Fatal System Error (6 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 ULTIMATE “GOTCHA” CAME shortly after the L.A. meeting, when eXe was chatting on another IRC network that Barrett monitored. Barrett looked up eXe’s profile information on that network and saw a private email address for the hacker. That address ended with “security-system. cc.” Hoping to get lucky, Barrett checked the registration records for the domain “
www.security-system.cc
.” It listed a Russian company Barrett had never heard of as the site’s owner. Then lightning struck: the records also listed the full name and address of a contact person at the company—a contact person named Ivan. Barrett couldn’t believe it. His enemy had bought a vanity website and used his real identity. It was like robbing a bank and going out and buying a sports car the next day. It would have made sense only if Ivan had intended to start a legitimate business with the new site.
www.security-system.cc
.” It listed a Russian company Barrett had never heard of as the site’s owner. Then lightning struck: the records also listed the full name and address of a contact person at the company—a contact person named Ivan. Barrett couldn’t believe it. His enemy had bought a vanity website and used his real identity. It was like robbing a bank and going out and buying a sports car the next day. It would have made sense only if Ivan had intended to start a legitimate business with the new site.
“eXe made a HUGE mistake!” Barrett informed the Hi-Tech unit and the FBI in an email March 13. He pasted in the goods from the Web address tied to the private email account.
Registrant:
Fizitheskoe lico
Maksakov Ivan
30 let pobedi 45 43
Balakovo, Saratovska 413864
RU
+7.8453323464
Email: [email protected]
The email handle was hacker license-plate-speak for “extremist.” That was within shouting distance of the nickname eXe.
The NHTCU forwarded Barrett’s coup to an agent in Moscow, who would use it to press the Russians for action. The Russians had already traced the Balakovo server to an Ivan Maksakov.
Even then, Barrett didn’t expect much to come of it. He thought it was cool that he had figured out who the bad guy was, and that at least the United Kingdom cared enough to send a man to Russia. After the handoff, he would occasionally hear from the NHTCU guys by phone or email. They wanted to get new lists of IP addresses, to check on technical questions, or get Barrett’s guesses about the roles of the other people in the chats. They were upbeat about how the case was progressing, but it dragged on and on.
A year later, Russian media broke the news that Maksakov and two other men had been arrested.
3
IN TOO DEEP
As THE U.K.’s HI-TECH UNIT followed the trail in Russia, Barrett was up to his neck in a different adventure.
On his return trips to Costa Rica during 2004, Barrett was treated not as a valued contractor but as a full-fledged business partner. The bookies welcomed him deeper into the inner circle of his new sponsor, Mickey Richardson. They came to trust him, blabbing over drinks about things outsiders never learned—like the fact that Mickey’s real name was Mickey Flynn III. Much of the Costa Rica gambling crowd, it turned out, had one name up north and another where it was warm. Many had women, even wives, arranged the same way.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Mickey had been in Central America for years, working his way up in the business. Barrett got the sense that he wanted to make it so big that he could return home in triumph, impressing old-timers like his dad, Mickey Flynn Jr., the son of a county commissioner. Flynn Jr. served in the Navy and worked in a steel mill before buying the Union Grill in Washington, Pennsylvania, during the 1960s. That restaurant became a landmark in the town not far from Pittsburgh, serving college students and the local political elite alike. Flynn even had photos on the wall of Bill Clinton eating lunch. But Flynn accepted bets there as well, and he was moving more than $1 million in wagers every month.
Mickey’s men told tales about their pasts, celebrating themselves as risk-takers and sometimes including run-ins with the law. They often fell into what Barrett thought of as wiseguy routines, tributes to mafia movies they all seemed to have watched over and over. Once an older visitor came from the U.S. and was welcomed with great respect and the honorific title “Don.” Barrett believed it was all in fun.
While Barrett was a “white hat” security hacker, as those in the trade called crime-fighters, he still had the disrespect for authority that predominates among hackers on either side of the law. He liked elements of the Costa Rica crew’s attitude. But a few of the tales nagged at him. Mickey, it emerged, had been a bookie during his college years in New York. In some of his stories he was in fights; in others he had gone to jail. Mickey told one about how he had been drinking in public during a spring break trip to Coney Island. When the cops told him to throw the booze away, Mickey took off running instead. The police gave chase, beat him, and dragged him off to jail. His father refused to bail him out, Mickey said with pride.
Prolexic’s other big investor, Brian Green, didn’t drink, and he appeared to be a recovering alcoholic. In his wilder days, he said, he’d been passed out in a gutter in the Dominican Republic when a local beauty queen named Daisy rescued him. Her family helped him get back on his feet before they married and moved to Costa Rica. Brian came across as aggressive, ready to jump into anything. One story he told involved a man who cut him off on the highway. Brian chased him, bumped the other car until it pulled over, then kicked the door in and slugged the man. Brian thought that was hilarious.
Barrett mulled over what stories he could tell on himself, and came up only with his teenaged hack of Network Solutions, the one that shut down
AOL.com
and
Disney.com
. Somehow it didn’t measure up. An uneasy feeling began to bubble inside Barrett, one that said he didn’t belong with this particular strain of rebels, as entertaining as they might be.
AOL.com
and
Disney.com
. Somehow it didn’t measure up. An uneasy feeling began to bubble inside Barrett, one that said he didn’t belong with this particular strain of rebels, as entertaining as they might be.
While Brian didn’t operate any betting endeavors directly, he was a gambler of some repute himself. He would often leave Digital Solutions in the care of his partner and disappear for a few days—either for sex trips to the Philippines and other locales or to compete in major poker tournaments. Brian played several times a year and on occasion walked off with more than $100,000. He won the April 2001 Limit Hold ’Em event at Jack Binion’s World Poker Open, getting four clubs among the five shared face-up cards to complete a queen-high flush on the final hand. A year and a half later, he won another limit tournament at the Bellagio Five Diamond World Poker Classic, finishing off his last opponent with a pair of jacks.
Of the scores of competitors in such tournaments, only Brian was calculating the size of his entry fee in $25,000 Lucent telecommunication switches, which he needed to keep building out Digital Solutions. He would return bragging that he had won several switches’ worth of cash, or gloomily complaining that he had lost as much.
Barrett got bits and pieces of Brian’s story over many months. The most relevant part seemed to be that Brian was lucky to be alive—that at one point there had been a contract reported out on his life. Brian said he had been helping out at an old-school sportsbook after one of the owners died and the other went to prison. The one in prison thought Brian had tried to sell the company out from under him and “some people from New York helped” by explaining Brian was only trying to pay off gamblers who had gotten stiffed. Brian admitted to doing “a lot of drugs” in those days, and he made other enemies as well, including a Central American bookie named Steve D. Budin.
Brian had helped set up communications for Budin’s SDB Global in Panama. The second-generation bookie had moved offshore with the approval of his backers in Brooklyn. Brian installed expensive multiplex machines to handle large numbers of toll-free calls. The equipment didn’t function as promised, and Budin suspected Brian was up to something else.
Budin strong-armed one of Brian’s assistants, who thought he was going to be killed. The assistant blurted out that Brian was designing software to siphon money away to extra-fortunate bettors. “It was going to be a back door that allowed you to put in bets after the game has started,” a time-honored scam known as past posting, Budin said in an interview. Brian said he hadn’t planned on stealing anything, but his life improved after he allied with the people at BetCRIS. It didn’t hurt when Budin was swept up in a 1998 federal gambling indictment that also named several other offshore bookies. After Budin’s father was arrested, Budin returned to the U.S., pleaded guilty to a reduced charge, and remained in his home country.
The stories were scary, but the worst ones seemed anchored in the past. Brian was sober now, with the possible exception of his sordid vacations, and presumably had cleaned up his business dealings as well. Besides, Barrett thought, he had to have his act pretty well together in order to win as much as he did in poker tournaments.
IN PRINCIPLE, BARRETT DIDN’T HAVE a problem with gambling on cards or sports. But the more he saw in the San Jose building, the happier he was not to be participating himself. Some of the bettors on the other end of the transactions were down big. The really high rollers got through to Mickey when they called. Everyone was identified by an account number to preserve confidentiality. But when someone picked up the line and shouted out that one of a handful of numbers was calling, everyone knew who it was. Actor Bruce Willis, Barrett learned, had lost millions of dollars.
Many of those working the phones and manning the website had been traditional bookies back home. Part of that job was getting tough with losers who didn’t pay up. There was some talk of cars that had blown up, taking bettors with them. The people inside Mickey’s organization carried some risk as well, depending on their job descriptions. The street-level employees in the U.S. were known as agents. The agents sent cash to Costa Rica and collected cash from there by way of runners, who often physically traveled back and forth. The agents acted like bookies, but they carried no risk as long as they followed the odds set out by the company. More accurately, they carried no risk in the ordinary sense of having to pay out more than they took in. The risk came with the extension of credit, which many of the betting houses did not offer. The rougher firms, including BetCRIS and one called Casablanca, did allow clients to get in the hole. And the agents could get in trouble for giving too much credit. If they allowed a bettor who was way down to make a new gamble on credit, and that bet won big—the bettor was out of the hole, and the agent might be held accountable for giving him the chance.
On the sports side of BetCRIS, players in most of the professional leagues were betting on their own games. The company didn’t do much to hide that, stating on its website: “whether you are in business, politics, professional sports, or the movie industry, it is our professional obligation to keep the details of our client’s financial and personal affairs strictly private.” Once an insider wagered, the bookies knew how to bet themselves. As Darren Rennick explained it to Barrett, sports stars often bet against themselves. Then Mickey would adjust the line on the odds and secretly bet the same way as the athlete at other, unsuspecting sportsbooks.
In the increasingly popular electronic poker and casino games, much of the play seemed harmless for non-addicts. The new games were wonderful for the sportsbooks, though, because they could be played at any time, while betting on sporting events built toward a specific date and hour. BetCRIS and others urged winning sports bettors to try their luck at the poker tables, where they often lost everything back. “It’s a playground for degenerates,” Mickey said approvingly of the newfangled games. Free-standing electronic casinos could have the same rough methods for collecting debts that the sportsbooks did.
There was another catch to playing poker or the slots. With a football game, everyone could tell who won and who lost. In card games, the players were relying on the companies to tell them who had “received” which cards. Costa Rica and other favored countries regulated little if at all, and the companies relied on software from a few suppliers, including Darren’s Digital Gaming. The poker outlets pledged that they were depending on random-number generators to keep the game fair. But true random numbers are surprisingly hard to manufacture. When Barrett asked Darren how exactly Digital Gaming spat out those figures, Darren would mumble a nonsensical answer. In any case, there was nothing to stop a company from ignoring a preselected hand and simply replacing it with a better one.
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