by Kate Fazzini
Brendan is from a suburb of Galway, Ireland, called Ballybane. A drab and gray place where he grew up in ivory-white public housing. He traveled the world and managed to get a few engineering certifications and make a decent living along the way, but he never made enough money to entice a woman to pay him any mind.
He likes Singapore. It’s clean and quiet, and he can go about his business undisturbed. He uses a virtual private network to access the dark web because, despite its many advantages, Singapore is still run by the thought police. To anyone trying to spy on him, it looks like he’s doing straight work, coding and fixing bugs for merchant websites on a freelance site called Fiverr. He does this on his “straight” laptop, which he connects to the local network. On a different laptop, however, the signal is routed through a server far away in Kiev using a virtual private network. Anyone trying to locate him will think he’s operating from Ukraine.
Local law enforcement agencies know all about him, but he’s not really doing any damage. The information he’s trading is irrelevant. But they’re watching. They know how VPNs work, too.
Dieter Reichlin is also watching. He likes to read Tahir’s ludicrous posts, especially now that he is writing about cyberterrorism.
There are two types of cyberterrorism, and Dieter is trying to distinguish between them for a possible article, which he is not sure he’ll ever be able to finish. He wants to find the parallels between the two.
There is the type of terrorism that everyone fears: the big, sweeping attack that takes down an entire country’s electrical grid or causes a nuclear facility to overheat.
But there is also the more personal type, the kind Tahir perpetrates, attempting to take low-level, rudimentary hacking tools and turn them into something that can be used to move his own personal agenda forward. This philosophy is behind many different types of attacks, of course, but Dieter wants to understand the agenda so he can make sense of the action.
Bo Chou is also watching people like Tahir. He’s permitted to go on the dark web as part of his job. As ISIS has proliferated, so have the armchair warriors who want to support the terrorist network. A fascinating bunch, and a legitimate reason for him to visit the very latest incarnation of the Silk Road.
* * *
Despite the large numbers of people like Tahir on the internet, there has been only one successful prosecution of a cyberterrorism case in the United States.
Ardit Ferizi was a Kosovar Muslim living in Malaysia who used stolen credentials from military bases to supply a kill list to ISIS. In order to do this, Ferizi used a rudimentary attack technique called a SQL (pronounced like sequel) injection—abbreviated as SQLi—in which malicious code is injected into a database in order to corrupt it and, in this case, extract information. Ferizi targeted retailers on military bases not only to steal names and addresses of government personnel who may be living overseas, in reach of actual ISIS fighters, but to provide those names to high-level members of the terrorist group.
Here’s a real interaction between Ferizi and Junaid Hussain, an ISIS recruiter, captured by the Department of Justice:
Ferizi: Elhamdulilah brother :)
wait i prepare some dumps i got ok
Hussain: which website akhi
Ferizi: [Company Name Withheld] :)
Plus i got
the credit card
of airforce
department
waiti show u
[Company Name Withheld] have around 190k users
:)
orders.html
Hussain: Where u get the mil/gov dumps?
Ferizi: in the website [Company Name Withheld] already now I’m connected on it
—
Ferizi: I have also another shop which have 878k clients and its a military shop :)
there is huge db [database]
—
Hussain: how did u get DB access?
Ferizi: easy penetration
Hussain: SQLi?
Ferizi: sqli the mobile app:P
And got access all in
Hussain: masha’Allah
Hussain: nice
Ferizi: everyday 400/500 orders come in this website [Company Name Withheld]:)
Hussain: But how you got DB login info
Ferizi: penetration after penetration
Injection after injection
Ferizi, who was 19 years old when he committed these crimes, would later be extradited to the United States, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years.
* * *
Bo Chou has been eagerly following Ferizi’s story. He has settled into a modest apartment provided by his new employer. His managers overlooked a number of holes in his resume to give him a job monitoring for insider threats, because they couldn’t find anyone else with the skills to do the job. They have sophisticated software tools that help him visualize the activity of all of the company’s employees.
He is like an ex-smoker, one who frequently seeks out information confirming the wisdom of his decision. And Ferizi’s case is just another one of those reference points, an example of what can happen to you when you go bad, when you pick up that cigarette again.
He knows it’s not the same, though. There are always a few smokers who live to be a hundred. And this sometimes keeps him up at night.
When he thinks about what could have been, he often goes back to one of his former associates: Nat Oren, an Israeli hacker who seemed to embody this moral ambiguity so perfectly.
Israel itself seemed to be churning out Nat Orens, in fact. It’s easy to become a cybersecurity expert in Israel, as easy as getting a degree in English in England or business management in New York or comparative studies in Portland.
Cybersecurity education starts in earnest in middle school there, and in many cases, even earlier. The population is small, agile, security-minded, and entrepreneurial. Nearly everyone gets military training. And in many ways, they dominate cyberspace. Proof, on a larger scale, that tight, small, and smart in the world of hackers may win out over big and sprawling any day.
Nat conducts detailed research on private online terrorist networks. He has several LLCs and S-Corps to his name, which he established by the time he was in his mid-20s.
He is also a frequent buyer on the dark marketplace of material nonpublic information, most of the time stolen by other hackers from law firms and banks. He uses this information in order to conduct a tidy one-man insider trading business. He buys the kind of data Bo used to provide on the dark web, discreetly.
Nat is one of the few people Bo keeps in touch with. Bo expects Nat will never get caught. Because unlike in the massive operation behind the hacks against NOW Bank, this Israeli is content with pocketing only a few million dollars here and there. Nat prefers to focus his life’s work on hunting terrorists. He justifies his cybercrime by saying it helps fund this endeavor. Bo can’t hold that kind of morality against him—it’s a higher justification than his own ever was.
Still, Bo is glad to have moved on from that life. The indictments of Chinese and Israeli and Russian hackers remind him of the terrible end he may have had.
Bo is quietly dating someone. A trader from India. Very quietly, since same-sex relationships carry various legal penalties in Singapore. It is the only part of his life in which he regularly flaunts the law. Still, it is a quiet life. Just like his mother had always wanted for him.
He almost never thinks about his old life anymore. Blown off to a faraway desert, scattered for all time.
19.
The Long Trip
It’s a rare night out for Charlie Mack. He’s one finger into a large glass of scotch as he contemplates a New York Times article about the 2012 terrorist attacks on a CIA compound in Benghazi, Libya.
“Is this true? How about this?” The Midtown bar looks like a law library by the light of the iPhone his companion holds up for him to see.
“Sure,” he says with a shrug. “It’s plausible.”
Not yes or no, but plausible.<
br />
* * *
“I left right before it happened,” he reminds them when they push for details.
“Did you take any time off in between?” one of his colleagues asks.
“No.” Sip. Silence.
For years, he traveled the world, performing an extremely dangerous job. It was, somehow at the same time, a fantasy that could only be dreamed up by a particularly creative schoolboy. He gambled in Monaco on the company dime. Helped liberate firearms from Gaddafi’s compound after the 2011 coup.
There are many people in the cybersecurity field who cross over, from the bad guy timeline to the good guy timeline. There are some who stay firmly in one timeline or the other. Charlie Mack is in the middle of a long, arduous trip on the good guy timeline, whether he likes it or not.
He shows off pictures of himself, which he’s saved on his own iPhone, in fatigues, sporting a beard and a weed-wacker haircut, holding two enormous guns, which he says were taken off Gaddafi when he was captured. In another photograph, an African militant is presenting him with a sword, a gift of some kind. For what, Charlie won’t say.
“It must be incredibly jarring to go from that to this,” his colleagues say, fishing for more details. North African intrigue to a bank lawyer and dad. From canvas fatigues to wool crepe.
Charlie puts the iPhone away. His companions put their phones away, too. Sip.
“Thought it was time to finally make use of my law degree.” He doesn’t say he earned his degree at Harvard. He doesn’t need to.
One of his drinking companions, a veteran of NOW Bank, recalls Charlie’s first day at work. Charlie was introduced to a big group of cybersecurity executives as a former employee of the CIA. There was silence and tension in the room. Then one executive shouted out: “Culinary Institute of America?”
Laughs all around. Then and now.
Someone asks again when, exactly, he started at NOW Bank. Someone else asks about the military. Something happens, nobody is sure what, but before Charlie is able to answer they are talking about something else. The Vatican. Then Donald Trump. Then Bob Raykoff.
Because Charlie has distracted them. It’s something he is exceedingly good at. Whenever the camera focuses on him, he bumps it away with a flick of his wrist, aiming its lens at someone else. Maybe even someone who isn’t there.
Raykoff, for example.
They share stories about the executive and some of his most frustrating moments. They laugh. They get loud.
Then the conversation turns a fourth time, to a scandal making headlines: the saga of a well-known security software maker called Achinsk Antivirus, which is based in Minsk. The company is highly rated, supplying one of the best-reviewed antivirus products in the world.
Achinsk’s software is in millions of companies and on hundreds of government servers. The company has a free product used by a significant number of small law firms, independent workers, and start-up tech companies. The company is suspected of providing a back door to hundreds of organizations to be used by the Russian government, something Achinsk continues to deny as it pushes its free products more fervently than ever.
Charlie Mack appears resigned to this reality, but the rest of the group is aghast. One by one, they recount companies and government agencies they’ve worked for that have used Achinsk software. They remember how deeply embedded it was into sensitive systems. They sober up a little, quiet down, as they come to the same grim conclusion that all security professionals do: we’re fundamentally compromised down to the very bones of every single one of our computers. What this means, really, for the cybersecurity profession itself is not something that will be solved tonight by a handful of drunk, 30-something bankers.
Charlie shifts the conversation again. He asks about Caroline. He is genuinely sad. Since she left NOW Bank, he hasn’t had a chance to see her.
The conversation continues without him. While they talk, he reaches for The New York Times and glances at the article on Benghazi.
Sip.
* * *
René is preparing to leave TechSolu. Sig instructs her to get a sandwich at Cafe Americain and take a taxi home. Detours along his suggested route might be dangerous, but she will make just one.
René walks down the stairs to the cafe. Henry is on her chest, sleeping contentedly. She buys two yogurts and two prepackaged fruit smoothies. They will be good for the train ride, and easy to carry.
She asks the teller for two bags and she splits up the food.
She walks out of Cafe Americain, stops in front of the store. She slightly loosens the strap on her carrier. Henry shifts and she catches him, dropping her cell phone on the ground, breaking it. “How clumsy of me,” she says.
She ducks into the technology store next door. Points to a burner phone on the wall. Shows the cashier her broken phone. Plausible deniability if Sig happens to find out.
She hails a taxi and heads home. Her head is whirring, but it spins in only one direction.
Out.
* * *
René plans to go to Germany on an EU passport she got while in college. She knows Sig won’t go back to Germany because of some legal trouble he’s been in there.
At home, she packs Henry’s diaper bag and the two bags from Cafe Americain. One will serve as her purse, the other for the food. The diaper bag holds four outfits for Henry, one extra for her. She will put on two layers of clothes, so three outfits total. The $1,000 she has folded into a roll and put inside a tampon box.
René will breastfeed Henry to get him milk-drunk and tired, so he will sleep through these last few moments in Romania.
* * *
Sig arrives home earlier than expected, drunk. To her surprise, he tells her he is going back outside for the evening. Investors from Vladivostok are in town.
He changes his clothes into something nicer looking. René busies herself around the house and keeps her head down.
“That’s right, don’t look at me,” he mumbles on his way out, slamming the door behind him.
It is 9 p.m. She knows he will be gone the rest of the night.
She lines up everything she’s prepared. The diaper bag, the two Cafe Americain bags, Henry’s carrier. This is all she needs. Using the burner smartphone, she calls a local taxi service. One Sig never uses. Gives the neighbor’s address.
She gathers Henry up into the carrier, puts on one of Sig’s jackets, and tucks her hair up under the hood. The car arrives. She picks up her bags and leaves.
* * *
René sidesteps through the darkness and over a small fence, to make it appear as if she is coming from her neighbor’s house.
There is no night train from Arnica Valka. So she asks the driver to take her all the way to Bucharest, a 2-hour, 30-minute drive that will cost $120. Her mother is ill, she tells him. It’s an emergency. He asks her a few questions. She says she is tired and wants to sleep. He leaves her in peace. She is grateful for this.
In Bucharest, she buys a train ticket to Prague. From there, she intends to go to Berlin. It’s beautiful there, lots of big companies, she thinks to herself.
The train trip will be 24 hours. She books a private overnight room. It has a seat and a fold-out twin bed. $200. She has the Bitcoin wallet address and her private keys memorized. She will tap into them once she’s in Germany, though it might not be easy to turn the cryptocurrency into euros. She attempts to tackle the problem from the train.
The train has good Wi-Fi, which she uses with her burner to set up a business identity in Estonia shielding her own name. She creates a PayPal account. She’s learned all this from the guys at TechSolu, idly discussing what they will do with their earnings. Someday she will thank them.
She does a test transfer from CEX.IO, a company that can cash out and transfer Bitcoin into PayPal accounts. She sees now, for the first time, that Sig had taken most of her stash. She isn’t surprised. She is more surprised that he’s left a fair amount, enough to get by for a year if she’s frugal. She transfers the r
emaining funds to PayPal. The transaction, thanks to the privacy of the blockchain, will be untraceable.
Henry is easy. He sleeps, wakes, feeds, sleeps. The privacy of the private car is glorious.
Despite being up all night, René doesn’t feel tired in the slightest, nor sad, nor scared. Her blood is pure adrenaline. The pain in her jaw is gone.
By 1 a.m. Bucharest time, she imagines Sig stumbling home. He won’t notice they are gone until he wakes up. This scenario is keeping her on edge. Imagining those first moments when he realizes she’s not there, has taken the money, and has left him for good.
Will he come after her?
She doesn’t think so. Sig values control above all things. If he knows she is no longer susceptible to his influence, he will simply cease to care about her.
This is what she hopes.
20.
The Reason
“Valery Romanov? Don’t know him. He’s in prison, you say?”
“I was wondering if you had heard of him,” the reporter asks.
Victor Tanninberg laughs. “Why would I hear of him? For the last time, I’m not a hacker!”
His reporter friend sits on the corner of the bed in his small house. But that’s only because there is nowhere else to sit. Every square inch of his place is covered with computer parts and wires and tools. Fox News blares in the background.
“So let’s go back to my original question then, because I’m writing a story on it. Is it possible to cut the brakes on a car remotely? To blow out the tires or depress the accelerator? Everyone says it’s possible, but nobody can demonstrate it.”
Victor sits in a dark corner of the room, next to a fat rabbit named Sam. Both like to be close to the air conditioner.
“Why would I do such a thing as cut brakes?” he says. “I would just lose customer.”
“I’m not asking if you would do it. I’m asking if it’s possible.”