Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 14. “The Raid”

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

The book has been completely translated, now we are translating the articles of Paul Graham . Who wants to help - write in a personal magisterludi .

Chapter 14. “The Raid”

(for the translation, thanks to Find_The_Truth and Shoohurt for editing)

“Awesome telly!” Said Tim, admiring Sony's 61-inch plasma hanging on the wall. Charity, an avid reading lover, hated this new display and how he swallowed the living room space in their new home. However, Max loved his gadgets, and this one was more than just a toy. This TV was a symbol of newfound financial well-being.

Max's friends knew that he was engaged in something, and not only because he no longer had to barely make ends meet. Max began to send Tim disks with fresh exploits written on them, thus giving the system administrator an advantage in protecting the fleet. In addition, there was his strange comment at the Hungry Programmers' monthly dinner at Chin-Chin in Palo Alto. When everyone was done with the ideas of their projects, Max could only mysteriously, with a hint of envy, say: “Wow, I wish I could do something good.”

However, no one became interested in the details of Max’s lessons. They could only hope that it would be something conditionally legal. The hacker, in turn, tried hard not to burden his friends with information about his double life, even when he finally got out of their circle, but only until one of his hacks brought someone to his home.

It was 6:30 in the morning, and it was still dark outside when Chris Toshok woke up from the sound of his doorbell: someone held his finger for a long time and persistently. Deciding that this was his drunken neighbor, Chris turned over on his side and tried to fall asleep again. The bell rang again, this time intermittently, imitating the busy signal in the handset. Reluctantly, Chris crawled out from under the blanket, pulled on his shirt and pants and slid down. Opening the door, Chris immediately squinted, - someone shone a flashlight right in his face.

- Is that you Chris Toshok? - Say a female voice.
- Mneee, yes.
“Mr. Toshok, we're from the FBI.” We have a warrant to search your home.

The agent, a long-haired blonde, showed her token to Chris and shoved a thin stack of papers into his hand. Another agent, putting his firm hand on Chris's shoulder, led him out into the courtyard so that he would not interfere with the other agents from entering the house. They woke up a neighbor, Chris, and then began to search the bedroom, going through books on the shelves and crawling in the closet with linen.

The blonde, accompanied by a Secret Service agent, sat down next to Chris to explain to him why they were here. Four months ago, the source code of the still-unreleased Half-Life 2 shooter was stolen from Valve Software in Bellevue, Washington. For a while they chatted on IRC, and then appeared on file sharing sites. Half-Life 2 was, perhaps, the most anticipated game of all time, so the emergence of source codes rattled the game world in earnest. Valve made a statement that they would have to postpone the release of the game, and the head of the company called on fans of the Half-Life series to help track down the thief. Based on the sales of the first part of the game, Valve estimated the source code at $ 250,000,000.

As the agent explained, tracking some hacker activity led the FBI straight to Toshok's IP address, to his old house. Therefore, if Chris wants to mitigate his punishment, he will have to tell where he stores the source code.

Toshok declared his innocence, although he said that he was aware of the leak: his old friend, Max Vision, allegedly was next to him during this whole story, and when the source began to appear on the Internet, Chris was very excited. The mention of the name of Max forced the agents to work at double the pace: they quickly finished the search, almost stumbled against each other, and instantly went to the office to prepare a warrant to search for Max's new home. Chris grimly watched the agents pick up nine computers, some music CDs and an Xbox. The blonde agent noticed his expression and said, “Yes, it will not be easy for you.”

Upon learning of the raid, Max realized that he was short of time. He ran all over the apartment, trying to hide the equipment. He buried one hard drive in towels in a bathroom cabinet, the other in a box of cornflakes. Max hid one of the laptops under a sofa cushion, and hung the second one outside the window in a trash bag. Everything important on the computer was encrypted, so even if the agents found something, they could not prove his guilt. However, according to the rules of his liberty, he did not have the right to use encryption. Moreover, it was in principle very dangerous to allow the FBI to his computers.

Twenty federals poured into Max's apartment and crawled across it like ants. All they managed to find were some of the usual attributes of a hippie-inspired computer geek from San Francisco: Orhelle's "1984" bookshelf, Orson Scott Card's classic science fiction novel "Ender's Game" and several pieces by Azimov and Karl Sagan, a bicycle and a bunch of stuffed penguins scattered all over the place. Max loved penguins.

The agents did not discover any of the hastily built by Max caches, so that this time he did not have to explain anything. The feds left without any evidence of Max’s involvement in Valve’s leakage, nor any evidence concerning the crimes he committed with Chris. Only a pack of disks, a broken winchester and an old Windows computer left in sight for distraction.

But Charity just found out what it is to be in the world of Max Vision. Max also insisted on his innocence to steal the code. Probably it was: waiting for the release of Half-Life 2 around the leaky Swiss-like network of Valve, there were at least a few shooter lovers, and Max was just one of them. Later, the FBI took another hacker into the development: Twenty-year-old German hacker Axl “Ago” Gembe, who confirmed his participation in the hacking of the Valve network (which he himself admitted in a letter to the head of the company, Geib Newel), but denied involvement in the theft of the source code.

Gembe was notorious for creating Agobot, an advanced computer worm that knew more than it did on Windows networks. When Agobot accessed the computer, the user could only notice sudden “brakes” in the system. However, at this point, the victim's computer became part of the hacker’s personal army. The worm, according to the program, automatically entered a certain IRC chat, then announced itself and prepared to accept commands transmitted by the host right there in the chat. Thousands of computers responded to commands, forming a kind of hive botnet. With one line of code, a hacker could run keyloggers on remote computers, obtaining passwords and credit card numbers. He could turn computers into spam sources. But the worst thing was that this worm could force all infected machines to simultaneously attack any site with a stream of traffic — such a DDoS attack could keep any top-end web resource down for as long as the administrators banned each of the IP addresses.

Initially, DDoS attacks were popular among hackers as a way to kick each other out of IRC chat. Then, in February 2000, fifteen-year-old Canadian Michael “MafiaBoy” Kalsey, as an experiment, set his botnet on the most visited sites that could be found. The sites of CNN, Yahoo !, Amazon, eBay, Dell, E-Trade - they all collapsed under pressure, providing newspapers with loud headlines, and security experts at the White House - an extraordinary emergency meeting. Since then, DDoS attacks have grown into one of the most monstrous problems of the Internet.

Bots, like those of Gembe, became the main innovation of the decade in the malware world, opening up a new era when any angry student could easily choke off a part of the Internet. The German's recognition of the invasion of the Valve network gave the FBI a smart opportunity to trap one of the most sinful innovators: the feds tried to lure Gemba to America, sending him an invitation to work from Valve itself. After months of negotiations and telephone interviews with company executives, the hacker was already ready to fly to the USA, but the German police intervened in the case and arrested the hacker, denouncing him in Germany for a one-year suspended sentence.

A raid in the house shook Max, filling his head with unpleasant memories of an FBI search on suspicion of BIND attacks. Max decided that he needed a safe house in the city, where he would be able to carry out his trade and store data in a place inaccessible for searches. For example, Chris's home in Villa Siena.

Using a pseudonym, Chris rented a second apartment, for Max. It was a spacious penthouse in the Fillmore area, with a balcony and a fireplace. Max liked to work by the fireplace: he joked that in case of danger, he could always burn the evidence. Max tried to visit Charity at home every day, but a comfortable safe haven made the hacker disappear for several days in a row. He appeared only when his girlfriend distracted him from work with a phone call: “Dude, it's time to go home. I miss you".

When the joint work of Max and Chris began to bring money, mistrust began to appear. Some of the baryg in the team of Chris loved parties, and the constant presence of cocaine, ecstasy and herbs in the house acted on Chris in much the same way as the long forgotten melody that comes to mind. In February, he was detained for driving drunk. At that time, he began to disappear regularly in Las Vegas with his comely employees, where he was disappearing all weekend. During the day, they were bought in stores, and in the evening, Chris could sniff out a couple of tracks and take his girls some fun at the Hard Rock Café or grumble at a VIP table in the Ghostbar unlocked bar at the top of Palms, where he could squander bucks for lunch and more the same for a bottle of wine. Returning to Orange Cauwee, he hooked an eighteen-year-old girl, whom he met through one of his baryg.

Max was unpleasant all these hobbies of drugs and adultery. But what really pissed off Max was their financial arrangements. Chris paid Max as a god per capita: at any moment he could change the amount of payments. Max also wanted a stable 50 percent of Chris profits. He was confident that Chris was raising real money from their joint business. Chris tried to explain the situation to Max and sent him a letter describing income and expenses. According to him, out of a hundred cards it worked well, maybe about fifty, and only half of them could buy something valuable; the rest turned out to be rubbish with a limit of $ 500, which was good only for small purchases like gasoline and food. And Chris himself had expenses: the distribution of goods required flights for his team to distant cities, and air tickets were not cheaper. In addition, he paid for the rental of the premises at Villa Siena, where his bank card factory was located.

Max was unrelenting: “Call me when you're not stoned.” The last drop in Max's patience fell three months after the story of Half-Life, when Chris almost slept. He came to San Francisco to meet Max and trade cards in the Península Shopping Center. He and his team were just settling in the neighboring rooms of the luxury hotel “W” in the Soma area when Chris was called from the reception: his credit card was not accepted by the terminal. Tormented by a hangover and the flu, Chris went downstairs and took out another fake card from his plump wallet. He watched as the administrator rolled his card - again by. Chris got another one, but she was rejected. The third card worked, but it aroused suspicion and, as soon as the elevator took Chris to the twenty-seventh floor, the administrator immediately called the bank. The next people who knocked on Chris’s door were people from the San Francisco Police Department.

Putting on handcuffs on Chris, the police searched his number and car, taking his Sony laptop, MSR206 (portable magnetic card reader, interpreter note) and the car that had the VIN crashed: in Las Vegas, Chris experimented with cars rented on fake cards sending cars to mexico where they got new numbers.

Chris was sent to the county jail. His disappearance worried Max, but Chris got off easily and admitted his mistake to his partner. Fortunately for him, the police investigation was far from over. A month later, Chris was given a three year probation and was banned from visiting the W Hotel. After that, he boasted that he was, so to speak, the beneficiary of the San Francisco justice system. Approximately the same garbage happened to Chris girls regularly, so he kept the guarantor on bail [on bail] and even allowed him to spend the night in his underground card factory at Villa Siena. But Max was furious. For a man of the level of Chris, letting yourself be caught in a hotel room for carding is an unforgivable carelessness.

Max decided that he could no longer rely on his partner. He needed a plan "B".

To be continued...