【正文】 d—human intelligence. Now, so far I’ve mentioned the hackers Anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group. Of course, the criminal justice system treats them as mon old garden criminals. But interestingly, Anonymous does not make use of its hacked information for financial gain. But what about the real cybercriminals? Well, real organized crime on the Internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a website, which led to the industrialization of cybercrime. Wele to the now forgotten realm of CarderPlanet. This is how they were advertising themselves a decade ago on the Net. Now CarderPlanet was very interesting. Cybercriminals would go there to buy and sell stolen credit card details, to exchange information about new malware that was out there. And remember, this is a time when we’re seeing for the first time socalled offtheshelf malware. This is sort of ready for use, outofthebox stuff, which you can deploy even if you’re not a terribly sophisticated hacker. And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals. And its creators were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial, because they were faced with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals. And that challenge is: How do you do business, how do you trust somebody on the Web who you want to do business with when you know that they’re a criminal? (Laughter) I mean it’s axiomatic that they’re dodgy, and they’re going to want to try and rip you off. So the family, as the inner core of CarderPlanet was known, came up with this brilliant idea called the escrow system. They appointed an officer who would mediate between the vendor and the purchaser. The vendor, say, had stolen credit card details。 the purchaser wanted to get hold of them. The purchaser would send the administrative officer some dollars digitally, and the vendor would sell the stolen credit card details. And the officer would then verify if the credit card, the stolen credit cards worked. And if they did, he then passed on the money to the vendor and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser. And it was this which pletely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web. And after that, it just went wild. We had a champagne decade for people we know as Carders. Now I spoke to one of these Carders who we’ll call RedBrigade—although that wasn’t even his proper nickname—but I promised I wouldn’t reveal who he was. And he explained to me how in 2003 and 2004 he would go on sprees in New York, taking out $10,000 from an ATM here, $30,000 from an ATM there, using cloned credit cards. He was making, on average a week, $150,000—tax free of course. And he said that he had so much money stashed in his upperEast side apartment at one point that he just didn’t know what to do with it and actually fell into a depression. But that’s a slightly different story, which I won’t go into now. Now the interesting thing about RedBrigade is that he wasn’t an advanced hacker. He sort of understood the technology, and he realized that security was very important if you were going to be a Carder, but he didn’t spend his days and nights bent over a puter, eating pizza, drinking coke and that sort of thing. He was out there on the town having a fab time enjoying the high life. And this is because hackers are only one element in a cybercriminal enterprise. And often they’re the most vulnerable element of all. And I want to explain this to you by introducing you to six characters who I met while I was doing this research. Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT—born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982. Now he developed his social and moral pass on the Black Sea port during the 1990s. This was a sinkorswim environment where involvement in criminal or corrupt activities was entirely necessary if you wanted to survive. As an acplished puter user, what Dimitry did was to transfer the gangster capitalism of his hometown onto the World Wide Web. And he did a great job in it. You have to understand though that from his ninth birthday, the only environment that he knew was gangsterism. He knew no other way of making a living and making money. Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi—founder of DarkMarket, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As an eightyearold, he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city, looking for Tamils like Renu to murder. At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military。 accused of being a terrorist, and his parents sent him on his own to Britain as a refugee seeking political asylum. At 13, with only little English and being bullied at school, he escaped into a world of puters where he showed great technical ability, but he was soon being seduced by people on the Internet. He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud, and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs Jail in London in 2012. Matrix001, Matrix Lunar Anx, who was an administrator at DarkMarket. Born in Southern Germany to a stable and wellrespected middle class family, his obsession with gaming as a teenager led him to hacking. And he was soon controlling huge servers around the world where he stored his games that he had cracked and pirated. His slide into criminality was incremental. And when he finally woke up to his situation and understood the implications, he was already in too deep. Max Vision, aka ICEMAN—mastermind of CardersMarket. Born in Meridian, Idaho. Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of Santa Clara, California in the late 90s for private panies and voluntarily for the FBI. Now in the late 1990s, he discovered a vulnerability on all . government networks, and he went in and patched it up—because this included nuclear research facilities—sparing the American government a huge security embarrassment. But also, because he was an inveterate hacker, he left a tiny digital wormhole through which he alone could crawl. But this was spotted by an eagleeye investigator, and he was co