Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 1. "Key"

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

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

The beginning and the translation plan are here: “ Shkvoren: schoolchildren translate a book about hackers ”.
Prologue
Chapter 1. "Key"
Chapter 3. “The Hungry Programmers”
Chapter 5. “Cyberwar!”
Chapter 34. DarkMarket
(we publish as soon as the translations are ready)
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The logic of choosing a book for working with schoolchildren is as follows:

• there are few books about hackers in Russian (one and a half)
• There are no books about carding in Russian at all (there was one UPD )
• Kevin Poulsen - WIRED Editor, No Stupid Comrade, Authoritative
• to introduce young people to the translation and creativity in Habré and get feedback from elders
• schoolchildren-students-specialists work very sparingly for learning and show the significance of the work
• The text is not very hardcore and is accessible to a wide range, but it touches on issues of information security, vulnerabilities of payment systems, the structure of the carding underground, basic concepts of the Internet infrastructure
• the book illustrates that "feeding" in underground forums - ends badly

Who wants to help with the translation of other chapters write in a personal magisterludi .

Chapter 1. The Key

(text translated as part of the collective project of schoolchildren in GoToCamp camp, thanks to Alena, Kate, Sonja, Grisha, Sasha and ShiawasenaHoshi habraiser)



Sasha (editor Katya)
As soon as the pickup rolled into the yard, the teenage geeks, squatting, realized that there was trouble. “Damn weaklings!” One of the “cowboys” shouted to them from the pickup window. A beer bottle flew out of the car and crashed on the sidewalk. The geeks who left the club to talk away from loud music and the noise of the crowd already knew what would happen next. In Boise in 1988, to appear in public without a belt with a wide buckle and a cowboy hat meant to commit a kind of crime.

Then one of the geeks did something that none of the "cowboys" expected: he got up. Tall and broad-shouldered, Max Butler made a very impressive impression; his coiffure, a sharp three-inch punk irokez, increased the already considerable growth of the guy. “Weak?” Max asked calmly, pretending that he didn’t know the slang spoken by the fans of New Wave and other musical trends in Boise. “What the hell is this?” - two “cowboys” burst out with curses and drove away on a squeaky pickup truck tire, waving rubber mudguards.

When they met in high school, Max became the unofficial bodyguard of a gathering of geeks in Meridian, Idaho, a sleeping town separated from Beuys by eight miles of assorted farms. A century ago, the founding fathers of Meridian gave him this name because of its location exactly on the Beuys meridian, one of the 37 invisible and imperceptible lines that vertically intersect the map of North America. But perhaps the only oddity of this town was that its school racing team consisted of only girls.

Max's parents got married young, and they moved to Idaho from Phoenix when he was a baby. To some extent, Max combined their best qualities: Robert Butler was a Vietnam War veteran and an enthusiastic technologist who ran a computer store in Boise. Natalie Skorupsky was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants — she was a humanist and peace advocate, she loved to relax by the Weather Channel and watch nature documentaries.

Max inherited the values ​​of his mother, avoiding red meat, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, in addition to the ill-fated experiment with chewing tobacco. From his father, Max gained a deep passion for computers. He grew up surrounded by exotic machines, starting with giant business computers that could be replaced by an office desk, ending with “IBM-sized laptop computers”. Max was allowed to play with them freely. He began learning the basics of programming at the age of eight.

But Max’s mental equilibrium was upset: at the age of fourteen he survived a parents divorce. His father moved to Boyce, and Max and his mother and younger sister Liza stayed at Meridian. The divorce had a depressing effect on the adolescent, and it seemed that since then he could only switch between the two “modes of work”: relaxation and total insanity. When the mania of his personality flared up, the world became too slow to hold him. When he got his driver's license, he began driving his silver Nissan as fast as the accelerator pedal was just a toggle switch; he drove from a traffic light to a traffic light, similar in his laboratory glasses to a mad scientist conducting experiments in Newtonian physics.

As Max defended his friends, they tried to protect Max from himself. His best friend, a child prodigy named Tim Spencer, found Max’s world fascinating, but he constantly curbed the impetus of his friend. One day, he came out of his house and saw Max standing by an elaborate geometric figure, burning on a lawn. Max nadybal gas canister. “Max, this is our home!” Tim shouted. Max silently apologized to Tim while they trampled the flames.
• • •

Alyona
It was because of his impulsiveness that his friends did not tell Max about the find. Meridian geeks discovered a bunch of keys in an unlocked table against the far wall of the chemical laboratory. They waited some time, then carefully opened the box, looking around cautiously when the lab technician was not around. They pulled out the keys, carried them out of the laboratory and began to carefully check at each lock of the meridian campus. So they found out that one of the keys was the main one: he opened the front door and all the doors that followed it.

They made four copies of it, one for each: Tim, Set, Luke and John. They returned the bundle to the darkness of the chemical laboratory after carefully erasing all the prints from it. The general solution was this: Max should not learn anything. The main key to high school has become a kind of talisman, with which it was necessary to be able to handle with great care, and not with waste and stupidity. The guys vowed to save him for some epic jokes at the prom. They could, for example, sneak into the school and hack into a loudspeaker system so that music can be heard in every office. In the meantime, the key will be hidden, and the four of them will have to keep this big secret from everyone.

Sonya
Nobody liked to keep secrets from Max, but they may have noticed that he already had a flop with school administration. He openly laughed at the curriculum, and while the teachers talked about the history or the solution of any equations, Max sat scrolling through the printouts with dial-up BBS (the predecessor of the global Internet). His favorite reading was Phrack's online hacker brochure, the creation of the 80s hacker scene.

Katya
The first generation, coming of age in the age of home computers, felt all the power at their fingertips, and Phrack was the impetus for revolutionary electrical information from a distant world, beyond the quiet confines of Meridian. Typical articles included tutorials about packet-switched networks, such as Telenet and Tymnet, telephone company reference books like COSMOS, and a view from inside of large-scale operating systems that power universal computers and minicomputers in air-conditioned rooms around the world.

Phrack also diligently tracked news reports from the boundaries of the battlefield between hackers and their opponents, representing state and criminal laws, who were just beginning to cope with the problems created by entertaining crackers. In July 1989, Cornell - a graduate student named Robert T. Morris Jr. - was accused under a completely new federal law on computer crime after he downloaded the first Internet worm, a virus that infected six thousand computers, clogging up a network bandwidth to a halt. In the same year in California, young Kevin Mitnick earned his second hacker arrest and received one year in prison — a strikingly harsh sentence for that time.

ShiawasenaHoshi
Max became “Mister Max” on Beuys electronic bulletin boards and delved into phone phreaking - a hacker tradition dating back to the 70s. When he used the modem on his Commodore 64 to scan for free long-distance codes, he first encountered the federal government: a secret service agent from the local branch visited Max at a school with phreaking evidence. Since he was a minor, he avoided serious punishment. But the agent warned Max to change course until he got into real trouble.

Max promised that he learned a lesson.
Then the unthinkable happened. Max noticed a strange form on John's keychain and asked what it was. John had to admit.
That evening, Max and John entered the school and staged a pogrom. One or two of them scratched the walls with inscriptions, sprayed fire extinguishers along the corridors and robbed a closed cabinet in a chemical laboratory. Max dragged off a bunch of chemicals and threw them into the back of his cars. Early in the morning Seth's telephone rang. It was Max. He set this gift in the yard. Seth went out and found bottles of chemicals on his lawn. In a panic, he grabbed them, moved them to the backyard, where he grabbed a shovel and began to dig a hole.

Katya
His mother went out into the backyard and found Seth trying to destroy the evidence. “You understand that I must report this to the school?” She asked. Seth was taken to the director's office and interrogated, but he flatly refused to extradite Max. All the computer scientists at Meridian High School were in turn taken for interrogation by a school security officer; some of them were handcuffed. When it was John’s turn, he broke down and split. A police force was summoned to the school, who discovered the treacherous yellow spots of iodine in the backseat of Nissan, which belonged to Max.

Theft of chemicals in Meridian was punished very severely. Max was expelled from school and prosecuted as a minor. He was accused of intentionally causing damage to property and carefully planned theft without any extenuating circumstances. Then he was sent to the clinic for two weeks for a forensic psychological examination, as a result of which he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Max was sentenced - a suspended sentence. His mother sent him to Boyce to her father and identified him in Bishop Kelly, the only Catholic high school in the state. The penalty imposed on Max was very mild. But it greatly influenced the character: he became more impulsive and disobedient. Max decided that he needed a lot more master keys.