Underground carders market. Translation of the book "KingPIN". Chapter 33. "Exit Strategy"

In chapter 33 they tied up the main character. He wanted to retire and become whitehat, but the government put pressure on the anonymous mail service, and they compromised the keys.

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 cyber-pahan, as well as some methods of the work of the special services to catch hackers and carders.
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The book quest for book translation began in the summer at ITish camp for high school students - “ Shkvoren: schoolchildren translate a book about hackers, ” then Habrayusers and even a little editorial staff joined the translation.

The second breath "quest for the translation of the book" was due to the company Edison .

Chapter 33. "Exit Strategy"

(for the translation thanks r0mk)

“These are feds,” said Max, pointing to the sedan following him down the street. Charity was skeptical of Ford. American cars were just one of many things that worried Max these days. Weeks have passed since the arrest of Chris, and reading the press reviews from Orange County, Max did not make it clear how much evidence the police found in Aragon’s house.

Using payment checks as a roadmap, the cops surrounded the entire team of cashiers; even Marcus, Chris's pocket grower, who is also an errand boy, was caught with a hydroponic farm, which he raised at his home in Archston. After two weeks of hunting, the police covered the production of Chris’s credit cards in Federico Vigo’s valley office, arrested Vigo and seized counterfeit parts. Chris was under the pledge of a million dollars.

The whole operation was disassembled in parts. They called it, perhaps, the largest ring search thieves in the history of Orange County.

“Hell, I guess what records he made about all of this,” Max wrote The3C0rrupted0ne later. “I mean, if he was casual enough to keep the equipment at home.”

Max has already destroyed his prepaid mobile and blocked his partner account in the Carders Market. These were the usual precautions, he basically did not care about arrests for the first time; after all, it was a common occurrence. Chris was caught red-handed on W, and this time left on probation.

But after a few weeks, as Chris went to jail, Max began to get worried. He noticed strange cars parked in the street — the animal control service trailer aroused suspicion; he pulled out a flashlight to look out the windows.

Then an FBI agent in San Francisco unexpectedly called him to inquire about the arachNIDS database. Max decided to make a rope ladder; and kept her at the far window of the apartment where he lived with Charity, in case he needed to leave urgently. Sometimes he stopped to think about his freedom - here he is, enjoying life, hacking, while Chris is behind bars in Orange County.

Max took a random criminal lawyer from San Francisco from the yellow pages, went into his office and handed him a bunch of cash; He wanted the lawyer to go to Southern California to check on Chris and see what he can do. The lawyer said he would get down to business, but Max never heard from him again.

It was then that Max learned about the arrest of Giannon from a news article about the life of Brett Johnson as an informant. Max lost track of Giannone and all his hacks, Max never thought about checking the names of his entourage through public databases on the federal court website. The news that Giannone lost the trial disturbed him.

“Of all the rats and informers, pieces of shit and bastards, Giannone was the closest to the surrender of me to the feds” - he confessed in a personal message to the administrators of the Carder Market forum. “The little idiot could help the feds get closer to me.”

Max was forced to leave Fox Plaza, hiding his equipment at home, while on creating a new refuge. Later, on June 7, he took the keys to Oakwood Geary, another corporate apartment in a building of shiny marble in Tenderloin. This time he was “Daniel Chance,” just another software phantom moved to the Bay Area. The real Chance was 50 years old, while Max was clean-shaven and had long hair, but fake rights and money transfer were enough to settle.

The next evening, Max rented a red Mustang at the nearby ZipCar and packed computer components into it. For all his paranoia, he did not notice the secret service agents sitting on his tail on the way to Oakwood, and watching from the street as he calls in to his new refuge.

A month has passed. Max jumped up on the bed in the middle of the night and stared into the darkness of the apartment. It was just Charity; She got into bed with him, trying not to wake him. Nervousness increased every day.

“Honey, you can’t continue to live like this anymore,” purity mumbled. “You do not realize it, but I realize it. I see it. You are mentally squeezed. You do not focus on who you are and what you do. ”
“You're right,” he said. "Everything"

Already enough time has passed since his last prison sentence. Maybe he could find an honest job again. NightFox had already offered him legitimate work in Canada, but he refused. He could not bring himself to leave Charity. He considered the possibility of marriage, beat the idea of ​​luring her to rest in Las Vegas and make an offer there. She was violently independent, but she could not complain that she lacked space.

It is time for the return of Max Vision as a white hat. Everything was official. He came to the San Francisco court and filled out the necessary documents. Already on August 14, the judge approved the legal name change from Max Butler to Max Ray Vision. He already had an idea for a new site that would bring him back to the white hat scene: a system for uncovering and managing zero-day vulnerabilities. He could fill him with information about security holes, he was involved in the underground and could transfer exploits to the world of white hat, as Charlie carried a full suitcase of state secrets.

After all this work on creating Carders Market, the best forum in the English-speaking world, he could not just abandon it.

Max returned to his shelter. It was August, the heat returned, the temperature outside was 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius) and even higher in his studio. The processor has threatened to overheat and burn. He turned to the fans, sat down at the keyboard and began to work, turning off the identity of Digits and Aphex.

He entered the Carders Market and, on behalf of Digits, left a message that he passed the devices for creating dumps to one of the administrators with the nickname Unauthorized. Then, on behalf of Aphex, he announced that he was leaving carding and selling Carding Market. He left a message hanging for a few minutes and turned off the site. When he turned it back on, Achilous, one of the administrators in Canada, was already looking. Max created a new, master record for himself “Admin” to help the new thief in the law from the Carder Market during the transition period.

He continued to work on a retirement strategy when a personal message appeared on the screen. It was Silo, the Canadian carder, who always tried to crack Max unsuccessfully. Max tracked him down and identified him as Lloyd Liska in British Columbia. He suspected that Lisk was an informant.

The message was a strange, long sentence about stupid novice mistakes. But Silo hid the second message inside, consisting of nine capital letters. They were combined in “MAX VISION.”

Just a guess, Max thought. Strength cannot know anything. It was just a guess.

...

A day after Max announced his dismissal, secret service agent Melis MacKenzie and the federal prosecutor from Pittsburgh flew to California to tie up some of the ends. The investigation was almost over. The Secret Service received a Digits contact email from the Vancouver Police Department - Handy Silo.

Max used email from a Canadian provider Hushmail, which provided a high level of security and encryption, using a Java applet that decrypted user messages directly to their PCs, instead of the company's servers.

In theory, the decryption location of messages ensures that even Hushmail cannot access the private key or the user's incoming messages. The company openly sells the service as a way around the FBI's surveillance.

But Hushmail, like e-gold, was another crime-friendly service, and was under the development of special services. The US and Canadian agencies received a special order from the Supreme Court of British Columbia, which forced Hushmail representatives to sabotage their own system and compromise the encryption keys of individual targets. Now the feds had a max email. At the same time, the agency found Tea, living in Berkley on probation. It turned out that she was caught using a gift card from Aragon at the Everville Apple Store, a month later. It was a training task for one of Chris's new recruits, but Tea had never cashed before, and when she added the Power Book to her Ipod order, she was arrested along with a new intern. In an effort to avoid big problems, she told the secret service everything she knew.

Meanwhile, the secret service began to separately physically observe Max. From Werner Janer's it was revealed to Mularski that Max's girlfriend is Charity Majors. Public records gave her address, and analysis of the bank statement showed that she had a joint account with Max. The secret service figured out the house and eventually sat on Max's tail in Oakwood Geary.

Electronic surveillance confirmed that Max was operating from Oakwood. The FBI obtained in court a secret order allowing electronic surveillance of IP connections to a false Carder Market included in hosting in the USA — a modern way of recording car numbers outside the city. Several traces returned to the clients connected in the same house and using Wi-Fi.

Two weeks before, the girl, a secret service agent, disguised as a maid, rode the elevator, along with Max and saw him open the number 409. The room number was the last piece of information that was needed.

There was one more stop before the start of the movement: Orange County District Men's Prison, a gloomy remote place on the plain, the sun-scorched center of Santa Ana, California. Mackenzie and Federal Attorney Luke Demboski visited the interrogation room to meet with Chris Aragon.

Chris was the last detainee on the Orange County team. Clara and six crew members received convictions ranging from six months to seven years in prison. Clara received two years and eight months. Chris's mom looked after two boys.

After completing the preparation, Mackenzie and Demboski got down to business. They couldn’t do anything about Chris’s case, but if he had collaborated, he would have received a letter from the US government confirming assistance to the federal prosecutor. This may affect the decision of the judge during sentencing. That was all they could do.

Mackenzie showed Chris a series of photos and asked if he would recognize anyone. Chris's situation was grim. With his bank robbery and drug smuggling, he could fall under the “Three Mistakes” law of California. This meant a mandatory period of twenty-five years. Chris chose Max's photo. Then he told the story of Max Vision's transition to the dark side.
...
On Wednesday, September 5, 2007, Max disembarked Charity to the post office with an order and sent a taxi to downtown CompUSA shop on Market Street. He chose a new fan for his processor, returned to the apartment, undressed and fell on the bed in the middle of a pile of linen. He fell into a deep sleep.

Max got involved with hacking, but had not yet finished his second life, after five years of relationships and adventures he could not give up everything overnight. He slept until about two nights they hit the door. Then the door was carried out and half a dozen agents broke into the room, waving arms and shouting orders. Max jumped up and screamed.

“Hold your hands so that I can see them!” Shouted the agent. "Lie down!" Agent stood between Max and his computer. Max often thought that in the event of an attack, he would have time to jump to the server and would have time to turn on a formidable reliable defense. Now that all this is happening, he realized that diving to the computer is not an option if he does not want to be shot.

Self-control returned to Max. Turned off or not his computer was blocked and encryption was pretty serious. He calmed down a bit, the agents asked him to get dressed and in handcuffs were taken along the corridor.

On the way, Mimi passed a team of three people, who waited while the secret service checked Max’s shelter. They were feds from the Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team, and they came in for the defense of Max.

This was the first time that CERT employees participated in a seizure, but the circumstances were special. Chris Argon deployed DriveCrypt’s full disk encryption, which Max used and neither the CERT agents nor CERT could recover anything. Full disk encryption keeps the entire disk always encrypted: all files, file names, operating system, software, directory structure - the key to what the user does. Without a decryption key, the disc can be used as a frisbee.

The full disk encryption key can be obtained while the computer is running. In this situation, the disk was still fully encrypted, but the encryption key is stored in memory so that programs can encrypt and decrypt data from the disk on the fly. A knock at the door was supposed to distract Max from his cars; if he turned them off before the secret service clicks on the handcuffs, even the CERT cannot do anything - the contents of the RAM have already evaporated. But Max was taken by surprise and the servers were still working.

CERT spent the last two weeks playing various scenarios of what they might encounter in Max's shelter. Now the commander had the following alignment: half a dozen hard drives were wired to the Max server. Two disks were de-energized by the fault of the agents who were stumbling over the cable lying on the floor, but the server was still working and it was important.

While the secret service searchlights illuminated Max’s cluttered apartment, forensic experts drove up on the machines and began their work, using software to remove memory dumps to external storage.

Further along the corridor, Max followed the feds into their apartments.

Two agents were watching him. Max will be questioned later. Now they just sat with him, chatting among themselves. A secret service agent was from a local San Francisco office; he asked his colleague from the FBI where he worked.

"I am from Pittsburgh," replied Kate Mularski. Max looked back at the Master Splyntr. Doubts about who won the war carders were not.

The secret service agent exulted after the arrest. “I dreamed of you,” said agent Melissa Mackenzie on her way to the department. And, seeing a raised eyebrow, she added: “I mean Iceman, not you personally.”

Two local agents were sent to Charity's house. They told her what happened and took to the center to say goodbye to Max. “Forgive me,” said Max, when she entered, “you were right.”

Max talked with agents from the local department, trying to figure out why he was detained and how great the trouble. Some of them were surprised by friendliness and friendliness. Max was not callous, as they expected from the thief in law, who was hunted for a year.

On the way to jail, Mackenzie finally expressed bewilderment. Looks like you're a good guy, she said, all that's happening right now is all for your own good. “But I have one question for you ... Why do you hate us?”

Max was silent. He never hated the secret service, the FBI, or even the informers from the Carder Market. Here Iceman hated. But Iceman was never real; he was a face, a personality that Max wore as a suit, on the net. Max Vision never hated anyone in life.

The Hungry Programmers were the first to hear the news of the re-arrest of Max. Tim Spencer offered to release Max on bail. Under security, he had 20 acres of land in Idaho, like his dream after retiring. When Tim heard the charges against an old friend, he hesitated. What if he didn't know Max at all?

A moment of doubt passed and he signed the petition. Max's mother offered to lay the house for the release of her son. In the end, it does not matter. When Max came to charges in San Jose, a federal judge announced that he needed to keep a hacker under protection until his arrival in Pittsburgh.

The government announced the arrest of Iceman on September 11, 2007. News reached the Carder Market and caused a flurry of activity. Achilous immediately deleted the entire database of posts and private messages, not knowing that the FBI already owned it.

“I think the SQL database was already compromised when I deleted it, but I did it anyway. I think Aphex would like that. ”He wrote. “This forum is open to messages, so that people could figure out where to go next. Just be careful, especially when opening links. Please try to keep threats to all to a minimum. ”

"Good luck, beware."

Silo switched to his pseudonym to mark the unreasonable stigma of his former rival, which was hanged on the basis of news and Max’s work on the FBI at the time when Max was white hat. “It's sad to see a good guy leave,” he wrote. “He brought a lot for this place and the scene as a creator and administrator. Many have made good money on it. ”

But “having hidden once you will always be a rat,” he wrote, without irony on his face. “The whole board came from the fact that years ago the FBI and Aphex did not agree on smashing ... As a result, it became the biggest hypocritical decoration of the scene.

Returning to her desk in Pittsburgh, Mularski wore a black Master Splyntr hat and joined the analysis of what happened. The FBI agents were completely confident that Iceman was not an informant, but his alter ego expected to take advantage of the news that Max worked with the feds.

“Oh, and how did I start?” - gloated over DarkMarket, enjoying the moment.

“We’ll see ... we’ll see ... how about the header of SFGate.com?And quotes “The ex-FBI informer in San Francisco has been charged with hacking financial institutions.

Has anyone noticed anything in this header? Oh yes, FBI informer. It will be the same as that of Gollumfun and El. No wonder why Iceman was a difficult task for them, he was like them, fighting for praise.

When Max arrived in Pittsburgh, his public defender tried again to secure his release on bail, but the judge refused, after the prosecutor claimed that Max had huge cash reserves and could easily use his contacts to hide with a new name. To prove that he was already trying to get away from the feds, they played their trump card: personal messages sent by Max to himself, describing a fake ID, describing the journey and his movement to the shelter.

Max sent messages to a secret service informant in Pittsburgh who was the administrator of the Carders market for a whole year.

Max was not at all surprised that he was Th3C0rrupted0ne.

To be continued