Read Fatal System Error Online
Authors: Joseph Menn
Tags: #Business & Economics, #General, #Computers, #Security, #Viruses & Malware, #Online Safety & Privacy, #Law, #Computer & Internet, #Social Science, #Criminology
Fatal System Error (11 page)
Every time Mickey came through town, he would meet with Howie, an older man with a walrus mustache who held the cash. Often, the group would head to Café Martorano in Fort Lauderdale, a “South Philly Italian” restaurant with a pronounced mobster shtick. On the walls hung pictures of the chef with stars from
The Sopranos
and plasma televisions running old mob movies. Martorano himself professed admiration for connected men, including his uncle Ray “Long John” Martorano, who was shot to death on a Philadelphia street in 2002. “My uncle was a man’s man,” Martorano told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in 2007. “He did 20-something years and kept his mouth shut. You tell me somebody who’ll do that today.”
The Sopranos
and plasma televisions running old mob movies. Martorano himself professed admiration for connected men, including his uncle Ray “Long John” Martorano, who was shot to death on a Philadelphia street in 2002. “My uncle was a man’s man,” Martorano told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in 2007. “He did 20-something years and kept his mouth shut. You tell me somebody who’ll do that today.”
Ron Sacco might have been the sort of man Martorano admired, but Barrett didn’t feel the same way. In another restaurant once with Barrett and Joe Daly, Sacco had tried to compliment their light-skinned Latina waitress by telling her he preferred his coffee “sweet and not too dark, like my women.” Barrett had wanted to crawl under the table. Barrett dined again with Sacco in Las Vegas during an industry conference. Sacco’s wife came too, and she complained that she had only $200,000 to decorate their new home. Barrett couldn’t help wondering how big a house he could buy with just her beautification budget.
He told Rachelle she had been right all along. These were not the good guys. As she slept in one weekend morning, Barrett spread rose petals through the condo, lit candles, and poured champagne. He woke her and proposed marriage again. This time she said yes with enthusiasm.
AS HE CONTINUED TO UPDATE others in the security community with his research, Barrett’s profile grew. In March 2005 he was invited to speak about botnets at what would become the first of an annual series of gatherings called the Peering Forum. Conveniently held at a hotel in Miami, the invitation-only convention drew the people in charge of operating the biggest pipes in the Internet infrastructure. Nobody outside of their insular world knew their names. But their deals to exchange traffic with one another, known as peering arrangements, were what kept the bits going to the right places. If one provider sent about as much traffic to another as the other way around, they typically struck a deal without money changing hands. If one sent a lot more than it received, it usually had to pay for the freight.
In ordinary circumstances, the peering chiefs were predominantly libertarian and firm believers in network neutrality, the doctrine that all Internet traffic should be treated the same. But the authorities were doing close to nothing to stop criminals who were abusing their access to the Net, and the group didn’t want to be facilitating mass fraud or worse. In the real world, the peering bosses had more power over the Internet than the government. If they acted together, they had the best chance of cutting off the providers who served the worst cybercriminals.
Barrett’s talk, “In the Trenches of Cyberwarfare,” included the Maksakov story and updates from the denial-of-service struggle. He impressed the crowd, and a number of listeners came up afterward to introduce themselves, including Jay Adelson, the founder and chief technology officer at giant hosting and connection provider Equinix. He was also approached by Paul Betancourt, who said he was from the Miami office of the FBI and would love to chat more. Barrett hadn’t grown much more impressed with the FBI since his days in California, but at least this agent cared enough about Internet crime to come to a conference for hard-core technologists. Betancourt dressed in slacks and an untucked shirt with a collar, dark sunglasses perched on his hair.
Straight out of Miami Vice,
Barrett thought. Betancourt offered to take Barrett shooting at the FBI range, and Barrett accepted, giving him some advice on a few technology cases in return. Betancourt got in touch with Barrett’s old FBI handler in Sacramento, Matthew Perry, and told Perry that he would be in charge of the informant from now on. Betancourt bumped Barrett up in the hierarchy of those who helped the agency, telling him that he was now part of a council of elders who could advise the FBI on a wide range of topics, not just cases he was personally involved with.
Straight out of Miami Vice,
Barrett thought. Betancourt offered to take Barrett shooting at the FBI range, and Barrett accepted, giving him some advice on a few technology cases in return. Betancourt got in touch with Barrett’s old FBI handler in Sacramento, Matthew Perry, and told Perry that he would be in charge of the informant from now on. Betancourt bumped Barrett up in the hierarchy of those who helped the agency, telling him that he was now part of a council of elders who could advise the FBI on a wide range of topics, not just cases he was personally involved with.
Barrett knew that Darren was no fan of the FBI. He had faulted Barrett for working so closely with the feds on the Russian case, even though the agency had mainly passed Barrett’s information on to the British. But Barrett felt that was Darren’s problem. He told his CEO that the new FBI man would be stopping by the office for some further education. Darren cursed, then spent a long time getting rid of anything in the suite that described Prolexic’s clients. Barrett blanched.
Within a few months, Darren’s concerns made a lot more sense. Over Barrett’s objection, Prolexic had been protecting some gaming companies by hosting their traffic on machines in the U.S. With gambling on sports banned in most of the U.S., that sure felt like it made Prolexic an accessory to criminal activity. And Sacco wasn’t the only customer with an alarming reputation. In early 2005, Prolexic was hit with a subpoena by prosecutors in New York who wanted information on another rough bookmaker, Casablanca, best known for its Wager-Web site. An executive there emailed Prolexic and said that the subpoena followed the arrest of one of the gambling firms’ U.S. agents. “We have had a problem with the New York police,” the man wrote. He asked Prolexic what it had given the cops. And to make sure the “problem” didn’t continue, he suggested ending the current contract with Prolexic in order to “create a new one under a different company name.”
Meanwhile Brian’s Digital Solutions, a major Prolexic client from the young company’s beginning, was in bed with all manner of questionable offshore firms. Worse still, Darren had Digital Gaming Solutions paperwork spread around his office, had demonstration software loaded on his computer there, and was selling the programs right out of the U.S. office. To Barrett, the Digital Gaming business was a cancer. He repeatedly asked Darren to keep it away from Prolexic, getting only vague promises in response. “You need to get the DGS stuff in the office OUT, I am sick of this crap,” Barrett exploded in a final email to his boss. “Please make sure you only use your Prolexic laptop and clear out any DGS stuff on it.”
In the end, what pushed Barrett over the edge was simply bad management. He had developed a new method for assessing the risks to clients from a denial-of-service attack. Barrett sold it to the Royal Bank of Scotland for $100,000, then told his bosses he needed to take some vacation. Rachelle’s grandmother was dying, and the couple flew together back home to Lake Tahoe. Instead of letting lower-level staff help the bank with the installation, Darren told Barrett he needed to see the job through. Since business hours in the United Kingdom were 1 A.M. to 9 A.M. California time and Barrett didn’t want to disturb Rachelle’s family, he checked into a hotel to work through each night. When the trip was over, no one thanked Barrett for his trouble.
“No more,” Barrett swore. He demanded that the company hire a service team. He wrote a letter detailing his ideas for the company and sent it directly to Brian and Mickey. The letter called for a return to California, where there were better job candidates and a potential customer base of technology companies that would give Prolexic a boost in credibility. Barrett also criticized strategic decisions by Darren and Laslop.
Brian and Mickey secretly forwarded Barrett’s letter to Darren. But Barrett had invoked what he felt was his prerogative as chief technology officer and begun monitoring the other executives’ email. Darren critiqued Barrett’s letter for Brian and Mickey in writing, and much of what he said was predictable. Then Barrett saw Darren’s main argument for keeping the company in Florida: that location, he wrote, would “keep Barrett in check.”
BARRETT BEGAN THINKING HARD about the ramifications if he simply quit—and about the ramifications if he didn’t. If he quit, the company he had started would go on, but might be outgunned by criminals who had reinvested in research and adopted newer techniques. More innocent companies would be slammed with DDoS attacks. And he would be abandoning his friends, including Glenn Lebumfacil and Dayton Turner, whose wives worked in Costa Rica and couldn’t move to the U.S.
If he stayed, he would be working to enrich crooks, perhaps helping them to launder money, and he might be criminally liable himself for that and for helping the gambling-firm customers in the U.S. Barrett no longer saw the bargain he had made with the devil, working for crooks against a bigger enemy, as worth the moral price.
In March 2006, Barrett offered to buy Prolexic for $5 million, part of it in cash and the rest to come from a slice of future earnings. His co-owners said no, perhaps because they wanted to keep using Prolexic for their own purposes. Then Barrett resigned as an officer and employee and suggested he sell back his 20 percent stake for the bargain price of $200,000. But Darren, Brian, and Mickey refused to buy him out. Barrett remained invested and on the company’s board, still potentially liable for all that was going on.
To contemplate his next step, Barrett took his long-delayed vacation, flying with Rachelle to Hawaii. Visiting his high school friend Peter Avalos, now in the Navy and stationed on Oahu, Barrett wrestled with what to do. He talked for hours with his friend and his fiancée about how to extract himself. He could do something new. But that would leave Ron Sacco and Mickey in charge of an illegal gambling empire, one that probably broke kneecaps or worse. Even if all Sacco was doing was paying tribute to the mob, that money was still going to fund murders. And evidence that could help the government take down Sacco was on his company’s computers. He didn’t walk away from chasing the Russians, even though he hadn’t been hired for that. So why should he walk away now? Barrett not only wanted out; he felt an obligation to help law enforcement pursue his investors. It might not be as satisfying as seeing Maksakov in handcuffs. But it was the only right thing left.
Barrett decided to expose the criminals around him. On his last day in Hawaii, he assembled his courage. Waiting in the airport for their flight home, Barrett called Paul Betancourt at the FBI. “Paul,” he said. “I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to tell you.” Barrett laid out much of what he knew about Mickey and Sacco, the parking-lot cash transfers, and the gambling transactions that were running through Prolexic’s machines. “That’s
really
interesting,” Betancourt said. But he hadn’t been working gambling cases, and he didn’t seem focused on what Barrett was saying. Barrett guessed that the FBI already had a lot of this information and that Betancourt wasn’t allowed to tell him so.
really
interesting,” Betancourt said. But he hadn’t been working gambling cases, and he didn’t seem focused on what Barrett was saying. Barrett guessed that the FBI already had a lot of this information and that Betancourt wasn’t allowed to tell him so.
In his high-rise condo in Florida, Barrett had been sketching out ideas for a new business he could start after making a break from Prolexic. A noncompete agreement in his employment contract meant that he couldn’t do denial-of-service jobs. But Prolexic had succeeded largely because it had both enormous amounts of bandwidth and clever techniques that Barrett and his crew used to maximize the efficiency of that bandwidth.
Barrett thought about what else would benefit from the fattest pipes and smart engineering and was also in a market destined to grow. Once he pondered it that way, the answer was obvious: Internet video. As an added bonus, that would keep him well clear of the bad guys. “It’s nice when people aren’t trying to destroy your network,” he told a friend. “And working in security makes you paranoid.” Barrett called around to his contacts until he had a pretty good idea how sites handled the demand for connectivity from millions of people watching their videos. It seemed awfully basic. So he started working out how it might be done for less money.
When Barrett knew he had something good, he got in touch with a venture capitalist who had come to check out Prolexic, Perry Wu. After a series of conversations, they co-founded a company called BitGravity. Instead of relying on investors that Barrett now knew they would have to research before trusting, Barrett and Wu decided to bootstrap the business by themselves. Barrett contacted some of the major Prolexic suppliers and told them that he had a new idea. If they could lend BitGravity some gear, it would pay them when it could. If the company got as big as Barrett thought, it would become a big customer. Normally that kind of pitch would get an entrepreneur nowhere. But the people Barrett called knew what he could do, because they’d seen it before. Barrett started off with $250,000 worth of equipment, for which he paid nothing upfront. Barrett and Rachelle moved back to Northern California. They settled in the Bay Area town of Pacifica, picking a condo with a view of the best surf break within half an hour of San Francisco.
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