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 (26 page)
Andy thought Mularski’s operation was a success overall, but one tainted by the collateral damage it caused. “Whenever I met up with Keith, I asked him: ‘How much information do you need?’” Andy said. “Two years facilitating crime on a forum is too long. I cannot see what extra could be achieved by running that for two years rather than running it for six months, once you know the identities of the main players.”
That, sadly, is not the worst of it. Hacker CumbaJohnny had been helping run Shadowcrew, while his real-life alter ego, Albert Gonzalez, was helping the Secret Service track what happened there. But the same man had a third identity, “Segvec.” Federal agents knew Segvec was bad, they just didn’t know he was one of their own. In filings against e-Gold, they described customer Segvec as a known Ukrainian carder. In reality, the Secret Service later admitted, Segvec was the young Cuban American who had been aiding their Shadowcrew probe since 2003. All the while, Gonzalez and two young men in Miami had been “wardriving”—driving up and down outside major businesses seeking wireless vulnerabilities to tap into. They hacked into OfficeMax, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and Barnes & Noble.
They hit the mother lode in July 2005, when they got into the network at a Marshall’s department store and installed a “sniffer” on the computers of parent company TJX, which also owned the T.J. Maxx chain. All told, they sucked down as many as 45 million credit and debit card numbers, about twenty times what Shadowcrew members were accused of trafficking. TJX racked up more than $100 million in expenses to settle litigation and belatedly improve its security. In terms of the hundreds of breaches publicly reported since ChoicePoint, “T.J. Maxx is kind of the grand-daddy of them all,” said an executive of a top encryption firm.
The investigation began in the U.S., went overseas, and boomeranged back. From their work on Shadowcrew and CarderPlanet, federal agents knew that one of the biggest wholesalers of purloined financial data was a Ukrainian named Maksym Yastremskiy, who went by Maksik. The Orange Revolution notwithstanding, they didn’t have any more luck apprehending him than they had nabbing Golubov. But when Yastremskiy made the mistake of going on vacation to Turkey, the U.S. persuaded authorities there to make an arrest. They caught him outside a Kemer nightclub in July 2007. Yastremskiy had thoughtfully brought his laptop on the trip. It contained millions of credit card numbers, a sniffer program, and records of ICQ chats with someone calling himself Segvec. Segvec’s ICQ address was tied elsewhere to an email address, [email protected], styled after a
Seinfeld
character.
Seinfeld
character.
Their U.S. informants and other records led the Secret Service, once again, to Albert Gonzalez. He had gone by both Soupnazi and Segvec. Agents busted the former star informant at a luxury hotel in Miami, where he had $20,000 in cash and a Glock pistol. Indictments ultimately named Gonzalez, his two Miami cohorts, Yastremskiy, and an Estonian hacker who blundered by traveling to Germany. They made up five of the eleven charged for the T.J. Maxx breach. The majority of those named—two more in Ukraine, one in Belarus, and three in China—appeared in no imminent danger of arrest. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in announcing another in a series of largest-ever cyberbusts, didn’t mention that.
Now that they realized they had been duped, the feds went after Gonzalez with a vengeance. In August 2009, they would charge him with the largest identity theft of all time, one three times bigger than T.J. Maxx. No. 5 card-processing firm Heartland Payment Systems alone coughed up records from 130 million transactions, and Gonzalez was also charged with a successful attack on Citibank ATMs. But the pattern from Shadowcrew and T.J. Maxx repeated itself. The indictment named three people: Gonzalez, and “Hacker 1” and “Hacker 2,” both of Russia. A prosecution source described those two as the leaders of the ring.
The Justice Department’s Peretti said getting duped by cybercrime informants who pull off unauthorized crimes was “a professional hazard. They all think that they are smarter than law enforcement.” She compared identity thieves to junkies who are always at risk of relapsing : “Everywhere you walk in society, you have access to a computer,” Peretti said. “It is so tempting to computer criminals. They are used to spending their entire lives in front of a computer screen, and they have many identities they’ve created.”
If the informants were addicted to misusing computers, though, the FBI and Secret Service appeared addicted to using poorly controlled informants.
At least Andy didn’t have that problem. Already jailed, Maksakov did most of his online chatting while Andy watched, and he was eager to please. After he had spent a few months in a Moscow jail, Andy and Igor arranged for him to stay in the same apartment complex as the MVD’s Alexei Morning, knowing he was too frightened to run. Once, the detectives granted Maksakov a weekend away from his online duties, and the young man sadly observed that he didn’t have the train fare to see his girlfriend back home. Andy gave him the money out of his own pocket.
Even more important than his handling of Maksakov, Andy had used every trick in the book, along with several he made up on the spot, to burrow deeper into the Russian criminal justice system than perhaps any Westerner since the Cold War ended. If anyone could get to the top of criminal hacking society—or at least learn how far it was possible to get—it was Andy.
10
TRIAL
AS ANDY CROCKER AND THE MVD officers continued to track paymaster Stran, denial-of-service gang leaders Brain and Milsan, and Bra1n’s partners in St. Petersburg, they also prepared for a trial scheduled to begin in January 2006 and run most of the year. Late in 2005, Andy learned prosecutor Anton Pohamov had been assigned to the case. Igor Yakovlev checked Pohamov out and told Andy they were lucky to get him. The prosecutor had worked his way up over many years and knew the Volga River region well. In a country where the morality of those with power was always shaded in gray, Pohamov had gone after a cop involved in illegal gun sales, as well as the usual complement of drug dealers and multiple murderers. It helped that his office was one of the braver outposts. Pohamov’s boss, the chief prosecutor in the region, pursued charges against a number of high-ranking officials in the area. Pohamov was friendly, tall, and handsome, and his English was excellent. He had enough years under his belt to know the court system well, but not so many that he was no longer interested in learning new types of cases. At their first meeting, he told Andy he had asked around, and there had never been an international denial-of-service attack prosecuted in Russia. Pohamov had tried a case against minor-league hackers who had swiped some financial passwords, which was better than nothing. He said he would be happy to add a few denial-of-service and extortion convictions to his resume.
Andy and Igor spent weeks going over the file with Pohamov, taking long detours to explain the technology issues. Because they might have to spend months working through that material with the judge, they quickly decided to try all three defendants at once. That way, they would only have to roll out the conspiracy and technology backdrops a single time. Ivan Maksakov had been cooperating extensively, so they would use his testimony against the other two—Denis Stepanov, the greedy joiner, and Alexander Petrov, the menacing police chief’s son who had worked most closely with Andy’s remaining targets. Pohamov asked questions as they went, usually honing in on what evidence the trio had left in their wake. Barrett’s logged chats with Maksakov and the others helped, but Pohamov warned Andy that the contents of the conversations themselves wouldn’t be admitted in court because of the informal way Barrett had passed them on. They could only use the fact that someone with the right nickname had been online in the chat channel at the specified time and that he had connected using the IP addresses Barrett recorded.
Maksakov’s hard drive and confession, and the logs of his monitored chats with others in the ring, would be a major plus. But with an unprecedented and complicated trial, it would hurt that Petrov’s machine was gone. Petrov’s father’s remaining influence in the region was a wild card.
All in all, Pohamov said, they had a better than even chance. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “But I’m not promising you anything.” Andy pledged to stay through the whole trial, providing testimony whenever it was needed. Igor had other cases to work back in Moscow, so he would show up when he could.
Pohamov saw that Maksakov’s cooperation had been critical. Andy told the prosecutor that he had grown fond of the remorseful hacker. Andy had even spent time with his parents, a sweet woman in her sixties and her mechanic husband, a guileless soul who had volunteered to fix a local police van while he was waiting to see his son in jail. Andy asked if Pohamov would stand behind the offer they had given Maksakov and request that the judge not sentence him to additional jail time. Pohamov said he had no problem with that. If Maksakov testified to everything he and the others had done, the case would be far stronger, and Petrov and Stepanov could get as much as a decade in prison.
Because Maksakov’s server had been located in the town of Balakovo, Russian law called for the trial to be held there as well. Pohamov said he could argue that it be moved somewhere else, such as the larger city nearby where he normally worked, Saratov. Since the trial would probably last for months at least, Saratov would provide many more pleasant distractions. But the safety issues would be trickier to navigate. If some friend of Petrov’s wanted to, he could keep an eye on the courthouse door, then follow Andy back to wherever he was spending his nights. The prosecutor’s office appreciated Andy’s assistance and bravery, but it wasn’t going to spring for a rotating shift of bodyguards.
“Maybe Balakovo is a better idea,” Andy admitted. Even there, Andy and Pohamov weren’t foolish enough to risk staying in town. They picked out a convalescent home four miles away, taking care to keep the choice a secret.
THE PALE BRICK COURTHOUSE sat in the middle of the town square, an uninspiring but clean and functional building with wood furniture from the 1960s. Pohamov had worked for days on his opening statement, which laid out an overview of the case and the evidence that would be presented. Andy jotted some notes himself, because Pohamov said he might call on him to speak early on through a courtroom translator.
When the trial opened, Maksakov stunned them all. He reversed himself and pleaded not guilty, claiming that he had confessed falsely under threats of violence. Andy’s jaw dropped as he took in the betrayal. He had been at the interrogation himself, and he would never have permitted abuse. Maksakov’s family had sent a lawyer to the interviews as well, and he too had never complained. During a smoking break, Andy asked the judge, Igor Grigoriev, if the prosecution could summon that first lawyer to testify about Maksakov’s fair treatment. “If I believed his story, you could do that,” Grigoriev told him. “But I don’t, so it’s not important.”
At the next opportunity, Andy and Pohamov cornered Maksakov’s new lawyer outside of court and warned that his client would lose if he fought. They ran down some of the evidence against him and assured him that the judge wouldn’t believe the confession had been forced.
But the lawyer pointed out that Russian prosecutors had never won a conviction in a denial-of-service case, and they could claim precious few hacking convictions of any sort. Andy was disappointed. He thought the attorney really felt he could get his client acquitted despite Maksakov’s statements. But Pohamov looked hard at the lawyer and stopped arguing.
Petrov is a dangerous man,
he thought. Pohamov was convinced that Petrov had scared Maksakov into denying wrongdoing, knowing that his testimony otherwise would have ruined Petrov’s defense.
Petrov is a dangerous man,
he thought. Pohamov was convinced that Petrov had scared Maksakov into denying wrongdoing, knowing that his testimony otherwise would have ruined Petrov’s defense.
Either way, Maksakov’s about-face raised the stakes dramatically for the young hacker. Under the law, there could be no leniency in sentencing for anyone who refused a plea deal and was subsequently found guilty. With the risk of tuberculosis and other harsh conditions, ten years in a Russian prison could easily turn into a death sentence.
Pohamov’s opening statement ran for a couple of hours. Then he turned to Andy and asked him to take over. Andy felt badly unprepared, but he glanced at his notes and stood. Reliving everything from the past two years, Andy spoke for the rest of the session and all of the next day’s. The three defendants sat near the front of the section that would have been reserved for the audience, if the trial had been open to the public. On most days they were accompanied by family members or girlfriends. Maksakov followed what was happening most closely, through his hangdog eyes. Stepanov’s attention wandered more. And Petrov would glower at one witness or another, then make a show of being bored by the whole affair, as if refusing to believe the next decade of his life was at issue.
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