Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 10. "Cris Aragon"

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 ”.
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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 on Habré and get feedback from elders
• schoolchildren-students-specialists work in spike very effectively for training and shows 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 .

(Regarding the order, they ask me many questions and advise me to publish the chapters one by one. I would also like that, but alas, since I work with a lot of people who, for example, have already translated 80% of the chapter, and then they have a force majeure on 2 On the one hand, I don’t want to put pressure on them, on the other hand, postponing the publication of those people who have already translated the next chapter is not entirely fair to them. Therefore, I’m publishing it.)

Chapter 10. "Cris Aragon"

(for help with translating thanks to the Find_The_Truth habraiser )

Chris Aragon
Max met his future friend and crime partner, Chris Aragon, in small Italy, San Francisco — North Beach, where shabby strip bars and fortune-tellers coexisted with pleasant, tasteless bakeries and hot pasta drinkers. The meeting was made at a cafe near the City Lights bookshop, the cradle of the beat generation in the 50s, towards the Vesuvio cafe, whose walls were decorated with wine bottles and symbols of peace. Below the hill, above the financial district, resting against the sky, stood the Pyramid of Transamerica.

Norminton introduced Chris to Max under the muffled knocks of coffee cups and saucers. These two got along right away. Chris, forty years old, was a student at the Eastern Theological School, a vegetarian who did yoga to concentrate his mind. Max and his hippie manners seemed to find a kindred spirit. They even read general books. And, like Max, Chris repeatedly had problems with the police.

It all started in Colorado when Chris was twenty-one. He worked as a massage therapist at a resort, earning enough to pay rent and maintain cocaine addiction. One day he met a violent veteran, Albert C, whom he met in a tavern when he was serving a sentence. C was on the run and he needed money to leave the country. Chris was from a privileged family - his mother, Marlene Aragon, worked in Hollywood as a talented singer. Not so long ago, she had the joy of participating in ABC's Challenge SuperFriends children's cartoon on ABC, voicing Magic Avenging Chita. However, he also loved the romantic images of criminals - in his apartment there was a poster on the wall representing the cover of the album by Waylon Jennings Lady Loved The Runaways. Chris took Albert into the business and made glad bold, though unsuccessful, bank robberies in the resort cities of Colorado.

The first robbery at Aspen Sawings and Loan started off quite well: it was morning when Chris in a white and blue bandana, covering his braces, sent an 11mm caliber army machine gun to the bank manager to open the safe. He and Albert shoved the manager inside, where they found a cleaning lady hiding under the desk that called the police. Grief-criminals in a hurry disappeared. The second robbery, in the Pitkin District Bank, ended before it could begin. Chris's partner hid in a garbage can in the yard, planning to jump out with a gun when the first employees start coming to work. The plan was destroyed when Chris, watching from the other side of the street, saw a garbage truck driving up to the tank. The third heist was better planned. On July 22, 1981, Chris and Albert visited the Chevrolet showroom in Rifle and said they would like to try a ride on the new Chevrolet Camaro. The unlucky salesman insisted that he go with them, however, as soon as they drove out of the city, Chris stopped on the sidelines, and Albert threw the salesman out of the car, threatening with a pistol. Tying the poor man with a rope, gagging his mouth, the robbers threw him into the field, rushing off in a silver sports car.

The next day, at 4:50 in the afternoon, Chris drove stolen Camaro up to Valley Bank and Trust in Glenwood Springs, where city dwellers spent their money they earned in a thriving tourism business. Chris himself was a customer of this bank. He waited for the car to drive while Albert, wearing sunglasses and a leather briefcase, entered the bank. A few minutes later, Albert ran out with $ 10,000 and jumped into Camaro, where they rushed off.

Chris drove to the south of the city on a dirt road that winds through a rocky red hill around Glenwood Spring. Then they moved onto the path where his girlfriend waited with another car. Celebrating and rejoicing, Chris stopped with a skid and raised a column of dust. He jumped and shouted: “We did it!” When a police car driving on a cloud of dust found the robbers. Chris and Albert rushed up the rocky and overgrown mountains. When Chris stumbled and fell on a cactus, two policemen caught up and caught him. Chris threw his gun and gave up. From this story, Chris learned a lesson: the most stupid in this robbery were weapons and a stolen car. When, in 1986, Chris came out ahead of time after five years in federal prison, he became interested in frauds with credit cards and even had some success. After that, he met a bargega from Mexico, whom he met in a tavern. Chris helped him deliver two thousand pounds (907 kg) of marijuana to a twenty-acre ranch, near Riverside, California, but was immediately arrested during a covert operation of the anti-drug department. In September 1991, Chris went to jail again.

When Chris came out in 1996, he was thirty-five years old - part of his childhood and more than half of his adult life he left behind bars. He promised himself not to break the law in the future. With the help of his mother, he founded a business called Mishn Pacific Capital, which deals with computer and business equipment leasing for start-up companies that tried to be on the wave of the dot-com race.

Neatly trimmed, pleasant, with a charming look, Chris easily fit into the role of a businessman in Southern California. After a life full of problems and uncertainties, the charm of ordinary life accessible to the middle class seemed exotic. He loved to travel to conferences, meet with employees, hire new people, chat with colleagues. At one of the marketing conferences, Chris met Clara Shao Yen, a stylish woman with Chinese roots who emigrated from Brazil. Fascinated by the beauty and mind of Clara, he soon married her. Under the leadership of Chris Mission, Pacific earned a reputation as an innovative company, one of the first to offer instant contracts via the Internet, which helped the company gain tens of thousands of customers across the country. A bank robber and drug dealer in the past, Chris had two prominent Orange County business associates and twenty-one employees who worked in a spacious office near Pacific Coast Highway. Clara periodically “glowed” in advertising magazines and on the company's website in order to help the company with promotion. By the 2000s, the couple was noted on all fronts - they bought a luxurious house in Newport Beach, gave birth to a son and made a bet on improving the business to a huge scale.

This spring the dream has died. The bubble of Internet companies burst and the flow of new companies, which was the basis of Mishn Pacifik, began to dry up. And after that, large companies, like American Express, entered the leasing sphere, displacing small firms. Chris's company was one of dozens of leasing firms destined to collapse and burn out. He began to cut staff, but this was not enough, and he had to admit to the rest that the company could no longer pay for their work. Chris went to work at another leasing company, where he was soon reduced when a wave of layoffs rolled in connection with the sale of the company to a large bank. Meanwhile, his wife gave birth to a second boy. Therefore, when Jeff Norminton appeared to discuss the superhacker, whom he met in Taft, Chris was ready for the meeting.

By the time he and Max met at North Beach Restaurant, Chris had already sponsored the Norminton scheme, providing the specific equipment that Norminton said the hacker needed. Now that Chris met Max in person, he was impatient to see him at work. After several hours of talking, the three men left the cafe to find a place from where to break. They climbed to the twenty-seventh floor of the Holiday Inn in Chinatown, a few blocks from the hotel. They asked Max to pick a room up the road. Max aimed at the window, turned on the laptop, plugged in the antenna, and began scanning the Wi-Fi network.

In 2003, the world was just starting a big journey into the wireless world, bringing with it a big security hole. The revolution began with Apple's AirPort wireless access point, later iron producers Linksys and Netgear joined it. As the price of iron fell, more and more companies and ordinary users were getting rid of a web of blue Ethernet cables. However, the creation and integration of companies across the country into a wireless network was a hackers dream. In most cases, these networks used the 802.11b wireless standard, which included an encryption scheme that, theoretically, was protected from hacking, wiretapping, and connecting to someone else's network. In 2011, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley highlighted a number of serious flaws in this scheme, which made it possible to crack it with available hardware and the necessary software. From a practical point of view, it was not necessary to resort to any technical black magic. To speed up the transition to new equipment, access point manufacturers have disabled encryption by default. Companies simply used the equipment from the factory, not tinkering with the settings, naively assuming that the walls of the office will save their network from breaking into the street.

A few months before Max went to prison, the whitehat-hacker came up with a sport called wardriving to show the scale of the holey networks of San Francisco. After installing the antenna on the roof of his Saturn, the whitehat-hacker rode through the streets of the city while his laptop scanned Wi-Fi access points. After an hour in the financial district of the city, its installation found about eighty networks. A year and a half has passed since then, and San Francisco, like any other big city, is mired in an invisible network of Internet traffic available to anyone who wants to dive into it.

Breaking out of the house - for idiots and teenagers, - Max found it out the hard way. Thanks to Wi-Fi, now it could work from almost anywhere, while remaining anonymous. This time, if the police get on Max's trail, then all they get is one of the poor providers that Max used to connect.

The antenna Max used was enormous — a two-foot-wide parabolic wire mesh that instantly tracked dozens of networks from the air surrounding the Holiday Inn. He chose one of the networks and showed Chris how it works. Using a vulnerability scanner - the same software that he used penetration tests - he could scan large fragments of Internet addresses in search of known vulnerabilities, as if throwing a net into the sea of ​​the Internet. Holes were safe everywhere. For Max, it was not a problem to penetrate the networks of a financial institution or a trading corporation. It was in Norminton and Chris to decide what data they needed and how they wanted to use it. Chris was exhausted. This hacker, six and a half feet tall, a semi-vegetarian, knew his business, even if he was rotten to the bone.

Chris introduced Max to one of his prison acquaintances, real estate fraudster Werner Caneru, whom Chris met at Terminal Island in 9292. Janer offered Max $ 5,000 if he hacked into a personal enemy’s computer. He wrote a check for Charity, so Max did not have to explain this income to his supervising officer. The money received gave Max a short respite. He began flying to Orange County, making a mistake in the name on the ticket, so that the officers would have no evidence that Chris violated the Bay Erie boundaries, which were allowed to him under surveillance. Max and Norminton hacked for a week, sowing in Chris's garage.

He downloaded a list of small financial companies from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation website, suggesting that they were most vulnerable to attack, and launched a script to scan each bank for known security holes. The electronic bell rang throughout the garage, announcing the completion of the scan. The worm scanned all the banks and pulled out customer names, financial data and check numbers of checks. The generalized approach meant that Max was again disappointed, as was the case during the last legal penetration test. Hacking a single target can be difficult, depending on the target, it may even be impossible. But scanning hundreds and thousands of systems ensures that something weak can be found. It was a game of numbers, like trying to open the door of a car accidentally left open in a huge parking lot.

Only Charity had a complete picture of what Max was doing, and she didn’t like it. Trying to get her whereabouts, Chris and Norminton invited a young couple to Orange County for the weekend, preparing to go to Disneyland. Charity saw that Max and Chris get along, but something was bothering her. He was too slippery and corny. Max switched to small e-commerce sites, where he collected transaction history, which sometimes included credit card numbers. However, this hacking was not directed, neither Chris nor Norminton knew exactly what they would do with the data. Fortunately, Chris had money. Werner Janer owed him $ 50,000 and was ready to transfer money to any account convenient to Chris. Expecting to get his hands on legitimate, cold, tangible cash, Chris asked Norminton what he would do, to which Norminton supported the opinion that it was better to make a transfer to someone of friends, and then, within a few days, cash it .

The first part of the transfer went as expected, and Norminton and his friend came with Chris and received $ 30,000 in $ 100 bills. The next day, however, did not work out, - Norminton said that his friend fell ill and he needed to rest in bed for a day.
To tell the truth, Norminton found out the source of the money - it was a piece of Chris in the Caner affair, where he helped with real estate frauds. It was dirty money, and now Norminton was in that scheme. The next morning, Chris found a Honda, which he borrowed to Norminton, parked not far from his office - one wheel was broken and a fresh dent was visible on the wing. Inside, there was a note from Norminton: “The FBI is chasing me. I'm out of town. ” Chris called Norminton's friend, guessing what they would say to him: “We feel fine, and we have already withdrawn the remaining $ 20,000. I gave them to Norminton. Didn't you get them? ”Chris sought out Max through Charity and brought down a barrage of questions on him: what did Max know about Norminton's whereabouts? Where is his money? Max was surprised no less than Chris by the disappearance of Norminton. After discussing the details, they further decided to act without Norminton.

Max and Chris are mired in a routine. Once a month, Chris flew in or came north and met Max in San Francisco, where they sat in a hotel. They brought a huge Max antenna up the steps to their room and mounted on a tripod, directing it out the window. Max then tweaked, looking for an access point with strong reception and high speed. They noticed that when hacking Wi-Fi, the height was not so important as the view from the window. If something was wrong with them, Chris could always ask for another room, explaining that he could not catch the signal of the cellular network or the fear of heights.

For Max, it was work, saying goodbye to Charity, he disappeared for a week in one of the best hotels in the city, in the Hilton, in Westin, W, or Hyatte. Under the clang of trams that drove through the streets, Max scanned the network, grabbing any information that he came across, not knowing exactly what to do with it. It occurred to him to hack the computer Kimi and her boyfriend, with whom she left. Max planned to crack her address book to send a letter on her behalf, in which he tells how she betrayed him. He thought everyone should know that Kimi’s new life is based on betrayal.

He did not do that. He had a charity. Kimi moved, so nothing changed if you tried to shame her. Soon after, Chris signed the divorce papers. Returning to work, he began a search on Google to decide on further actions on hacking - “What do other scammers do?”, “How can you use stolen data?” He was surprised when he found the answers to his questions on two sites: CarderPlanet and ShadowCrew.

To be continued