DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia

DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia

In this fascinating and compelling book—a must-read for anyone who owns a computer—Misha Glenny exposes our governments’ multi-billion-dollar war against an ever-morphing, super smart new breed of criminal: the hacker.   The benefits of living in a digital, globalized society are enormous; so too are the dangers. We bank online, shop online, date, learn, work, and live online, but have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us from the deadly “new mafia” of cybercriminals? To answer this question, Glenny offers a vivid examination of the rise of the criminal hacking website DarkMarket and its ultimate fall. Along the way, he presents alarming and illuminating stories about both the shadowy individuals behind its scenes and the organizations tasked with bringing them to justice. “[An] engaging tale of cops and robbers in cyberspace.” — San Francisco Chronicle    “An eminently readable, witty narrative that sustains suspense until the very last pages.” — The Wall Street Journal   “Misha Glenny tells us that cyber crime is right here and has been for years—hiding in plain sight. . . . Required reading.” — The New Yorker   “A truly remarkable story. . . . Magnificent.” — Financial Times “This extraordinarily powerful book demonstrates how utterly we lack the shared supranational tools needed to fight cybercrime.” —Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah Misha Glenny is a former BBC Central Europe correspondent. Glenny covered the fall of Communism and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He is the author of McMafia ; The Rebirth of History; The Fall of Yugoslavia (which won the Overseas Press Club Award in 1993 for Best Book on Foreign Affairs); and The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 . He has been regularly consulted by U.S. and European governments on major policy issues. Misha Glenny lives in London. 1 AN INSPECTOR CALLS Yorkshire, England, March 2008 The Reverend Andrew Arun John was in a minor state of shock one morning in early March 2008. Hard to blame him. Not only had he just survived the long journey from Delhi in cattle class, but it was two weeks before the opening of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, and the world’s busiest international airport was exploring new standards in passenger misery. His fl ight had left India around three o’clock in the morning and, after negotiating passport control and the baggage mayhem, he still had to face a four-hour drive north to Yorkshire. Switching on his mobile phone, Reverend John saw he had an inordinate number of missed calls from his wife. And before he’d had time to call back to ask her what the fuss was about, she was ringing again. She told him that the police had telephoned several times and were desperate to get in touch with him. Taken aback and confused, the Reverend replied sharply to his wife, saying that she was talking nonsense – though he regretted his tone almost immediately. His wife, happily, chose to ignore his grumpiness. Clearly and calmly, she explained that the police had wanted to alert him to the fact that somebody had broken into his bank account, that this was a matter of urgency and that he should ring the number she had for the offi cer in charge as soon as possible. His wife’s call unsettled the Reverend still further and his weary brain went into overdrive. ‘Who has broken into my account?’ he wondered. ‘What account? My Barclays here?’ he speculated. ‘My Standard Bank account in South Africa? Or my ICICI one in India? Or maybe all three?’ Even more puzzling: what did she actually mean? ‘ How have they broken into my account?’ Coming so soon after his exhausting flight, the whole affair made the Reverend anxious and edgy. ‘I’ll deal with this later when I get to Bradford and after I’ve rested,’ he muttered to himself. Bradford is 200 miles north of Heathrow Airport. Sixty miles due east of the city lies Scunthorpe, where Detective Sergeant Chris Dawson’s small team was nervously awaiting the Reverend John’s phone call. The officer began to feel he was sinking in the quicksand of a case that he suspected was very big, and which presented him with one seemingly insuperable problem – he couldn’t get his head round it. The evidence gathered so far included hundreds of thousands of computer files, some of which were large enough to hold the complete works of Shakespeare 350 times over. Inside these documents lay a planetary library of numbers and messages in a language that was effectively indecipherable to all but a tiny elite around the world who are trained in the arcane terminology of cybercrime. DS Dawson may have known nothing about that novel and particularly rarefied branch of criminal investigation, but he was a first-class homicide officer with many years of service behind him. He could detect among the endless lists and number strings an agglomeration of sensitive data, which should not be in the possession of a single individual. Yet as police offi cers in