DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

by Misha Glenny

  Part III

  9

  TIGER, TIGER

  Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1988

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  ‘Open up! Open up!’

  Soldiers in this mood rarely wait for an answer, particularly not at half-past five in the morning. They smashed against the door with their rifles and poured into the house. Searching from room to room, they ordered family members to lie on the floor before ransacking the place.

  Three youngsters woke in terror as their home filled with noise and light. ‘Out of bed! Out of bed!’ Sweating in the tropical heat with nothing but their underwear on, the children found that their teeth started chattering with fear. The soldiers pulled out the eldest, just eleven years old, and pointed to a patch of white skin the size of a hand on his stomach. ‘What’s this? What is this?’ they shouted almost triumphantly. ‘He’s been using explosives!’

  ‘It’s a birthmark,’ he replied, ‘it’s just a birthmark.’

  They pulled the boy away and sat him on a chair in the living room before beginning the interrogation. His parents and his grandmother pleaded with the soldier who appeared to be in charge, and finally they agreed that the frail youngster, who had yet to embark on his adolescence, seemed an unlikely bomb-manufacturer for the Tamil Tigers.

  Little Renu was used to turbulence like this. It had punctuated his life from an early age. Five years earlier, in July 1983, he was evacuated from Colombo when still only six years old. Tamil militants had murdered thirteen soldiers of the Sri Lankan army. Taking revenge, a Singhalese mob slaughtered hundreds of innocent Tamils in Colombo, the capital, triggering a sustained civil war, which only came to an end twenty-six years later.

  Sitting tight in Colombo as Singhalese gangs marauded through the city was no longer an option, and so Renu’s parents packed up and took their three children to Jaffna, the main centre of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka. Lying at the northern tip of the country, Jaffna was separated by only fifty miles from the south-eastern coast of India. It was also the stronghold of militant Tamil guerrillas. Resistance to the Singhalese-dominated government in Colombo was growing.

  It was not long after Renu’s move that the unpredictable violence of civil war and insurgency started to creep ever closer to his new home. By 1987 government troops were laying siege to Jaffna, battling with various armed groups, notably the LTTE, the infamous Tamil Tigers. The number of refugees streaming from the city into southern India across the Palk Strait reached a critical mass, persuading the government in New Delhi that it had to act. In a deal reached with the Sri Lankan government, the Indians sent a large peace-keeping force into Jaffna to oversee a peace agreement.

  Before long, relations between the Indian peace-keepers and the Tamil Tigers had broken down and once more Jaffna became one of the most dangerous cities on Earth. In October 1987 Indian troops were responsible for the massacre of several dozen innocent civilians in the city’s main hospital, the only incident during a quarter of a century of civil war that united the Colombo government and the Tigers in their outrage. For Renu and his family, the risks of staying in Jaffna were too high and so they trekked back down south to Colombo.

  One afternoon, Renu’s father asked the young boy to buy some groceries. Renu had never seen so many rupees and he stuffed them in his pocket, along with the list of things to get. On the way to the shops, he spotted a man by the side of the road playing a game. There were three pots and underneath one of them was a pebble. Renu watched as people placed their money against one or other of the pots after the deft entertainer switched them around at lightning speed. Renu was mesmerised and shocked that the players consistently failed to find the pebble, and yet he had guessed right every time. He wriggled his way to the front of the queue and pulled out his father’s crumpled banknotes. One by one they were scooped into the man’s pocket as Renu failed to guess the right pot, just like those before him. The more he lost, though, the more frenziedly he placed his bet. Oblivious to his losses, he just couldn’t stop himself – until there were no more notes and his little body, woozy with adrenalin, was suddenly overcome by a cold sweat and a vision of his father’s hand raised high above his head. He never gambled again.

  In the years since they had left for Jaffna the capital had calmed down somewhat, although the safety of Tamil residents was never fully assured, as the raid on their house by the military made clear. But the options for Renu’s family were running out.

  Not yet in his teens, Renu had spent much of his life toing and froing between the frying pan and the fire, sometimes literally avoiding the crossfire. Soon after the army’s raid on the house, when a birthmark almost made a terrorist of the young lad, Renu’s grandmother decided that his situation as a Tamil coming of age in Sri Lanka’s capital was too perilous. He might either be tempted to join the Tigers or fall foul of the nationalist Singhalese groups on a prowl across the capital.

  By 1992 the family had scraped enough money together to send Renu to London, where his aunt and uncle lived.

  His new life on the other side of the world, in a most unfamiliar setting, contained its own dangers. At the Langdon School – one of the biggest and most unruly in east London – Renu, stick-thin and small, found himself caught between two large communities, one white and one Bengali. He performed well in maths, outstripping all his peers, but was barely able to express himself in English. A complete outsider, he was bullied relentlessly and after six months simply refused to attend classes any more, despite the entreaties of his despairing aunt and uncle.

  For two years Renu locked himself inside the house, sometimes not emerging into the fresh air for weeks on end. Watching television from morning till night was his sole activity.

  Renukanth Subramaniam learned how to be alone.

  And he might have stayed alone, had his uncle not finally forced him back into the outside world, specifically to Newham College of Further Education. Here he learned some new skills: how to socialise with his peers; how to smoke marijuana; how to drink Martell brandy; and how to programme a computer.

  Down at the local pub, stoned and drunk, Renu would hammer his virtual opponents on the arcade machine, Street Fighter. How many young men were drawn obsessively to this mesmerically repetitive challenge, which pitched their avatar in a fight to the death against a string of equally aggressive fighters? Did this tame aggression or encourage it? Did the flood of dopamine around the brain’s frontal lobe, which these games trigger, lead to intense addiction in all young men or just in some of them?

  Renu pounded away at the machine, drenching his body in adrenalin and his brain in endorphins. When he finished, his body still wired, he hit the Martell to sustain a feeling of well-being and to calm himself down. Slowly, this dual habit began to take its toll on his paltry allowance. Street Fighter became ever more central to his life. As he lay down to sleep, the game’s violent images would appear in technicolour in his mind’s eye.

  As he had once stopped gambling, so he now resolved to stop playing and he never touched the machine again. Unfortunately, his decision at the time only applied to Street Fighter, and not to his burgeoning predilection for drink and drugs.

  His break with the game did not mean an end to his fascination with computers in general. He had loved them ever since he had first played with one as a nine-year-old in Sri Lanka. Lack of money had ensured he never had regular access, but he overcame that problem in his early twenties by accepting a place to study computer science at London’s Westminster University.

  Soon afterwards Renu had discovered warez, pirated software programs whose security systems had been cracked and distributed among devotees known collectively as The Scene.

  It was a world where he could be with friends and alone, at one and the same time.

  10

  GAME THEORY

  Eislingen, Baden-Württemberg, 2001

  Just as Renu was exploring The Scene for the first time, 500 miles away in southern Germany another young computer user had
stumbled across the same mysterious community.

  Fifteen-year-old Matrix001 had fallen in love. Not with a girl. Matrix was infatuated with computer games. At first, they were just one aspect in a balanced and normal adolescence, competing for his spare time with gymnastics and the school orchestra in which he played the clarinet. There was nothing outwardly unusual about him. His secret obsession with games was easily hidden. Nobody knew – not his friends, not his parents or his siblings – except perhaps for his younger brother.

  Not only did he adore games, but he was a skilled practitioner too, and as his final high-school exams approached, his sessions at the keyboard began to extend deep into the night. Keeping up with the latest games proved an expensive affair, especially if (as among Matrix’s gaming peer group) there was kudos in announcing that you had played and beaten those games which had only just been released.

  By the year 2000 new games with dazzling graphics were cascading onto the market. The Pokémon series rolled out thick and fast, while at the more extreme end, WWF Smackdown 2: Know Your Role was proving a big hit, along with Grand Theft Auto, whose storylines were forging their violent and pornographic hallmarks. Matrix was always desperate to get his hands on the latest game, but he just couldn’t afford them all.

  In respect of gaming, his life mirrored Renu’s. Otherwise the two had nothing in common.

  Determined to satisfy his driving passion, Matrix discovered an Internet community known as the fXp scene. This phenomenon was an important moment, not just in Matrix’s life, but in the rapidly changing parameters of Internet culture.

  Over two decades since the introduction of the personal computer, its usage had become the subject of a passionate if arcane debate – among its developers, prophets and most committed users – about its role in society. Many of the criminal skills on the Web have emerged from an essential division in the philosophical debate generated by the Internet.

  In simple terms the debate is between those, on the one hand, who believe its commercial role is paramount and those, on the other,

  who argue that it is in the first instance a social and intellectual

  tool, whose very nature changes the fundamental moral code of mass communication. For the former, any copying of computer ‘code’ (shorthand for the computer language in which software or a program is written) that is not explicitly sanctioned is regarded as a criminal violation. The latter, however, are convinced that by releasing software you are also relinquishing copyright.

  The heart of the matter was revealed as long ago as February 1976 when Bill Gates addressed an open letter to ‘the hobbyists’, an inchoate cluster of computer users who would variously evolve into geeks, hackers and crackers. In the letter Gates bemoaned the fact that 90 per cent of those using Microsoft’s first programming language, Altair BASIC, had never bought it. Instead they had copied it, which meant that Gates was not getting the return on the huge amount of work and cash he had invested in developing it. Although Gates’s language bore the hallmark of inelegance common to many geeks, the message was clear: he accused the hobbyists of theft.

  The hobbyists, geeks, hackers – ‘crackers’ as they later became known – disagreed. As far as they were concerned, once ‘code’ was out there, it was fair game. Both on the West Coast and at MIT in Cambridge, MA, some of the world’s most important computer developers and early users were infected by a strong dosage of a ‘kumbaya’ ideology, which held that this particular technology was one for bringing the world together and that for some (unspecified) reason it was not subject to the rules of copyright that had traditionally applied to books, music and other creative output.

  It was clear why this could happen: in the past the public was not in a position to print an unlicensed copy of a book or produce pirated pressings of an LP, as it did not have the machinery to do it. And if it did, this machinery was cumbersome, stationary and easy for law enforcement to track down, in the name of intellectual copyright.

  Code or software was different. After graduating from the cassette machines on which the first computer games for domestic use were written in the early 1980s, it was produced on floppy disks, CDs, DVDs and ever-shrinking hard disks. By this time, the Empire of Commerical Software Producers attempted its first strike-back by inserting pieces of additional code onto their product, which sought to prevent unauthorised copying of their material. CDs and cassettes routinely included digital locks.

  While understandable as a tactic, it backfired. As far back as 1982 another German teenager, who later went under the enigmatic hacker’s moniker of MiCe!, finally persuaded his parents – against their better judgement – to buy him a computer for Christmas. But having spent all that money, they refused to give him a penny more for games, not understanding that without the games’ software, which was written on cassettes at the time, the computer was useless as far as their son was concerned.

  He found that the only way he could use the computer was to borrow software from friends and then copy it. On one occasion he discovered that the cassette would not copy. He tried everything imaginable, but his computer crashed every time. After days and nights of frustration, he finally spotted a bit of code at a specific point on the tape, which had no apparent function. And then it dawned on him: it was blocking the process! Once he had understood this, MiCe! was able to experiment by rewriting the code in different sequences until one night – bingo! – he cracked it.

  Early gamers like MiCe! were inspired to crack the locks because they were addicted to gaming, not because they wanted to make money. The copies were passed from gamer to gamer, giving birth to The Scene.

  It was still a laborious and time-consuming process as it involved physically copying the code onto a new cassette. Nonetheless, the gamers had taken up with gusto the challenge laid down by software manufacturers, and before long a significant subculture of cracker groups had flowered. Its members’ sole aim was to crack games and other software the minute they came onto the market and then parade their cracking skills to their peers.

  The cyber underworld was born, although it would quickly start fracturing into very different communities – some good, some bad.

  11

  NO TURNING BACK

  Almost two decades after MiCe! had cracked his first cassette, young Matrix was faced with an identical dilemma. He was addicted to games, but he could not afford them. The dilemma was the same, but the technology had advanced almost beyond recognition. Games now boasted breathtakingly sophisticated graphics, intricate storylines and mind-bending challenges.

  For many gamers, their obsession had intensified correspondingly. Cassettes and floppy disks were already museum pieces and time was running out for CD-Roms, DVDs and memory sticks (before they were even invented). Increasingly games could exist merely as code on the Internet. However, you could not store very many on your domestic PC. Furthermore, these were the days of dial-up modems, when hooking up to the Internet meant keeping the phone line busy for hours. But if, with your home computer, you could access a much bigger computer, then you could store and share all the games you liked . . .

  fXp stands for File Exchange Protocol, but all you need to know about fXp is that it enables the very swift transfer of data between two computers. It is especially useful for exchanging data between servers. It is important to spell out that a server is simply a computer that has been adapted to function as a communications hub. Thus a large company, for example, will have its own server that provides Internet access for all employees. Many servers are big and powerful and not dependent on telephone lines for their access to the Web.

  The fXp message boards united a fraternity whose members hacked into servers and then used them to store and play games. Matrix was a quick learner and before long his computer was scanning for servers on the Internet.

  Using an automatic program, his computer would send myriad messages onto the Web that would effectively knock on the door of servers whose physical location could have been anywhere in
the world. When the server answered the door, Matrix’s computer would ask, ‘Can I come in?’ Most servers would then reply to his computer, ‘What’s the password?’ But he found a sufficient number of servers whose administrators had not bothered to set a password, in which case the server replied to Matrix’s machine, ‘Sure, come on in. I’m yours to do with as you please, you naughty master computer!’

  For Matrix, administrators who left their computers vulnerable like this were beneath contempt. Anyone could walk in and steal a company’s secrets. It’s no different, he thought, from me taking my wallet stuffed full of notes to a shopping centre and then placing it in the middle of the mall before walking away.

  Then there were other servers whose passwords could be easily guessed, such as those that retained the default password from the manufacturer, usually something like ‘admin’ or – the most crushingly stupid password of all – ‘password’.

  With other computers, he found a vulnerability in their security system (perhaps a little-used ‘port’ or point of entry that failed to ask for a password), which he could exploit to gain access to the inner workings of the server. It might have looked like rocket science to most computer users, but to Matrix it was like pushing at an open door and he could teach anyone how to do it in half an hour.

  The first task Matrix had to undertake, once he had taken control of the server, was to fix the vulnerability that he himself had exploited to gain entry: he had to ensure that nobody else could attack it as he had done.