Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 8. “Welcome to America”

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. "The Key"
Chapter 3. “The Hungry Programmers”
Chapter 4. "The White Hat"
Chapter 5. “Cyberwar!”
Chapter 6. "I miss crime"
Chapter 8. “Welcome to America”
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 .

The chapter describes the incredible adventures of harsh Chelyabinsk hackers in America and the first international seizure of evidence through hacking. (The person who translates Chapter 7 has a “full deadline”, so we post chapter 8.)

Chapter 8. Welcome to America

(for the translation, thanks to GrizliK (Alexander Ivanov), all matches are pure coincidence)

The two Russians felt at home in a small office in Seattle. Twenty-year-old Alexey Ivanov was typing on a computer keyboard, and his colleague, nineteen-year-old Vasily Gorshkov, stood and watched. Immediately after their arrival from Russia, they went headlong into the biggest interview of their lives - negotiations on a lucrative international partnership with the American computer security startup Invita.

Office workers flashed around them and pop music flowed from computer speakers. A few minutes later, Gorshkov moved to the computer, at the other end of the room, and Michael Patterson, the general director of Invita, began a conversation.


Patterson was the one who invited the Russians to Seattle. He told them in a letter that Invita is a young company, but it is recruiting customers through the contacts and connections of the founders they have developed while working at Microsoft and Sun. The company now needs help to expand in Eastern Europe. Ivanov, argued, like many talented twenty-year old programmers working with him, seemed like an ideal candidate for this job; Gorshkov was a man for the company, invited by Ivanov as the press secretary of their duet. At home he had a bride who was pregnant with his first child. Patterson casually began talking about a recent chain of attacks on computers of American companies, some of which paid money to the attackers, to stop them. “It's just that if you guys are as good as I think,” said Patterson, “could any of you participate in this?”

Gorshkov - dressed in a heavy jacket, which he wore at home in Chelyabinsk, a gloomy, polluted city in the Urals, thought about it, but answered. “We tried several months ago, but we decided that it was not a very profitable business.”

Russian shy. For nearly a year, small and medium-sized Internet companies throughout the United States suffered from predatory cyber attacks of a group that called itself the “Hacker Protection Expert Panel” - a name that probably sounds better in Russian. Crimes always took place in the same scenario: Malefactors from Russia or Ukraine invaded the victim’s network, stole credit card data or other valuable information, then sent a letter or fax to the company, demanding payment for silence about the intrusion and for fixing security vulnerabilities. If the company does not agree to pay, the Expert Group threatened to destroy the victim’s systems.

The gang received tens of thousands of credit card numbers from a network information bureau, the focal point for financial operations in Vernon, Connecticut. Provider Speakeasy in Seattle has been subject to attack. Sterling Microsystems in Anaheim, California, was hacked, a provider in Cincinnati, a Korean bank in Los Angeles, a financial company in New Jersey, an electronic payment company E-Money in New York, and even a venerable Western Union, which lost almost sixteen thousands of customer credit card numbers as a result of the attack, after which the extortion of $ 50,000 began. When the Universe music distributor refused to pay $ 100,000, thousands of their customers' credit card numbers were posted on a public website.

Some companies paid small sums to the "Group of Experts" while the FBI was doing everything possible to track the incursions. In the end, they found one of the leaders, they were “subbsta”, whose real name was Alexey Ivanov. It was not so difficult, the hacker was convinced that he was beyond the reach of American justice and shared his resume on Speakeasy during extortion.

Russian police ignored diplomatic requests for the arrest and interrogation of Ivanov, so the feds created Invita, a full-scale business, as a cover to trap a hacker. Now Ivanov and Gorshkov were surrounded by undercover FBI agents posing as employees of the company, along with a “white” hacker from a nearby Washington University who played the role of a computer geek named Ray. Hidden cameras and microphones recorded everything in the office, and the FBI-installed spyware recorded every click on the keyboard. In the parking lot outside, there were about twenty FBI agents ready to help with the arrest. Agent playing CEO Patterson tried to find out more from Gorshkov. “What about credit cards? Credit card numbers? Something like that? ”

“While we are here, we will never say that we had access to credit card numbers,” the hacker replied.

The FBI agent and Gorshkov simultaneously laughed. "Clear. I understood, I understood, ”answered Patterson.

When the two-hour meeting was completed, Patterson took the guys to the car, ostensibly to take them to their rented accommodation. After a short trip the car stopped. The agents opened the doors and arrested the Russians.

Returning to the office, the FBI agent realized that the keylogger installed on the Invita computers presented him with a rare opportunity. The next thing he did could make him the first FBI agent whom the Russian federal police accused of committing a computer crime. He looked into the keylogger's log and extracted data from it for accessing a computer in Chelyabinsk. Then, after coordination with the head and the federal prosecutor, he remotely connected to the Russian hacker server and began downloading directory names and looking for files related to Ivanov and Gorshkov.

When he found them, he merged 2.3 gigabytes of compressed data and burned them to disk, and only after that, a warrant was received from a federal judge to search the downloaded information. This was the first international seizure of evidence through hacking.

When the feds began to dig into the data, Ivanov’s striking scope of activity became clear. In addition to extortion, Ivanov developed a frighteningly efficient way to cash out stolen cards, using special software to open PayPal and eBay accounts and then participate in bidding on exhibited goods using one of the half a million collections of stolen credit cards. When the program won the auction, the goods went to Eastern Europe, where Ivanov's man received it. Then the program did it again and again. PayPal checked a list of stolen credit cards with a list from internal databases and found that they were absorbing a staggering $ 800,000 in fraudulent transactions.

This was the first impetus to the tectonic shift, which radically changed the Internet for the next decade. Maybe forever. With first-class technical universities, but with only a few legal directions for graduates, Russia and the former Soviet republics became incubators for a new breed of hackers.

Some, like Ivanov, made their fortunes in robbing users and companies, being protected by corrupt or lazy law enforcement agencies in their home countries with underdeveloped international cooperation. Others, like Gorshkov, were involved in crimes due to the difficult economic situation. Hacker graduated from Chelyabinsk State Technical University with a degree in mechanical engineering and plunged into the small legacy of his father, a company engaged in hosting and web design. Despite the complacent hacker manliness in Invita, Gorshkov was the latest addition to the Ivanov gang, he paid for his own way to America in the hope of improving his financial situation. In a sense, he did it, after his arrest in Seattle, he earned 11 cents working in prison in the kitchen or doing cleaning, and it was more than the social help his bride received at home.

After his arrest, Ivanov began to cooperate with the FBI, revealing a list of friends and accomplices who continued hacking from home. The bureau realized that there are dozens of money-hungry intruders and fraudsters from Eastern Europe who have already launched their tentacles into Western computers.

In the year this number will increase by several thousand. Ivanov and Gorshkov were both Magellan and Columbus: Their arrival in America instantly redrew the global cybercrime map for the FBI, unquestionably placing Eastern Europe at the center of this map.