboard while his associate, nineteen-year-old Vasiliy Gorshkov, stood by and watched. They were straight off a flight from Russia and already knee-deep into the biggest job interview of their lives—negotiating for a lucrative international partnership with the U.S. computer-security start-up Invita.
Office workers milled around them, and tinny pop music spilled from the computer’s speaker. After a few minutes, Gorshkov drifted off to another computer across the room, and Michael Patterson, Invita’s CEO, struck up a conversation.
It had been Patterson who’d invited the Russians to Seattle. Invita, he’d told them in an e-mail, was a young company, but it was gaining customers through contacts the founders had made while working at Microsoft and Sun. Now the company wanted help expanding into Eastern Europe. Ivanov, who claimed to have as many as twenty talented programmers working with him, seemed perfect for the job; Gorshkov was a tag-along, invited by Ivanov to act as the duo’s spokesman. He had a fiancée waiting back home, pregnant with his first child.
Patterson began casually asking Gorshkov about a recent rash of computer intrusions into U.S. companies, some of whom paid money to theattackers to make them stop. “Just so I know you guys are as good as I think you are,” Patterson said, “could any of that have been you guys?”
Gorshkov—bundled in the heavy jacket he wore back home in Chelyabinsk, a bleak, polluted industrial city in the Ural Mountains—hedged for a minute and finally answered. “A few months ago we tried, but we found it’s not so profitable.”
The Russian was being modest. For nearly a year, small to midsized Internet companies around the United States had been plagued by extortionate cyberattacks from a group calling itself the Expert Group of Protection Against Hackers—a name that probably sounds better in Russian. The crimes always unfolded the same way: Attackers from Russia or Ukraine breached the victim’s network, stole credit card numbers or other data, then sent an e-mail or a fax to the company demanding payment to keep quiet about the intrusion and to fix the security holes the hackers exploited. If the company didn’t pay up, the Expert Group would threaten to destroy the victim’s systems.
The gang had lifted tens of thousands of credit card numbers from the Online Information Bureau, a financial transaction clearinghouse in Vernon, Connecticut. The Seattle ISP Speakeasy had been hit. Sterling Microsystems in Anaheim, California, had been hacked, along with a Cincinnati ISP, a Korean bank in Los Angeles, a financial services company in New Jersey, the electronic payment company E-Money in New York, and even the venerable Western Union, which had lost nearly sixteen thousand customer credit card numbers in an attack that came with a $50,000 extortion threat. When music-seller CD Universe didn’t give in to a $100,000 ransom demand, thousands of its customers’ credit card numbers showed up on a public
To all appearances, federal law enforcement now had firm control of the computer intrusions that had for so long struck fear into corporate America and government officials. In truth, all these victories were battles in yesterday’s cyberwar against bedroom hackers, a dying breed. Even as Max copped his plea in a San Jose courtroom, the FBI was discovering a twenty-first-century threat gathering five thousand miles away—one intimately entwined with Max Vision’s future.
Welcome to America
he two Russians made themselves at home in the small office in Seattle. Alexey Ivanov, twenty, typed on a computer keyboard while his associate, nineteen-year-old Vasiliy Gorshkov, stood by and watched. They were straight off a flight from Russia and already knee-deep into the biggest job interview of their lives—negotiating for a lucrative international partnership with the U.S. computer-security start-up Invita.
Office workers milled around them, and tinny pop music spilled from the computer’s speaker. After a few minutes, Gorshkov drifted off to another computer across the room, and Michael Patterson, Invita’s CEO, struck up a conversation.
It had been Patterson who’d invited the Russians to Seattle. Invita, he’d told them in an e-mail, was a young company, but it was gaining customers through contacts the founders had made while working at Microsoft and Sun. Now the company wanted help expanding into Eastern Europe. Ivanov, who claimed to have as many as twenty talented programmers working with him, seemed perfect for the job; Gorshkov was a tag-along, invited by Ivanov to act as the duo’s spokesman. He had a fiancée waiting back home, pregnant with his first child.
Patterson began casually asking Gorshkov about a recent rash of computer intrusions into U.S. companies, some of whom paid money to theattackers to make them stop. “Just so I know you guys are as good as I think you are,” Patterson said, “could any of that have been you guys?”
Gorshkov—bundled in the heavy jacket he wore back home in Chelyabinsk, a bleak, polluted industrial city in the Ural Mountains—hedged for a minute and finally answered. “A few months ago we tried, but we found it’s not so profitable.”
The Russian was being modest. For nearly a year, small to midsized Internet companies around the United States had been plagued by extortionate cyberattacks from a group calling itself the Expert Group of Protection Against Hackers—a name that probably sounds better in Russian. The crimes always unfolded the same way: Attackers from Russia or Ukraine breached the victim’s network, stole credit card numbers or other data, then sent an e-mail or a fax to the company demanding payment to keep quiet about the intrusion and to fix the security holes the hackers exploited. If the company didn’t pay up, the Expert Group would threaten to destroy the victim’s systems.
The gang had lifted tens of thousands of credit card numbers from the Online Information Bureau, a financial transaction clearinghouse in Vernon, Connecticut. The Seattle ISP Speakeasy had been hit. Sterling Microsystems in Anaheim, California, had been hacked, along with a Cincinnati ISP, a Korean bank in Los Angeles, a financial services company in New Jersey, the electronic payment company E-Money in New York, and even the venerable Western Union, which had lost nearly sixteen thousand customer credit card numbers in an attack that came with a $50,000 extortion threat. When music-seller CD Universe didn’t give in to a $100,000 ransom demand, thousands of its customers’ credit card numbers showed up on a public
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