Read Online Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground by Kevin Poulsen - Free Book Online Page B
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
Ads: Link
website.
Several companies wound up paying the Expert Group small amounts to go away, while the FBI did its best to track the intrusions. They finally zeroed in on one of the ringleaders, “subbsta,” whose real name was Alexey Ivanov. It wasn’t that hard—the hacker, convinced he was out ofreach of American justice, had given his résumé to Speakeasy during the extortion negotiations there.
Russian police had ignored a diplomatic request to detain and question Ivanov, and that was when the feds created Invita, a full-blown undercover business designed to lure the hacker into a trap. Now Ivanov and Gorshkov were surrounded by undercover FBI agents posing as company employees, along with a white-hat hacker from the nearby University of Washington who was playing the role of a computer geek named Ray. Hidden cameras and microphones recorded everything in the office, and FBI-installed spyware captured every keystroke typed on the computers. In the parking lot outside, around twenty FBI agents were standing by to help with the arrest.
The agent playing CEO Patterson tried to draw Gorshkov out some more. “What about credit cards? Credit card numbers? Anything like that?”
“When we’re here, we’ll never say that we got access to credit card numbers,” the hacker replied.
The FBI agent and Gorshkov laughed conspiratorially. “I understand. I hear ya, I hear ya,” said Patterson.
When the two-hour meeting concluded, Patterson ushered the men into a car, ostensibly to take them to the temporary housing arranged for their visit. After a short drive, the car stopped. Agents threw open the doors and arrested the Russians.
Back at the office, an FBI agent realized the keystroke logger installed on the bureau computers at Invita presented him with a rare opportunity. What he did next would make him the first FBI agent to be accused by the Russian federal police of committing a computer crime. He went into the keystroke logs and retrieved the password the pair had used to access their computer in Chelyabinsk. Then, after checking with his supervisor and a federal prosecutor, he logged in to the hackers’ Russian server over the Internet and started scrounging through the directory names, looking for the files belonging to Ivanov and Gorshkov.
When he found them, he downloaded 2.3 gigabytes of compressed data and burned it onto CD-ROMs, only later obtaining a warrant from a federal judge to search through the information he’d grabbed. It was the first international evidence seizure through hacking.
When the feds dug into the data, the breathtaking scope of Ivanov’s activity became clear. In addition to the extortion plots, Ivanov had developed a frighteningly effective method for cashing out the cards he stole, using custom software to automatically open PayPal and eBay accounts and bid on auctioned goods with one of the half-million stolen credit cards in his collection. When the program won an auction, it had the goods shipped to Eastern Europe, where an associate of Ivanov picked them up. Then the software did it all again and again. PayPal checked the stolen credit card list against its internal databases and found it had absorbed a stunning $800,000 in fraudulent charges.
It was the first tremor in a tectonic shift that would fundamentally change the Internet for the next decade. Maybe forever. With top-flight technical colleges but few legitimate opportunities for their graduates, Russia and the former Soviet satellite states were incubating a new breed of hacker.
Some, like Ivanov, were amassing personal fortunes by looting consumers and companies, protected by corrupt or lazy law enforcement in their home countries and poor international cooperation. Others, like Gorshkov, were driven into crime by tough economic circumstances. The hacker graduated from Chelyabinsk State Technical University with a degree in mechanical engineering and sank a small inheritance from his father into a computer-hosting and
Several companies wound up paying the Expert Group small amounts to go away, while the FBI did its best to track the intrusions. They finally zeroed in on one of the ringleaders, “subbsta,” whose real name was Alexey Ivanov. It wasn’t that hard—the hacker, convinced he was out ofreach of American justice, had given his résumé to Speakeasy during the extortion negotiations there.
Russian police had ignored a diplomatic request to detain and question Ivanov, and that was when the feds created Invita, a full-blown undercover business designed to lure the hacker into a trap. Now Ivanov and Gorshkov were surrounded by undercover FBI agents posing as company employees, along with a white-hat hacker from the nearby University of Washington who was playing the role of a computer geek named Ray. Hidden cameras and microphones recorded everything in the office, and FBI-installed spyware captured every keystroke typed on the computers. In the parking lot outside, around twenty FBI agents were standing by to help with the arrest.
The agent playing CEO Patterson tried to draw Gorshkov out some more. “What about credit cards? Credit card numbers? Anything like that?”
“When we’re here, we’ll never say that we got access to credit card numbers,” the hacker replied.
The FBI agent and Gorshkov laughed conspiratorially. “I understand. I hear ya, I hear ya,” said Patterson.
When the two-hour meeting concluded, Patterson ushered the men into a car, ostensibly to take them to the temporary housing arranged for their visit. After a short drive, the car stopped. Agents threw open the doors and arrested the Russians.
Back at the office, an FBI agent realized the keystroke logger installed on the bureau computers at Invita presented him with a rare opportunity. What he did next would make him the first FBI agent to be accused by the Russian federal police of committing a computer crime. He went into the keystroke logs and retrieved the password the pair had used to access their computer in Chelyabinsk. Then, after checking with his supervisor and a federal prosecutor, he logged in to the hackers’ Russian server over the Internet and started scrounging through the directory names, looking for the files belonging to Ivanov and Gorshkov.
When he found them, he downloaded 2.3 gigabytes of compressed data and burned it onto CD-ROMs, only later obtaining a warrant from a federal judge to search through the information he’d grabbed. It was the first international evidence seizure through hacking.
When the feds dug into the data, the breathtaking scope of Ivanov’s activity became clear. In addition to the extortion plots, Ivanov had developed a frighteningly effective method for cashing out the cards he stole, using custom software to automatically open PayPal and eBay accounts and bid on auctioned goods with one of the half-million stolen credit cards in his collection. When the program won an auction, it had the goods shipped to Eastern Europe, where an associate of Ivanov picked them up. Then the software did it all again and again. PayPal checked the stolen credit card list against its internal databases and found it had absorbed a stunning $800,000 in fraudulent charges.
It was the first tremor in a tectonic shift that would fundamentally change the Internet for the next decade. Maybe forever. With top-flight technical colleges but few legitimate opportunities for their graduates, Russia and the former Soviet satellite states were incubating a new breed of hacker.
Some, like Ivanov, were amassing personal fortunes by looting consumers and companies, protected by corrupt or lazy law enforcement in their home countries and poor international cooperation. Others, like Gorshkov, were driven into crime by tough economic circumstances. The hacker graduated from Chelyabinsk State Technical University with a degree in mechanical engineering and sank a small inheritance from his father into a computer-hosting and
Similar Books
