Hire the hackers Misha Glenny

now this is a very unlike thing to do

but let’s kick off the afternoon with a

message from a mystery sponsor dear fox

news it has come to our unfortunate

attention that both the name and nature

of anonymous has been ravished anonymous

ladies and gentlemen a sophisticated

group of politically motivated hackers

who have emerged in 2011 and they’re

pretty scary you never know when they’re

going to attack next who or what the

consequences will be but interestingly

they have a sense of humor these guys

hacked into Fox News’s Twitter account

to announce President Obama’s

assassination now you can imagine the

panic that would have generated in the

news room at Fox what do we do now put

on a black armband or crack open the

champagne and of course

who could who could escape the irony of

a member of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp

being a victim of hacking for a change

sometimes sometimes you know you turn on

the news and you say is there anyone

left to hack Sony PlayStation Network

done the government of Turkey tick

Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency

a breeze the CIA falling off a log in

fact a friend of mine from the security

industry told me the other day that

there are two types of companies in the

world those that know they’ve been

hacked and those that don’t I mean three

companies providing cybersecurity

services to the FBI have been hacked

I mean it is nothing sacred anymore for

heaven’s sake anyway

this mysterious group Anonymous and they

would say this themselves they are

providing a service by demonstrating how

useless companies are at protecting our

data but there is also a very serious

aspect to anonymous they are

ideologically driven they claim that

they are battling a dastardly conspiracy

they say that governments are trying to

take over the Internet and control it

and that they anonymous are the

authentic voice of resistance be it

against middle-eastern dictatorships

against global media corporations or

against intelligence agencies or whoever

it is and their politics are not

entirely unattractive okay they’re a

little inchoate and there’s a there’s a

strong whiff of sort of half-baked

anarchism about them but one thing is

true we are at the beginning of a mighty

struggle for control of the internet the

web links everything and very soon it

will mediate most human activity because

the Internet has fashioned a new and

complicated environment for an old age

dilemma that pits the demands of

purity with the desire for freedom now

this is a very complicated struggle and

unfortunately for mortals like you and

me we probably can’t understand it very

well nonetheless in an unexpected attack

of hubris a couple of years ago I

decided I would try and do that and I

sought I sort of get it

these were the various things that I was

looking at as I was trying to understand

it but in order to try and explain the

whole thing I would need another 18

minutes or so to do it so you’re just

gonna have to take it on trust for me on

this occasion and let me assure you that

all of these issues are involved in

cyber security and control of the

Internet one way or the other but in a

configuration that even Stephen Hawkins

would probably have difficulty trying to

get trying to get his head around so

there you are and as you see in the

middle there is our old friend the

hacker the hacker is absolutely central

to many of the political social and

economic issues affecting the net and so

I thought to myself well these are the

guys who I want to talk to and what do

you know nobody else does talk to the

hackers they’re completely anonymous as

it were so despite the fact that we are

beginning to pour billions hundreds of

billions of dollars into cybersecurity

for the most extraordinary technical

solutions no one wants to talk to these

guys the hackers who are doing

everything instead we prefer these

really dazzling technological solutions

which cost a huge amount of money

so nothing is going into into the

hackers well I say nothing but actually

there is one teeny-weeny little research

unit in turin italy called the hackers

profiling project and they are doing

some fantastic research into the

to ristic sin to the abilities and the

socialization of hackers but because

there are UN operation maybe that’s why

governments and corporations and that

interested in them and because it’s a UN

operation of course

it lacks funding but I think they’re

doing very important work because where

we have a surfeit of technology in the

cybersecurity industry we have a

definite lack of call me old-fashioned

human intelligence now so far I’ve

mentioned the hackers anonymous who are

a politically motivated hacking group of

course the criminal justice system

treats them as common or garden

criminals but interestingly anonymous

does not make use of its hacked

information for financial gain but what

about the real cyber criminals well real

organized crime on the internet goes

back about ten years when a group of

gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a

website which led to the

industrialization of cybercrime welcome

to the now forgotten realm of karma

planet this is how they were advertising

themselves a decade ago on the net now

kada planet was very interesting cyber

criminals would go there to buy and sell

stolen credit card details to exchange

information about new malware that was

was out there and remember this is a

time when we’re seeing for the first

time so-called off-the-shelf malware

this is sort of ready for use out of the

box stuff which you can deploy even if

you’re not a terribly sophisticated

hacker and so kartaa planet became a

sort of super market for cyber criminals

and its creators were incredibly smart

and entrepreneurial because they were

faced with one enormous challenges

cyber criminals and that challenge is

how do you do business how do you trust

somebody on the web who you want to do

business with when you know that they

are

I mean it’s axiomatic that they’re dodgy

and they’re going to want to try and rip

you off so the family as the inner core

of Carter planet was known came up with

this brilliant idea called the escrow

system they appointed an officer who

would mediate between the vendor and the

purchase of the vendor say of stolen

credit card details but Chester wanted

to get hold of them the purchaser would

send the administrative officer some

dollars digitally and the vendor would

sell the stolen credit card details and

the officer would then verify if the

credit card the stolen credit cards

worked and if they did he then passed on

the money to the vendor and the stolen

credit card details to the purchaser and

it was this which completely

revolutionized cybercrime on the web and

after that it just went wild we had a

champagne decade for people we known we

know as Carter’s now I spoke to one of

these Carter’s who will call red brigade

although that was not even his proper

nickname but I promised I wouldn’t

reveal who he was and he explained to me

how in 2003 and 2004 he would go on

sprees in New York

taking out $10,000 from an ATM here

30,000 from an ATM there using cloned

credit cards he was making on average a

week 150,000 dollars tax-free of course

and he said that he had so much money

stashed in his upper US East Side

apartment at one point that he just

didn’t know what to do with it and

actually fell into a depression but

that’s a slightly different story which

I won’t go into now now the interesting

thing about repre Gaede is is that he

wasn’t an advanced hacker he sort of

understood the technology and he

realized that security was very

important if you were going to be a cada

but he didn’t spend his days and nights

bent over a computer eating pizza

drinking coke and that sort of thing he

was out there on the town having a fab

time in enjoying the high life and this

is because hackers are only one element

in a cyber criminal enterprise and often

they’re the most vulnerable element of

all and I want to explain this to you by

introducing you to six characters who I

met while I was doing this research

dmitri golubov AKA script born in odessa

ukraine in 1982 now he developed his

social and moral compass and the Black

Sea port during the 1990s this was a

sink or swim environment where

involvement in criminal or corrupt

activities was entirely necessary if you

wanted to survive as an accomplished

computer user what Dmitri did was to

transfer the gangster capitalism of his

hometown on to the World Wide Web and he

did a great job in it you have to

understand over that from his ninth

birthday the only environment that he

knew was gangsterism he knew no other

way of making a living and making money

then we have Renault can’t subramanian

aka jillsy founder of dark market born

in colombo sri lanka as an 8 year old he

and his parents fled the sri lankan

capital because single e’s mobs were

roaming the city looking for Tamils like

Renu to murder at 11 he was interrogated

by the Sri Lankan military accused of

being a terrorist and his parents sent

him on his own to Britain as a refugee

seeking political asylum at 13 with only

little English and being bullied at

school he escaped into a world of

computers where he showed great

technical ability but he was soon being

seduced by people on the internet he was

convicted of mortgage and credit card

fraud and he will be released from

Wormwood Scrubs jail in London in 2012

from matrix zero zero 1 matrix null null

ants who was an administrator of dark

market born in southern Germany to a

state

and well-respected middle-class family

his obsession with gaming as a teenager

led him to hacking and he was soon

controlling huge servers around the

world where he stored his games that he

had cracked and pirated his slider into

criminality was incremental and when he

finally woke up to his situation and

understood the implications

he was already in too deep Mac’s vision

aka iseman mastermind of Cardoz market

born in Meridian Idaho Mack’s vision was

one of the best penetration testers

working out of Santa Clara California in

the late 90s for private companies and

voluntarily for the FBI now in the late

1990s he discovered a vulnerability on

all US government networks and he went

in and patched it up because this

included nuclear research facilities

sparing the American government a huge

security embarrassment but also because

he was an inveterate hacker he left a

tiny digital hot wormhole through which

he alone could crawl but this was

spotted by an eagle-eye investigator and

he was convicted at his open prison he

came under the influence of financial

fraud stirs and those financial

fraudsters persuaded him to work for

them on his release and this man with a

planetary size brain is now serving a

13-year sentence in California Adewale

tiwa aka Freddy BB master bank account

cracker from Abuja in Nigeria he set up

his prosaically entitled news group of

Bank frauds at Yahoo Co UK

before arriving in Britain in 2005 to

take a masters in chemical engineering

at Manchester University he impressed in

the private sector developing chemical

applications for the oil industry while

simultaneously running a worldwide bank

and credit card fraud operation that was

worth millions until his arrest in 2008

and then finally chart eye area pan aka

Chow one of the most remarkable hackers

ever from Ankara in Turkey he combines

the tremendous skills of a geek with the

suave social engineering skills of the

master criminal one of the smartest

people I’ve ever met he also had the

most effective virtual private network

security arrangement that police have

ever encountered amongst global cyber

criminals now the important thing about

all of these people is they share

certain characteristics despite the fact

that they come from very different

environments they are all people who

learnt their hacking skills in their

early to mid teens they are all people

who demonstrate advanced ability in

maths and the sciences remember when

they develop those hacking skills their

moral compass had not yet developed and

most of them with the exception of

script and chaough well they did not

demonstrate any real social skills in

the outside world only on the web and

the other thing is is the high incidence

of hackers like these who have

characteristics which are consistent

with Asperger’s syndrome

now I discussed this with Professor

Simon baron-cohen who’s the professor of

developmental psychopathology at

Cambridge and he has done path-breaking

work on autism and confirmed also for

the authorities here that gary mckinnon

who was who is wanted by the United

States for hacking into the to the

Pentagon suffers from acts per

Asperger’s and the secondary condition

of depression and Baron Cohen explained

that

certain disabilities can manifest

themselves in the hacking and computing

world as tremendous skills and that we

should not be throwing in jail

people who have such disabilities and

skills because they have lost their way

socially or been duped now I think we’re

missing a trick here because I don’t

think people like max vision should be

in jail and let me be blunt about this

in China in Russia and in loads of other

countries that are developing cyber

offensive capabilities this is exactly

what they are doing they are recruiting

hackers both before and after they

become involved in criminal and

industrial espionage activities and

mobilizing them on behalf of the state

we need to engage and find ways of

offering guidance to these young people

because they are a remarkable breed and

if we rely as we do at the moment solely

on the criminal justice system and the

threat of punitive sentences we will be

nurturing a monster we cannot tame thank

you very much for listening

so so your idea we’re spreading is hire

hackers how how would someone get over

that the kind of fear that the hacker

they hire might preserve that at all

teensy wormhole I think to an extent you

have to understand that it’s axiomatic

among hackers that they do that they are

you know they’re just relentless and

obsessive about what they do but all of

the people who I have spoken to who

fallen foul of the law they have all

said please please give us a chance to

work in the legitimate industry we just

never knew how to get there what we were

doing we want to work with you okay well

that makes sense

thanks a lot me sir