Fatal System Error (27 page)
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
The courtroom procedure baffled Andy. The two sides didn’t take turns presenting their case, as they would in Britain or America. Instead, witnesses from one side prompted the other to call counter-witnesses on the spot. Anyone could ask questions at any time.
After a full day in court, Andy and Pohamov would drive off together, and they quickly developed a routine. When their translator was with them and had his gun, they would chance a local restaurant as a group. Otherwise, they would head out of town, and because their car usually was the only one on the road, they could make sure they weren’t followed. They had no stove where they were staying. So they bought cold food in the supermarket, then returned to the convalescent home. They would eat, drink vodka, and plan the next day’s testimony until midnight. Weekends presented the comparative luxury of a road trip to Saratov. The journey was just eighty miles each way, but it took two and a half hours to negotiate the potholes. The summer rains that filled the cracks and holes in the highway froze in winter and expanded, making the gaps even bigger.
The case broke so much new ground that the defense lawyers had a field day challenging different types of evidence. Once Andy used a PowerPoint slide show to illustrate that while the extortion emails went out from different names and used a variety of phrasing, each message had something in common with at least one other email. Most logically, they had come from the same gang. The only problem: no one had ever presented a PowerPoint in a Russian court. Arguments and appeals over the admissibility of the slides ate up a week of the trial.
Maksakov’s lawyer began presenting his evidence a month into the proceedings. He admitted that Maksakov had viruses for assembling bot networks on his computer, but argued that the youth was only studying them. Records from Stepanov’s computer likewise damaged the St. Petersburg man’s defense, which was that he had done bad things, but not DDoS attacks.
Petrov didn’t have that problem, since his father had illegally disposed of his machine. Petrov testified that he didn’t even own a computer at the crucial time and never went online. But Pohamov figured that records from Petrov’s Internet service provider could get the job done. Normally, that sort of request for evidence might have involved the Astrakhan police department, led until recently by Petrov’s father. “If that happens, the papers will disappear,” Pohamov told Andy. “But don’t worry, I have a friend.” He routed the request through a man he knew in the prosecutor’s office in Astrakhan. Sure enough, the records came back, and the evidence showed that someone on Petrov’s account was online during all of the attacks and chats, with the times corresponding to the minute. Petrov was left claiming that a friend had been using a laptop from his house on each of those occasions.
Nevertheless, during a smoking break in the judge’s chambers, Petrov’s lawyer told the judge stiffly that Petrov’s father “would not allow” a guilty verdict. Andy stared at the man, who had otherwise seemed a reasonable sort. From the way the lawyer averted his eyes, Andy guessed that he had been ordered by the police chief to say what he did. He never said anything of the kind again.
Andy had developed a good rapport with the judge and others who were in the courtroom every day, including the defense lawyers. But Petrov was another matter. Once, while Andy was speaking with Pohamov, he heard a faint clicking sound. Andy wheeled around and thought he saw Petrov sliding a cell phone into his pocket. Andy bolted upright and waved for the judge’s attention. Any picture of him circulating on the Internet or in the Russian underground would mean he might not see England again. The judge, who had banned cameras from the trial at the outset, immediately ordered the defendants’ phones turned over. When they complied, Andy saw that Petrov had indeed managed to get a pretty fair shot of him. The hair stood up on his neck.
Pohamov and Andy thought they had a good chance of winning from the start. But Judge Grigoriev was no pushover. When it came time that summer to present the expert analysis of the programs found inside Maksakov’s and Stepanov’s machines, Grigoriev asked good, reasonable questions. So many of them, in fact, that the prosecution team realized that the analysis it had commissioned was hopelessly weak. They pleaded for the weekend to get a new study done. Friday afternoon, they raced from the courthouse to Saratov and an MVD training site. A small crew there taught computer forensics, and Pohamov begged for help. The two instructors available were glad to be useful. As the Russian lawyer and the British detective returned with more and more food and cold drinks to keep them going without air conditioning, the teachers teased apart more than a hundred programs and wrote up their functioning in plain language.
They worked all Saturday, all Sunday, and all Sunday night until Pohamov and Andy had to leave early Monday morning. Later that day, nearly dead on his feet in court, Pohamov went through the new analysis with the judge. He turned back and saw the defeated looks on the three defendants. Now he was sure the case was his, barring some sort of back-channel deal.
IN LATE SUMMER, three weeks before the end of the ten-month trial, Igor told Andy that Timur Arutchev, the main part of Stran, had returned from abroad to his hometown of Pyatigorsk. Andy was exuberant. He immediately asked Pohamov if he could add Arutchev to the case. Pohamov asked Grigoriev, who answered that it was up to them. If they did so, though, they would have to start the trial all over—and they might have to move it to Pyatigorsk. There was no way it was worth it, all agreed, not after they’d come this far.
Arutchev’s return also triggered an intense and hurried conversation between the attorneys for Maksakov and Petrov. If they could bring Arutchev to testify, they figured, he would certainly deny knowing either of their clients, throwing serious doubt on the case. The defense lawyers asked Grigoriev if they could summon Arutchev, and the judge agreed. Andy fumed again. Not only was the moneyman behind the trio confident enough that he could return to Russia unmolested, he had a good chance of blowing up the case against them.
There was one complication. If Arutchev did try to come, he probably wouldn’t make it, because he was still officially a wanted man in Russia, and he would have to go through numerous checkpoints. When the defense lawyers made that point, Grigoriev declared that he would grant the paymaster safe passage. Pohamov tried to cheer Andy up, pointing out that they would at least get Arutchev testifying on the record. While it’s expected that defendants will lie in Russian courts to protect themselves, witnesses who lie face severe penalties.
Grigoriev issued the guarantee of safe passage and ordered Arutchev to appear. He and his brother Yan arrived together. They were clean-cut, sporting fancy T-shirts and smart trousers, looking like many others who were well off in southern Russia. When the judge wouldn’t notice, they glared at Pohamov and Andy. Timur Arutchev testified that he didn’t know the defendants and never used the nickname Stran. He admitted that he had received $1.2 million from the Latvians. But Arutchev said the money was from American friends investing with him in a new business venture. When the police came after him, he said, he couldn’t get the business going. Now they were poor. “If we were criminals,” Arutchev said, “we would drive big cars.”
At this, the judge smiled. He had guaranteed safe passage to Balakovo, but he had also made sure that the brothers’ car would be stopped at least once before the witnesses arrived at court, and he had arranged for a full report of the traffic stop. So he knew that they had been driving a $150,000 BMW, even though they had been careful to park it far from the courthouse. He also noted that while he had promised that they wouldn’t be arrested on the way to testify, he had never pledged that they wouldn’t get picked up on the way home.
“You are not serious people,” Grigoriev told the Arutchev brothers. “You are liars. I know you have a great deal of money. You are dressed in designer clothes, and you drive to court in a car that you could not afford if you were honest men.” The judge had told Igor to be ready, and MVD officers surrounded the courthouse. They arrested Timur Arutchev as he left and jailed him overnight. A different judge heard his case in the morning. He allowed Arutchev to post bail and return to Pyatigorsk but ordered him to report to the local police daily and stay in Russia.
Andy asked Igor whether he thought they would ever get a conviction and real jail time for Arutchev. Igor shrugged. “It depends on how much he pays,” he said. But it was definitely not a good sign that he had come home. No way would he have returned without assuring himself that he would be protected.
While Grigoriev worked on his verdict, a friend of his got in touch and asked if he would be willing to accept a bribe of about $1 million to find Petrov not guilty. The judge reported it to Andy and the prosecutor, who wanted to outfit the judge with a hidden microphone and record a follow-up to the bribe attempt. But it was the weekend, and they couldn’t get the equipment together in time. Instead, the judge handled it solo. Grigoriev agreed to a meeting, then bluffed by informing the tempters that the FSB was recording everything. They drove away in a hurry. Not long after, the judge reported that his life had been threatened.
In early October 2006, after more than a week working on his decision, Grigoriev rendered a 120-page verdict. As all in the courtroom stood, he read from the ruling for five hours. Near the end, police entered the courthouse. Grigoriev found that all three men were guilty of the key charges, having orchestrated DDoS attacks with as many as 600,000 simultaneous Web connections to Canbet, Blue Square, and many others. “Having analyzed all the obtained and investigated evidence, the court reaches the decision that the guilt of Maksakov, Petrov and Stepanov, in extorting money by threatening to destroy and damage one’s property committed by the organized group, is confirmed.”
With regard to Timur Arutchev’s version of events, Grigoriev wrote that he “did not accept it as evidence for this criminal case.”The judge said he was not in a position to rule whether Arutchev was guilty of the investigators’ accusation “of extorting money from foreign companies by using harmful computer programs.” But he suggested that Arutchev was already on the hook for perjury: “For giving false evidence to the court as a witness, Arutchev can be considered to be criminally responsible.” Grigoriev sentenced the original trio to eight years in prison with hard labor.
Pohamov was named trial prosecutor of the year for his region. He told Andy he wanted him as the godfather for his first child, who was due early the next year. With the MVD happy to brag about a rare jail term for computer crimes, the verdict featured prominently on Russian television news and in the papers.
Andy’s boss had come for the ruling, and they went out to a restaurant to celebrate. The next day, Andy went to his room and did something he’d been looking forward to for a long time. During all his years on the case, he had never spoken to Barrett Lyon, in part because his cell phones didn’t work in Balakovo and in part because of the eleven-hour time difference. There had been just a few direct emails; otherwise he had fed his questions to his colleagues in London, who typically relayed them via email to Barrett. But Andy had kept Barrett’s phone number handy, and at last he dug it out.
Barrett was at home in Pacifica, groggily getting ready for a day at BitGravity. Besides worrying about his start-up, Barrett was in the middle of his traumatic final departure from Prolexic. Congress had passed the bill banning online gambling the previous week, and he would resign from the company’s board within the month. He hadn’t gotten an update from the British in ages, and Ivan Maksakov was far from his mind.
“Hello, is that Barrett?” Andy began. “This is Detective Constable Andy Crocker. I thought you might like to know that a Russian court yesterday convicted Ivan Maksakov, Denis Stepanov, and Alexander Petrov, sentencing each of them to eight years in prison. And I wanted to thank you for all your help.”
“Holy shit,” Barrett said, and sat down. He had a million questions. Why had the trial taken so long? Had Andy been there the whole time? Who else had been involved? What was it like?
Andy loosened up, telling Barrett whatever he wanted to know and explaining how they had gotten the rest of the evidence they needed. They were still going after Brain, he said, and he would like to come to California to interview Barrett properly. “Absolutely,” Barrett said. Barrett certainly hoped they got whoever had been in charge. He felt a pang of remorse that Maksakov had drawn such a long sentence after cooperating.
Barrett hadn’t worked at Prolexic for the past half year. He had never even met some of the company’s newer employees. But he sent out a message to the entire company anyway with the news. “Hi Prolexic, A lot of you have no idea who I am, I am the founder of Prolexic,” he wrote. “We worked harder than I could imagine to get the company on its feet. We also spent a large effort tracking down some of these idiot DDoS people, and our efforts finally resulted in the imprisonment of three people....
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