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 (19 page)
After a flurry of paperwork, Andy began shuttling back and forth to Moscow, staying two or three weeks at a time. For his first trip, in November 2003, Mike Ford wangled an introduction to Department R, the Moscow police division charged with technology cases. Dept. R belonged to the sprawling Russian Ministry of the Interior, known by the acronym MVD, which operated like the FBI but also ran the police departments in every city. Dept. R had received the letter of request asking for help in intercepting Webmoney transfers to the man known as Stran and in identifying him. And the officers there had indeed been investigating the matter in the intervening three weeks. But they saw no reason to share what they had found.
It was a slap after the enthusiastic cooperation in Latvia, a bad sign about how any joint operations were going to be conducted. Andy was left to drink vodka with the police colonel in charge of Dept. R, while the colonel’s men did the work. At the end of the day, the colonel would tell Andy what he felt like telling him, which wasn’t much. It didn’t help that the bitter Moscow winter was different from anything Andy had encountered in the army, even when he taught skiing to servicemen. Once Andy thought he saw a billowing cloud of smoke emerge from the entrance to the Pushkin Square subway station. He couldn’t understand why people were still walking in. As Andy drew closer, he finally realized that the cloud was water vapor condensing as the trapped human moisture inside hit the freezing external air. It was as if the entire subway system could see its breath. The same way a Texas television reporter might try to fry an egg on the sidewalk during a heat wave, a Moscow station’s reporter emptied a bucket of water off a roof, then showed it turning to ice and shattering as it hit the ground.
The Cold War hadn’t thawed much either. Everywhere Andy went, he saw men from the all-powerful Federal Security Service, or FSB, the spy agency that inherited most of the old KGB’s duties in 1995 and had gone on to assume the same dominant role in society once played by the Communist Party. The men didn’t bother much with subtlety. After a week’s trip to England, Andy returned through the Moscow airport and got a border agent who didn’t know he was supposed to make a phone call and then ask Andy some time-consuming questions. As the U.K. detective drove off, traffic police promptly pulled his car over until an FSB sedan could catch up and start following him. Staying at the Golden Ring hotel, across from the towering, Stalin-era building housing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andy saw that FSB agents were constantly tailing him. He and a colleague teased them one day, waiting until the last second before darting across a busy boulevard to the Golden Ring as the crossing signal changed. When they got to the opposing sidewalk, they turned around and smiled. One agent had sprinted after them as cars honked: he angrily lowered his head and went past them. Another hung back and tried to conceal himself behind a lamppost. Andy and his colleague walked to their hotel elevator and were still laughing when the desk clerk ran to intercept them, demanding they show identification. That gave the FSB time to get inside. By way of apology, Andy sent the agents beers in the lobby restaurant that night, but the spies grumpily sent them back.
Barrett had identified one of the servers directing the attacks on BetCRIS as having the domain name
fbi.pp.ru
, and he saw that the same server was going after the London betting firms. The Dept. R detectives now managed to trace that server to an Internet hosting service in Houston that was known for providing computing facilities to scam artists and other Internet undesirables. Andy asked Houston FBI man Todd Burns to go to the provider, Everyone’s Internet, and get the server taken offline. Andy was inexperienced enough to think that would end the attacks.
fbi.pp.ru
, and he saw that the same server was going after the London betting firms. The Dept. R detectives now managed to trace that server to an Internet hosting service in Houston that was known for providing computing facilities to scam artists and other Internet undesirables. Andy asked Houston FBI man Todd Burns to go to the provider, Everyone’s Internet, and get the server taken offline. Andy was inexperienced enough to think that would end the attacks.
After a wave of denial-of-service assaults on Christmas Eve 2003, Andy flew to Houston in January to get his hands on the server. The head of the Everyone’s Internet office provided records showing that the server had been rented by a man in England who paid with a Visa credit card. That transaction would turn out to be like virtually every other technology deal in the multiyear case: the man’s credit card information had been stolen, and he had never heard of Everyone’s Internet. Andy found the contents of the confiscated Houston hard drive much more useful. The first pass at the hard drive came up empty. Back in England, though, a deeper forensic probe discovered a connection to the box from a site based in the Russian town of Balakovo, a server called
balakovo.pp.ru
.
balakovo.pp.ru
.
Though the FBI’s Burns had been happy to help, just as Sacramento agent Matthew Perry had been willing to listen to Barrett, the FBI as a whole still didn’t seem especially concerned that American computers had fallen under the control of a Russian gang and that American hosting and connectivity providers were effectively acting as accomplices. The FBI had agreed to broker U.K. dealings with Barrett, but there was no sign they had done any further digging on their own. The combination of unsympathetic and offshore victims, sheer complexity, and probably unarrestable perpetrators was too much for an agency obsessed with Islamic terrorists.
What happened next in Moscow made Andy want to give up on the Americans altogether. As he wheedled information out of Dept. R operatives, an officer of the FSB summoned them to the intimidating FSB headquarters building for a briefing. Once they assembled, the FSB agent gave them a surprising nugget. Some of the money sent to Stran had ended up in the hands of terrorists in Chechnya.
Located just below Russia’s volatile south, the predominantly Muslim nation had a special hold on the Russian psyche, like Vietnam and Iraq rolled into one for Americans. Russia had fought two wars there, and the real power in that country remained in the hands of gangsters. Chechens had conducted vicious attacks on Russian soil, and they had been blamed for apartment bombings around Moscow that killed hundreds, though in all likelihood those were orchestrated by the FSB.
The FBI needs to know the Chechnya connection,
Andy thought. He called the U.S. Embassy and told the officials there that he needed to pass along sensitive information about an ongoing international criminal probe that led to terrorists in Chechnya, some of whom had allied with anti-American jihadists. An FBI agent grudgingly agreed to a meeting in the sprawling, high-security Embassy complex, which had been built during the Cold War to include housing, food, and shopping in case bilateral relations deteriorated. But the FBI agent insisted on hearing Andy talk in the Embassy canteen, within earshot of many Russians, and he didn’t bother to bring along a pen. After Andy finished whispering what he knew and what he theorized, the FBI agent borrowed Andy’s pen, jotted a few notes on a napkin, and promised to relay the information upstairs. Walking out, Andy cursed and vowed never to work with the FBI again.
Andy thought. He called the U.S. Embassy and told the officials there that he needed to pass along sensitive information about an ongoing international criminal probe that led to terrorists in Chechnya, some of whom had allied with anti-American jihadists. An FBI agent grudgingly agreed to a meeting in the sprawling, high-security Embassy complex, which had been built during the Cold War to include housing, food, and shopping in case bilateral relations deteriorated. But the FBI agent insisted on hearing Andy talk in the Embassy canteen, within earshot of many Russians, and he didn’t bother to bring along a pen. After Andy finished whispering what he knew and what he theorized, the FBI agent borrowed Andy’s pen, jotted a few notes on a napkin, and promised to relay the information upstairs. Walking out, Andy cursed and vowed never to work with the FBI again.
ANDY WAS SOON SIX MONTHS into the extortion case. His superiors at the NHTCU were willing to bankroll the effort because they believed that if arrests were made in Russia, it would send a stunning message that no one was safe after attacking British e-commerce. That did not mean, though, that they were delighted to waste their money and Andy’s time. Even Andy’s patience was wearing out. With help from Barrett, Dept. R had figured out that eXe was operating the server in Balakovo, well south of Moscow. The Russians knew the server’s numeric Internet Protocol address, which matched the one Barrett had found and the one on the Houston machine. Now Andy needed to go get the machine.
But every time he pressed for action, the Russians asked him to fill out another form. He completed so many he lost count. None of them made sense to him, and he couldn’t grasp the real reason for the stall either. Until he figured it out, at least he could keep typing and showing them that he wasn’t going away. In the afternoons, he walked the streets to Red Square and back, stewing in his own juices and wondering how anyone could live in such a country.
Mick Deats, the No. 2 at NHTCU and Andy’s boss, arranged to come to Moscow for two weeks of meetings with the brass at Dept. R in a bid to get things moving. Andy brought Deats in from the airport and got him settled in the hotel. The next morning, before the first of their meetings, the British Embassy called to tell them that Dept. R had canceled.
Enraged and making the best use of Deats’s greater rank, the two men protested so loudly that they got some additional information that would have been far more useful months earlier: Dept. R had no jurisdiction outside of Moscow. It might have wanted to expand its mission, but for now doing anything in Balakovo or wherever else the trail led required cooperation from another arm of the MVD, Dept. K. “At least you’re still in town,” Andy told Deats. “Let’s see how far we can get with Dept. K.” When Andy reached a Dept. K official, he explained the case and told him that they needed to get to Balakovo and that Deats wanted to meet with the top officers in K. The meetings were duly scheduled—and then duly canceled, one after another, for the rest of Deats’s time in the country.
On the eve of his departure, a fuming Deats met with the British ambassador to Russia to complain. As it happened, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was scheduled to come soon for talks with the Russian minister of foreign affairs, Sergey Lavrov. The ambassador listened sympathetically. He said he would do what he could, and he began plotting with Deats to get the Russian ministry involved. He even pledged to get Andy’s plea into the tightly choreographed chat between the two dignataries as they walked between Moscow buildings.
Andy soon got an invitation to meet General Boris Miroshnikov of the MVD, a former FSB official who oversaw Dept. K and much of the rest of the sprawling organization. This time there was no vodka. Instead there were flags from each country in the middle of the table, as if a small piece of the United Nations had come loose and lodged itself in the Russian administration. Miroshnikov was a bright and powerful man, one of a network of FSB alumni who held key posts elsewhere in government and atop many of the telecommunication companies, which the FSB had free rein to tap. Slim and dressed in a suit, Miroshnikov struck Andy as fundamentally serious but half-amused by the situation at hand. “Obviously, you’re not going to go away,” the general said. “Everything we’ve asked, you’ve done. Please go back to the U.K. and return in two weeks. You will have an office, and you will work with this man, Igor Yakovlev.” Igor, a broad-shouldered colonel in the MVD’s elite, forty-man Investigative Committee, was now in charge of the case, Miroshnikov said. Not even Dept. K, it emerged, could decide to open a formal case. Only the MVD’s Investigative Committee could, though it could ask Dept. K for help.
Andy did as he was told. When he came back to Russia, Igor Yakovlev welcomed him politely into his small office. Igor smiled easily but was built like a bear, with a short shock of dark brown hair and a belly that suggested a preference for drink. He sat back down behind a creaky wooden desk that looked like it had been inherited from a high school. None of the rest of the furniture matched, and the small refrigerator in the corner could have been decades old. Igor told Andy that he had gotten up to speed on the case, but he offered few details at first. Instead, Igor introduced Andy to his staff. Five of the men shared a larger office with only three dirty desks among them.
Andy decided to apply what he had learned about Russian customs during his otherwise unproductive time at Dept. R. Drinking prodigious amounts of vodka on the flimsiest of excuses was important, Andy had gathered. That was partially because Russians were the per-capita drinking champions of the world. But there was a sober point to the practice as well. In darker days, when the country was full of government informers, Russians said the best way to tell who was planning to betray the confidences of a group was to look for the man who wasn’t drinking.
So Andy took Igor to lunch, informed him that the Queen would be picking up the check, and suggested a little vodka with their meal. A bottle and a half later, they went back to work. The next day was Igor’s birthday, and his family came to visit the office. Two more bottles of vodka disappeared before 4 P.M. The next morning, Andy apologized to Igor for passing out, only to learn that Igor’s wife, Sonia, had subsequently passed out on Andy’s shoulder. “It’s very good you feel you can drink with us,” Igor reassured him. “I trust you.”
That trust would prove the key to the case. Igor was a competent and ambitious officer who had volunteered for the DDoS case despite having never worked a technology crime. He learned quickly. The two men discovered that they had been in the military at the same time: Andy as an instructor in the U.K. forces and Igor as a political officer in an engineering unit of the Russian army. Back then, in Soviet times, being in the Russian army meant you had enough food and money when others had little of either.
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