Now Reading | 'DarkMarket'

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http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/now-reading-darkmarket/?=

By STEPHEN HEYMAN
The New York Times Style Magazine
December 2, 2011

If style, per Gore Vidal, is about not giving a damn, then one might say 
cybercriminals have lots of style. “DarkMarket” (Knopf, $27), the new 
book by the T contributor Misha Glenny, disturbingly catalogs the 
capabilities of these nefarious Internet trolls — imagine, as Glenny 
does, that they could not only clog your in-box and steal your financial 
identity but attack your government, cripple your power grid or disable 
your national banking system. Still, the most common illicit activity on 
the Interwebs — pornography aside — seems to be some form of personal 
credit card fraud. In fact, Glenny’s title, “DarkMarket,” comes from the 
name of a Web site where thousands of hackers coordinated the cloning 
and selling of credit card numbers and pins, often culled from illegally 
placed “skimmers” in A.T.M.’s and card machines. The site was 
infiltrated by an F.B.I. agent and taken down in 2008, resulting in many 
arrests.

Glenny tells the story not just of DarkMarket’s undoing but of its 
genesis, its pathbreaking precursors and its intriguing bedfellows 
(among them, the purveyors of other dark digital arts, like cyberwarfare 
and cyberespionage). Commingling politics, economics and culture, his 
book goes from cruddy Internet cafes in London to sleek restaurants in 
Istanbul, from the high-tech corporate campuses around Pittsburgh to the 
garishly luxe Odessa Hotel on the Black Sea.

In some ways, the cyberthieves Glenny finds at the ends of the earth 
conform to your image of sniveling, amoral nerds. Ninety-six percent of 
them are male. “Your average cybercriminal has the manners of a 
chimpanzee and the tongue of a Sicilian fishwife,” Glenny writes. One 
notorious Polish spammer took on the nom de guerre Master Splyntr, a 
“typically adolescent reference to the rat who trained the Teenage 
Mutant Ninja Turtles.” Since the hackers can literally make money out of 
thin air, many of them become spendthrifts. Glenny tells of a gaggle of 
Swedish cybercriminals who set upon Monte Carlo with a dozen cloned 
American Express Centurion cards, collectively withdrawing $400,000 in a 
single weekend. “Nobody challenged us once,” says one of the Swedes. 
“You got the feeling that people did this sort of thing all the time.”

RedBrigade, the handle of a hacker who split his time between a tony 
Upper East Side apartment and hotels like the Four Seasons, tells Glenny 
that in a period of about two weeks he took his cloned bank cards to 
several branches of Washington Mutual and withdrew over $300,000 in 
cash. “Just as well,” Glenny writes, “because his average weekly 
outgoings were in the region of $70,000. First-class travel was 
axiomatic. He thought as much about purchasing a $10,000 Breitling watch 
as we might before buying a newspaper.” Many of these hackers view their 
crimes as victimless — individual cardholders are often not liable if 
their accounts are compromised — but Glenny justly notes that “such 
sentimental, populist twaddle conveniently overlooks how banks pass on 
the costs of fraud to their customers,” often in the form of more and 
higher fees.

[...]

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