# Kingpin - Kevin Poulsen


---

Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Poulsen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Poulsen, Kevin, 1965–
Kingpin / Kevin Poulsen.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Butler, Max. 2. Computer crimes—United States—Case
studies.
3. Computer hackers—United States—Case studies. 4.
Commercial criminals—
United States—Case studies. I. Title.
HV6773.2.P68 2010
364.16′8092—dc22 2010027952
eISBN: 978-0-307-58870-8
Jacket design by Chris Sergio
Jacket photographs © Jonathan Kitchen/Photographer’s
Choice

v3.1

For Lauren,
my unindicted coconspirator in life

CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
COPS AND CARDERS
PROLOGUE
1. The Key
2. Deadly Weapons
3. The Hungry Programmers
4. The White Hat
5. Cyberwar!
6. I Miss Crime
7. Max Vision
8. Welcome to America
9. Opportunities
10. Chris Aragon
11. Script’s Twenty-Dollar Dumps
12. Free Amex!

13. Villa Siena
14. The Raid
15. UBuyWeRush
16. Operation Firewall
17. Pizza and Plastic
18. The Briefing
19. Carders Market
20. The Starlight Room
21. Master Splyntr
22. Enemies
23. Anglerphish
24. Exposure
25. Hostile Takeover
26. What’s in Your Wallet?
27. Web War One
28. Carder Court
29. One Plat and Six Classics
30. Maksik
31. The Trial
32. The Mall
33. Exit Strategy
34. DarkMarket
35. Sentencing
36. Aftermath
EPILOGUE
NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author

COPS AND CARDERS
Max Vision, born Max Butler. Ran Carders Market under
the handle Iceman. Also known as Ghost23, Generous,
Digits, Aphex, and the Whiz.
Christopher Aragon, aka Easylivin’, Karma, and the
Dude. Max’s partner on Carders Market, who ran a
lucrative credit card counterfeiting ring fueled by Max’s
stolen data.
Script. A Ukrainian seller of stolen credit card data and
founder of CarderPlanet, the first carder forum.
King Arthur. The Eastern European phisher and ATM
cashout king who took over CarderPlanet from Script.
Maksik. The Ukrainian carder Maksym Yastremski, who
replaced Script as the underground’s top vendor of stolen
credit card data.
Albert Gonzalez, aka Cumbajohnny and SoupNazi. An
administrator on Shadowcrew, the largest crime site on the
Web until the Secret Service took it down.
David Thomas, aka El Mariachi. A veteran scammer who
ran a carding forum called the Grifters as an intelligence-
gathering operation for the FBI.
John Giannone, aka Zebra, Enhance, MarkRich, and the
Kid. A young carder from Long Island who worked with Max
online and with Chris Aragon in real life.
J. Keith Mularski, aka Master Splyntr, Pavel Kaminski.

The Pittsburgh-based FBI agent who took over DarkMarket
in a high-stakes undercover operation.
Greg Crabb. A U.S. postal inspector, and Keith Mularski’s
mentor, who spent years tracking the underground’s elusive
international leaders.
Brett Johnson, aka Gollumfun. A Shadowcrew founder
who went on to serve as an administrator on Carders
Market.
Tea, aka Alenka. Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger, a
Mongolian immigrant who helped run Carders Market from
a safe house in Orange County.
JiLsi. Renukanth Subramaniam, the Sri Lankan–born
British citizen who founded DarkMarket.
Matrix001. Markus Kellerer, a German DarkMarket
administrator.
Silo. Lloyd Liske, a Canadian hacker who became an
informant for the Vancouver police.
Th3C0rrupted0ne. A former drug dealer and recreational
hacker who served as an administrator on Carders Market.

PROLOGUE
he taxi idled in front of a convenience store in
downtown San Francisco while Max Vision paid the driver
and unfolded his six-foot-five frame from the back of the
car, his thick brown hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. He
stepped into the store and waited for the cab to disappear
down the street before emerging for the two-block walk to
his safe house.
Around him, tiny shops and newsstands awakened under
the overcast sky, and suited workers filed into the office
towers looming above. Max was going to work too, but his
job wouldn’t have him home after nine hours for a good
night’s sleep. He’d be cloistered for days this time. Once
he put his plan into motion, there’d be no going home. No
slipping out for a bite of dinner. No date night at the
multiplex. Nothing until he was done.
This was the day he was declaring war.
His long gait took him to the Post Street Towers, from the
street a five-by-fourteen grid of identical bay windows, trim
painted the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d been
coming to this apartment complex for months, doing his
best to blend in with the exchange students drawn by short
leases and reasonable rents. Nobody knew his name—not
his real one anyway. And nobody knew his past.
Here, he wasn’t Max Butler, the small-town troublemaker
driven by obsession to a moment of life-changing violence,
and he wasn’t Max Vision, the self-named computer
security expert paid one hundred dollars an hour to harden
the networks of Silicon Valley companies. As he rode up
the apartment building elevator, Max became someone

else: “Iceman”—a rising leader in a criminal economy
responsible for billions of dollars in thefts from American
companies and consumers.
And Iceman was fed up.
For months, he’d been popping merchants around the
country, prying out piles of credit card numbers that should
have been worth hundreds of thousands on the black
market. But the market was broken. Two years earlier
Secret Service agents had driven a virtual bulldozer through
the computer underworld’s largest gathering spot, arresting
the ringleaders at gunpoint and sending the rest scurrying
into chat rooms and small-time Web forums—all riddled
with security holes and crawling with feds and snitches. It
was a mess.
Whether they knew it or not, the underworld needed a
strong leader to unify them. To bring order.
Off the elevator, Max idled in the hallway to check for a
tail, then walked to his apartment door and entered the
oppressive warmth of the rented studio. Heat was the
biggest problem with the safe house. The servers and
laptops crammed into the space produced a swelter that
pulsed through the room. He’d brought in fans over the
summer, but they provided scant relief and lofted the
electric bill so high that the apartment manager suspected
him of running a hydroponic dope farm. But it was just the
machines, entwined in a web of cables, the most important
snaking to a giant parabolic antenna aimed out the window
like a sniper rifle.
Shrugging off his discomfort, Max sat at his keyboard
and trained a bead on the Web forums where computer
criminals gathered—virtual cantinas with names like
DarkMarket and TalkCash. For two days, he hacked, his
fingers flying at preternatural speed as he breached the
sites’ defenses, stealing their content, log-ins, passwords,
and e-mail addresses. When he tired, he crashed out on
the apartment’s foldaway bed for an hour or two, then
returned bleary-eyed to his work.

returned bleary-eyed to his work.
He finished with a few keystrokes that wiped out the
sites’ databases with the ease of an arsonist flicking a
match. On August 16, 2006, he dispatched an unapologetic
mass e-mail to the denizens of the sites he’d destroyed:
They were all now members of Iceman’s own
Cardersmarket.com, suddenly the largest criminal
marketplace in the world, six thousand users strong and the
only game in town.
With one stroke, Max had undermined years of careful
law enforcement work and revitalized a billion-dollar
criminal underworld.
In Russia and Ukraine, Turkey and Great Britain, and in
apartments, offices, and houses across America, criminals
would awaken to the announcement of the underground’s
first hostile takeover. Some of them kept guns in their
nightstands to protect their millions in stolen loot, but they
couldn’t protect themselves from this. FBI and Secret
Service agents who’d spent months or years infiltrating the
now-destroyed underground forums would read the
message with equal dismay, and for a moment, all of them
—hacking masterminds, thuggish Russian mobsters,
masters of fake identities, and the cops sworn to catch
them—would be unified by a single thought.
Who is Iceman?

1

The Key
s soon as the pickup truck rolled up to the curb, the
teenage computer geeks squatting on the sidewalk knew
there’d be trouble. “Fucking wavers!” one of the cowboys
called out the window. A beer bottle flew from the truck and
crashed on the pavement. The geeks, who’d left the club to
talk away from the din of music, had seen it all before. In
Boise in 1988, being caught in public without a wide belt
buckle and a cowboy hat was a bottlin’ offense.
Then one of the geeks did something the cowboys
weren’t expecting: He stood up. Tall and broad shouldered,
Max Butler cut a quietly imposing figure that was enhanced
by his haircut, a spiky punk-rock brush that added three
inches to his height. “Waver?” Max asked calmly, feigning
ignorance of the Boise slang for New Wave music fans and
other freaks. “What’s that?” The two cowboys blustered and
swore, then finally drove away with a screech of tires and
the waving of mud flaps.
Since they met one another in junior high, Max had
become the unofficial bodyguard in the klatch of fellow
computer nerds in Meridian, Idaho, a bedroom community
then separated from Boise by eight miles of patchy
farmland. The town fathers had named Meridian a century
earlier for its placement directly on the Boise Meridian, one
of the thirty-seven invisible north-south lines that form the Y-
axes in America’s land survey system. But that was
probably the only thing geeky about the town, where the
high school rodeo team got all the girls.
Max’s parents had married young, and they’d moved to
Idaho from Phoenix when he was an infant. In some ways,

Max combined their best qualities: Robert Butler was a
Vietnam veteran and enthusiastic technology buff who ran a
computer store in Boise. Natalie Skorupsky was the
daughter of Ukrainian immigrants—a humanist and a
peacenik, she liked to relax in front of the Weather Channel
and nature documentaries. Max inherited his mother’s
clean-living values, eschewing red meat, cigarettes, and
alcohol and drugs, except for an ill-fated experiment with
chewing tobacco. From his father, Max acquired a deep
passion for computers. He grew up surrounded by exotic
machines, from giant business computers that could double
as an office desk to the first suitcase-sized “portable” IBM
compatibles. Max was allowed to play with them freely. He
started programming in BASIC at the age of eight.
But Max’s equilibrium disappeared when his parents
divorced in his fourteenth year. His father wound up in
Boise, while Max lived in Meridian with his mother and his
younger sister, Lisa. The divorce devastated the teenager
and seemed to reduce him to two modes of operation:
relaxed, and full-bore insane. When his manic side flared,
the world was too slow to keep up; his brain moved at light
speed and focused like a laser on whatever task was
before him. After he got his driver’s license, he drove his
silver Nissan like the accelerator was a toggle switch,
speeding from stop sign to stop sign, wearing lab goggles
like a mad scientist conducting an experiment in Newtonian
physics.
As Max protected his friends, they tried to protect Max
from himself. His best buddy, a genial kid named Tim
Spencer, found Max’s world exciting but was constantly
reining in his friend’s impetuousness. One day he emerged
from his home to find Max standing over an elaborate
geometric pattern burning in the lawn. Max had found a
canister of gasoline nearby. “Max, this is our house!” Tim
shouted. Max sputtered apologies as the pair stamped out
the blaze.

• • •
It was Max’s impulsive side that made his friends resolve
not to tell him about the key.
The Meridian geeks had found the key ring in an
unlocked desk at the back of the chemistry lab. For a time,
they just watched it, sliding open the desk drawer when the
lab instructor wasn’t around and checking to see if it was
still there. Finally, they swiped it, smuggled it from the lab,
and discreetly began testing its keys against various locks
on the Meridian High campus. That was how they
discovered that one of the keys was a master key to the
school; it opened the front door and every door behind it.
Four copies were made, one for each of them: Tim, Seth,
Luke, and John. The key ring was returned to the darkness
of the chem lab desk after being carefully wiped down for
fingerprints. They all agreed that Max must not know. A
master key to the high school is a very special talisman that
must be wielded with great care—not squandered on
foolishness. So the juniors vowed to save the key for an
epic senior-year prank. They would sneak into the school
and hijack the PA system, blaring music into every
classroom. Until that day, the four keys would stay in hiding,
a burden borne in silence by the four of them.
Nobody liked keeping secrets from Max, but they could
see that he was already on a collision course with the
school’s administrators. Max scoffed at the curriculum, and
while instructors droned on about history or sketched
equations on the blackboard, Max would sit at his desk
thumbing through computer printouts from dial-up bulletin
board systems and the pre-Web Internet. His favorite read
was an online hacker newsletter called Phrack, a product of
the late-1980s hacking scene. In its plain, unadorned text,
Max could follow the exploits of editors Taran King and
Knight Lightning, and contributors like Phone Phanatic,
Crimson Death, and Sir Hackalot.
The first generation to come of age in the home

computing era was tasting the power at its fingertips, and
Phrack was a jolt of subversive, electric information from a
world far beyond Meridian’s sleepy borders. A typical issue
was packed with tutorials on packet-switched networks like
Telenet and Tymnet, guides to telephone-company
computers like COSMOS, and inside looks at large-scale
operating systems powering mainframe and mini-
computers in air-conditioned equipment rooms around the
globe.
Phrack also diligently tracked news reports from the
frontier battleground between hackers and their opponents
in state and federal law enforcement, who were just
beginning to meet the challenges posed by recreational
hackers. In July 1989, a Cornell graduate student named
Robert T. Morris Jr. was charged under a brand-new
federal computer crime law after he launched the first
Internet worm—a virus that spread to six thousand
computers, clogging network bandwidth and dragging
systems to a halt. The same year, in California, a young
Kevin Mitnick picked up his second hacking arrest and
received one year in prison—a startlingly harsh sentence at
the time.
Max became “Lord Max” on the Boise bulletin board
systems and delved into phone phreaking—a hacking
tradition dating to the 1970s. When he used his
Commodore 64 modem to scan for free long-distance
codes, he had his first run-in with the federal government: A
Secret Service agent from the Boise field office visited Max
at school and confronted him with the evidence of his
phreaking. Because he was a juvenile, he wasn’t charged.
But the agent warned Max to change course before he got
in real trouble.
Max promised he’d learned his lesson.
Then the unthinkable happened. Max noticed an odd
shape on John’s key ring and asked what it was. John
confessed the truth.

Max and John entered the school that very night and went
berserk. One or both of them scrawled messages on the
walls, sprayed fire extinguishers in the hallways, and
plundered the locked closet in the chemistry lab. Max
carted off an assortment of chemicals and piled them into
the backseat of his car.
Seth’s phone rang early the next morning. It was Max;
he’d left Seth a gift in his front yard. Seth walked out to find
the bottles of chemicals sitting in a pile on his lawn.
Panicked, he scooped them up and took them into the
back, where he grabbed a shovel and started digging a
hole.
His mother stepped out back and caught Seth in the act
of burying the evidence.
“You know I have to tell the school now, right?” she said.
Seth was brought into the principal’s office and
interrogated, but he refused to name Max. One by one, the
other Meridian High geeks were dragged in by the school’s
uniformed security officer for questioning, some in
handcuffs. When it was John’s turn, he spilled the beans.
The school called the police, who found a telltale yellow
iodine stain in the back of Max’s Nissan.
The chemical theft was taken very seriously in Meridian.
Max was expelled from school and prosecuted as a
juvenile. He pleaded guilty to malicious injury to property,
first-degree burglary, and grand theft, and spent two weeks
at an in-care facility under psychiatric evaluation, where the
staff diagnosed him as bipolar. His final sentence was
probation. His mother sent him to Boise to live with his
father and attend Bishop Kelly, the only Catholic high
school in the state.
Max’s first criminal conviction was a minor one. But the
impulsiveness and mischievousness that spawned it ran
deep in Max’s personality. And he was destined to hold a
lot more master keys.

2

Deadly Weapons
HIS is the Rec Room!!!!
This large, darkened room has no obvious exits. A
crowd relaxes on pillows in front of a giant screen TV, and
there is a fully stocked fridge and a bar.
Those words welcomed visitors to TinyMUD, an online
virtual world contained in a beige computer the size of a
minifridge squatting on the floor of a Pittsburgh graduate
student’s office. In 1990, hundreds of people from around
the globe projected into the world over the Internet. Max,
now a freshman at Boise State University, was one of them.
The Internet was seven years old then, and about three
million people had access through a measly three hundred
thousand host computers at defense contractors, military
sites, and, increasingly, colleges and universities. In
academia, the Net was once seen as too important to
expose directly to undergraduates, but that was changing,
and now any decent U.S. college allowed students online.
MUDs—“multi-user dungeons”—became a favorite
hangout.
Like most everything else on the pre-Web Internet, a
MUD was a purely textual experience—a universe defined
entirely by prose and navigated by simple commands like
“north” and “south.” TinyMUD was distinct as the first online
world to shrug off the Dungeons and Dragons–inspired
rules that had shackled earlier MUDs. Instead of limiting the
power of creation to select administrators and “wizards,” for
example, TinyMUD granted all its inhabitants the ability to
alter the world around them. Anyone could create a space
of his own, define its attributes, mark its borders, and

receive visitors. Inhabitants quickly anointed the user-
created recreation room the world’s social hub, building off
it until its exits and entrances connected directly to
TinyMUD spaces like Ghondahrl’s Flat, Majik’s Perversion
Palace, and two hundred other locales.
Also gone from TinyMUD was the D & D–style reward
system that emphasized collecting wealth, finishing quests,
and slaying monsters. Now, instead of doing battle with
orcs and building up their characters’ experience points,
users talked, flirted, fought, and had virtual sex. It turned out
that freeing the game from the constraints of Tolkienesque
roleplay made it more like real life and added to its
addictive power. A common joke had it that MUD really
stood for “multi-undergraduate destroyer.” For Max, that
would prove more than just a joke.
At Max’s urging, his girlfriend Amy had joined him in one
of the TinyMUDs.* The original at Carnegie Mellon
University had closed in April, but by then the same free
software was powering several successor MUDs scattered
around the Net. Max became Lord Max, and Amy took the
name Cymoril, after a tragic heroine in Michael Moorcock’s
Elric of Melniboné series of books and short stories—
some of Max’s favorites.
In the stories, Cymoril is the beloved of Elric, a weak
albino transformed into a fearsome wizard emperor by dint
of a magic sword called Stormbringer. To Max, the fictional
sword was a metaphor for the power of a computer—
properly wielded, it might turn an ordinary man into a king.
But for Elric, Stormbringer was also a curse: He was bound
to the sword, fought to tame it, and was ultimately mastered
by it instead.
Elric’s epic, doomed romance with Cymoril was very
much of a piece with the fraught, uncompromising vision of
romantic love Max had formed after his parents’ divorce:
Cymoril meets her fate during a battle between Elric and
his hated cousin Yyrkoon. Cymoril pleads with Elric to
sheath Stormbringer and stop the fight, but Elric,

sheath Stormbringer and stop the fight, but Elric,
possessed by rage, presses on, striking Yyrkoon with a
mortal blow. With his last breath, Yyrkoon exacts a
heartbreaking revenge, pushing Cymoril onto the tip of
Stormbringer.
Then the dark truth dawned on his clearing brain
and he moaned in grief, like an animal. He had slain
the girl he loved. The runesword fell from his grasp,
stained by Cymoril’s lifeblood, and clattered
unheeded down the stairs. Sobbing now, Elric
dropped beside the dead girl and lifted her in his
arms.
“Cymoril,” he moaned, his whole body throbbing.
“Cymoril—I have slain you.”
When she first met Max, Amy thought he was cool,
rebellious, and kind of punky—different from the usual
Boise crowd. But as they spent every free moment
together, she began to see a darker, obsessive side to his
personality, particularly after he introduced her to the
Internet and TinyMUD.
At first Max was thrilled that his girlfriend shared his
passion for the online world. But as Amy started making
friends of her own in the MUD, including guys, he became
jealous and combative. To Max it made no difference if
Amy was cheating on him in the virtual world or the real
one: It was cheating either way. He tried to get her to stop
logging on, but she refused, and the couple began arguing
online and off.
Eventually, Amy’d had enough; they were arguing about a
stupid computer game? On a Wednesday night in early
October 1990, the couple were in another user’s room in
TinyMUD when Cymoril finally told Lord Max that she wasn’t
sure they really belonged together after all.
It was Max’s first serious relationship, and his reaction
was powerful. They had sworn to spend their lives united.

Now they should both die, rather than be parted, he wrote in
the MUD. Then he got explicit, telling her how he’d kill her.
Other users watched with growing concern as his raging
took on the tone of a serious threat. What should they do?
One of the in-world wizards got Max’s Internet IP address
from the server—a unique identifier that was easily traced
to Boise State University. The MUDers looked up the
phone number for the Ada County Sheriff’s Department in
Boise and called in a warning that a potential murder-
suicide was unfolding.
The year had begun hopefully for Max. He excelled at the
part-time job his dad gave him at his computer store,
HiTech Systems, performing clerical work, making
deliveries in the company van, and assembling PC-
compatible computers in the shop. And he managed to
stay clean of probation violations—though he’d stopped
taking his bipolar medication; his father didn’t want him
drugged, and, anyway, Max didn’t agree with the diagnosis.
He began dating Amy in February of 1990, four months
after meeting her at the Zoo, a dance club in Boise that
catered to an underage crowd. A year younger than Max,
she was blond, blue-eyed, and, when he first saw her, on
the arm of Max’s friend Luke Sheneman, one of the former
Meridian key bearers. As Max finished up his last year in
high school, they began getting serious.
Max did nothing in half measures, and his devotion to
Amy was absolute. She planned on attending Boise State
University, so Max applied there, postponing his dream of
attending CMU or MIT. He brought her home to meet his
computer, and the couple played Tetris together. Their
relationship was everything his parents’ hadn’t been. They
both thought it would never end.
His old friends barely saw him over summer break. Then
the fall term began at Boise State. Max declared a major in
computer science and enrolled in a battery of courses:

calculus, chemistry, and a computer class on data
structures. Like all students, he was given an account on
the school’s shared UNIX system. Like a few of them, he
started hacking the computer right away. Max’s path was
eased by another student, David, who’d already worried his
way into a bunch of the faculty accounts. They spent hours
in the BSU terminal room, staring at the luminous green text
of the terminals and banging on the clacky keyboards.
They’d skim through faculty e-mail boxes while holding long,
silent conversations, shooting messages back and forth
across the room through the computer. David struggled to
keep up with Max’s overclocked mind and typing speed,
and Max would often get impatient. “What are you waiting
for?” Max would type when David fell behind in the
conversation. “Respond.”
A little local hacking was generally tolerated by
administrators. But then Max started poking at the
defenses of other Internet systems, earning him a brief ban
from the BSU computer. When his access was restored, he
was back on TinyMUD, fighting with Amy.
The sheriff called BSU’s network administrator at two in the
morning to tell him about the murder-suicide threat. The
police wanted a copy of Max’s computer files to examine
for evidence—a request that raised difficult privacy issues
for the college. After some discussion with the university’s
lawyer, administrators decided not to voluntarily hand over
anything. Instead, they’d preserve Max’s files on a
computer tape and lock Max out of the computer at once.
Amy worried about what Max might do next, even as she
pressed through the slow process of breaking up with him.
She still cared about Max, she’d later testify, and was afraid
he’d really hurt himself.
Max continued to call her after the TinyMUD incident, and
the conversations followed a predictable pattern. Max
would start off nice—showing the friendly, caring side that

his friends and family knew well. Then he’d escalate into
self-pity and threats before hanging up in anger.
On October 30, Max told Amy he wanted to talk to her in
person. Still hoping to end the relationship amicably—she
was bound to see Max on campus, and she didn’t want him
hating her—Amy agreed to come over.
Max had just moved back to his mother’s home in
Meridian, a ranchstyle house on a quiet street a block from
his old high school. He met Amy at the door, and after
reassuring her that he wouldn’t do anything crazy, she
followed him to his bedroom at the back of his house. His
mother was out, and his fourteen-year-old sister was
watching TV.
His bed was still disassembled, so they sat together on
the mattress on the floor and began discussing their
feelings. Amy admitted that she’d met another boy in
TinyMUD. His name was Chad, and he lived in North
Carolina. The relationship had moved beyond the
keyboard; they’d sent each other photos in the mail, and
she’d been calling him on the phone.
Max struggled to control his feelings, holding back tears.
He felt betrayed, he said. At the same time, he couldn’t
quite believe what he was hearing. He asked her for
Chad’s phone number, produced a calling card, and dialed
his online rival.
A strained three-way conversation followed; Max
introduced himself to Chad and then let Amy take over. She
told Chad how she felt. Then Chad asked Amy for her
phone number. She gave it to him, and the conversation
drifted into an idle banter that only added to Max’s
agitation. He grabbed at the phone and hung it up.
Amy watched Max carefully as his breathing intensified
and his eyes darted around the room.
“I’m going to kill you,” he finally said. “I’m going to—you’re
going to die now.”
She told Max that she didn’t feel like she’d betrayed him,
and she wouldn’t apologize. Max began trembling. Then his

and she wouldn’t apologize. Max began trembling. Then his
hands were around her throat and he was pushing her
down onto the mattress.
“Fine,” she said. “Why don’t you just kill me then?”
Once Max regained his self-control, he wanted Amy out
of his sight. He pulled her from the mattress, pushed her out
of his bedroom, and shuffled her through the house and out
the front door.
“Go, now,” he said. “Just get out, because I don’t want to
kill you. But I might change my mind.” Amy jumped into her
car and took off fast.
As she headed back to Boise, she replayed the events in
her mind. Lost in thought, she didn’t see the other car until
she was slamming into it with a jolt and the crunch of metal
against metal.
Both cars were totaled, but no one was seriously hurt.
When Amy’s parents learned about the confrontation at
Max’s house, though, they began to fear for her life. A week
after the accident, Amy went to the police, and Max was
arrested.
Max told his friends that Amy was exaggerating the
incident. In Amy’s version of events, Max had kept her
prisoner in his bedroom for an hour, his hands returning to
her throat repeatedly, at one point briefly cutting off her
breathing. In Max’s version, he’d put his fingers loosely on
her throat for one minute, but he hadn’t choked her, and she
was always free to leave. Amy said Max continued to
phone her obsessively after the incident, issuing more
threats; Max said he left her alone after pushing her out of
his house. As far as Max was concerned, Amy was
sacrificing him to get out of trouble for her car accident.
The county prosecutor offered Max a misdemeanor deal.
But a month before he was scheduled to receive a forty-
five-day slap on the wrist from the judge, Max—free on his
own recognizance—spotted Amy walking hand in hand with
a new boyfriend down University Avenue.

Once again, Max’s emotions overrode his common
sense. On impulse he pulled his father’s repair-shop van
onto a lawn and caught up with the couple on foot. His body
was tight with tension as he circled the pair.
“Hi,” he said.
“You’re not supposed to be around me,” Amy said in
protest.
“Don’t you remember what we used to have?”
Amy’s escort spoke up, and Max gave him a warning:
“Better watch yourself, friend.” Then he stalked off. A
moment later, the roar of an engine. Max was back in the
van, zooming across the center line toward the couple on
the sidewalk. He passed close enough for Amy to feel the
wind from the van as it tore off.
The deal was canceled. The district attorney stretched
the law to slam Max with a felony charge of assault with a
deadly weapon—his hands. It was a questionable charge:
Max’s hands were no deadlier a weapon than anyone
else’s.
The prosecution offered him a new deal: nine months in
jail, if Max would admit to choking Amy. He refused. After a
three-day trial, and just an hour and a half of deliberation,
the jury found him guilty. On May 13, 1991, Tim Spencer
and some of the other Meridian High geeks sat in the
courtroom and watched as Judge Deborah Bail sentenced
their friend to five years in prison.
* Amy is not her real name.

3

The Hungry Programmers
ax found Tim Spencer’s house perched at a summit
in the hills separating the suburban sprawl of the San
Francisco Peninsula from the quiet, undeveloped towns
clinging to the Pacific coast. But “house” was too small a
word. It was a villa, six thousand square feet sprawling
across a fifty-acre plot overlooking the sleepy coastal town
of Half Moon Bay. Max passed through the entranceway
columns to the double front doors and entered the
cavernous living room, where a curved wall of windows
stretched from floor to ceiling.
It was a year after his parole, and Max had come to San
Francisco to start over. Tim and some of his friends from
Idaho had been renting the house they called “Hungry
Manor,” the name a reference to their first enterprise when
they’d migrated to the Bay Area a year earlier. They’d
planned to bootstrap into the Silicon Valley economy by
forming a computer consulting business called the Hungry
Programmers—will code for food. Instead, the valley
quickly metabolized the geeks into full-time employment,
and the Hungry Programmers morphed into an unofficial
club for Tim’s friends from Meridian High and the University
of Idaho, two dozen in all. Hungry Manor was the group’s
party house and home to five of them. Max would be the
sixth.
Max walked into Hungry Manor with few belongings but
lots of baggage, not least a deep bitterness over his
treatment by the justice system. In 1993, while Max was on
his second year in prison, Idaho’s Supreme Court ruled in a
similar case that hands “or other body parts or

appendages” couldn’t be considered deadly weapons.
That meant Max should never have been convicted of
aggravated assault. Despite the ruling, Max’s own appeal
was denied on procedural grounds: The judge conceded
that Max was technically not guilty of the felony for which he
was serving time, but his old lawyer had failed to raise the
issue in an earlier appeal, and it was too late now.
When Max was finally paroled on April 26, 1995, he left
knowing that he’d served more than four years in the Idaho
State Penitentiary for what, by law, should have been a
misdemeanor worth sixty days in the county jail. He’d
served hard time on an unjust sentence, while beyond the
prison fence his friends had gone off to college, earned
four-year degrees, then left Idaho to start promising
careers.
He’d moved in with his dad near Seattle, and Tim, Seth,
and Luke drove up from San Francisco for a reunion party
of the old Meridian High geeks. They marveled at Max’s
prison-enhanced physique and his seemingly boundless
optimism, despite having no degree and a serious felony
conviction on his record. Max knew it was a time of
opportunity: A British computer scientist had created the
World Wide Web three months after Max’s sentencing.
Now there were nearly nineteen thousand websites,
including one for the White House. Dial-up Internet service
providers were surfacing in every major city, and America
Online and CompuServe were adding Web access to their
offerings.
Everyone was going online; Max was no longer the
weirdo, addicted to a network nobody had heard of. Now, it
turned out, he’d been at the head of a pack that was
growing to include millions of people. Yet, thanks to his
record, Max struggled to win computer employment in
Seattle, working odd tech-support jobs through a temp
agency.
Online, Max was hanging out in some rough
neighborhoods. Looking for the technical challenges his

neighborhoods. Looking for the technical challenges his
day jobs denied him, Max returned to a network of chat
rooms called IRC, Internet relay chat, a surviving vestige of
the old Internet of his teenage years. When he’d gone to
prison, IRC had been a social hotspot. But with the
gentrification of the Net, most inhabitants moved uptown to
easy-to-use instant messaging clients and Web-based chat
systems. Those who remained on IRC tended to be either
hard-core geeks or disreputable sorts—hackers and
pirates scheming in the forgotten tunnels and alleyways
below the whitewashed, commercialized Internet growing
above them.
Max fancied himself an invisible, spectral presence in
cyberspace. He chose “Ghost23” as his IRC identity—23
was his lucky number, and among other meanings it was
the I Ching hexagram representing chaos. He floated into
the IRC “warez” scene, where scofflaws build their
reputations by pirating music, commercial software, and
games. There, Max’s computer skills found an appreciative
audience. Max found an unprotected FTP file server at an
ISP in Littleton, Colorado, and turned it into a cache for
stolen software for himself and his new friends, stocked
with bootlegged copies of programs like NetXray, Laplink,
and Symantec’s pcAnywhere.
It was a mistake. The ISP noticed the drain on its
bandwidth and traced Max’s uploads to the corporate
offices of CompuServe in Bellevue, where Max had just
started working a new temp job. Max was fired. Barely a
year after his release from prison, his name was mud.
That was when Max decided to start over again in Silicon
Valley, where the dot-com economy was swelling to
ripeness and a talented computer genius could pick up
work without a lot of questions about his past.
He’d need a new name, unstained by his past folly. Max
had been known by a nickname in the joint, one
abbreviated from a cyberpunk-themed ’zine he’d published
from the prison typewriter: Maximum Vision. It was a clean,

optimistic name that exemplified everything he wanted to
be and crystallized his clarity and hopefulness.
As he left Seattle in the rearview mirror, he said good-
bye to Max Butler. From now on, he would be Max Ray
Vision.
• • •
Max Vision found that life in Hungry Manor was good.
Surrounded by rolling meadows on all sides, the house
boasted two wings, four bedrooms, a maid’s quarters, a full
dining room, a livestock pen, and a brick pizza oven and
indoor barbecue in a vented room adjoining the vast, sunlit
kitchen. The Hungries had turned the library into a computer
lab and server room, packing in a slew of custom-built
gaming PCs for recreation. They ran networking cable into
every room and energized it with a high-speed Internet link
that necessitated the partial shutdown of the 92 freeway as
the phone company trenched a new cable run alongside the
road. A vintage phone system linked the west wing to the
east. As a finishing touch, one of the Hungry Programmers
had brought in a hot tub and set it up on the grounds, under
the stars.
Max couldn’t have asked for a better launchpad for his
new life. One of the resident Hungries got him a job as a
system administrator at MPath Interactive, a computer
gaming start-up in Silicon Valley that was flush with venture
capital. He threw himself into the job. Defying the
stereotype of a computer nerd, he drew his greatest
satisfaction from his support duties. He liked helping
people.
But it wasn’t long before Max’s antics in Seattle caught
up with him. One morning, a process server showed up at
his cubicle to hand him a $300,000 lawsuit filed by the
Software Publishers Association—an industry group that
had decided to use his piracy bust to send a message.
“This action is a warning to Internet users who believe they

can infringe software copyrights without fear of exposure or
penalty,” the association proclaimed in a press release.
As the first lawsuit of its kind, the case earned Max Butler
a brief write-up in Wired magazine and a mention in a
congressional hearing on Internet piracy. Max Vision,
though, emerged largely unscathed—few in his new life
made the connection to the man named in the high-profile
lawsuit.
When the press attention faded, the SPA was willing to
quietly settle the case for $3,500 and some free computer
consulting. The whole affair even had a silver lining. It
introduced Max to the FBI.
Chris Beeson, a young agent with the bureau’s San
Francisco computer crime squad, gave Max his pitch. The
FBI could use Max’s assistance navigating the computer
underground. Recreational hackers were no longer a target
for the bureau, he said. There was a new, more dangerous
breed of computer criminal emerging: “real” criminals. They
were cyberthieves, pedophiles, even terrorists. The FBI
was no longer chasing people like Max and his ilk. “We’re
not the enemy,” said Beeson.
Max wanted to help, and in March 1997 he was formally
inducted into the FBI’s Criminal Informant program. His first
written report for the bureau was an introductory course on
the virus-writing, warez, and computer-hacking scenes. His
follow-up report ten days later ran down compromised file-
transfer sites—like the one he’d exploited in Seattle—and
a music piracy gang called Rabid Neurosis that had
debuted the previous October with a bootlegged release of
Metallica’s Ride the Lightning.
When Max got his hands on a pirated version of
AutoCAD that was being circulated by a crew called
SWAT, the FBI rewarded him with a $200 payment.
Beeson had Max sign the receipt with the bureau’s code
name for its new asset: Equalizer.

Max liked the FBI agent, and the feeling seemed to be
mutual. Neither of them knew that Chris Beeson would one
day put his Equalizer back behind bars and begin Max’s
transformation into one of the “real” criminals Beeson had
hoped to catch.

4

The White Hat
ax was building his new life at a time of profound
change in the hacking world.
The first people to identify themselves as hackers were
software and electronics students at MIT in the 1960s. They
were smart kids who took an irreverent, antiauthoritarian
approach to the technology they would wind up pioneering
—a scruffy counterweight to the joyless suit and lab-jacket
culture then epitomized by the likes of IBM. Pranks were a
part of the hacker culture, and so was phone phreaking—
the usually illegal exploration of the forbidden back roads of
the telephone network. But hacking was above all a
creative effort, one that would lead to countless watershed
moments in computer history.
The word “hacker” took on darker connotations in the
early 1980s, when the first home computers—the
Commodore 64s, the TRS-80s, the Apples—came to
teenagers’ bedrooms in suburbs and cities around the
United States. The machines themselves were a product of
hacker culture; the Apple II, and with it the entire home
computer concept, was born of two Berkeley phone
phreaks named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. But not all
teenagers were content with the machines, and in the
impatience of youth, they weren’t inclined to wait for grad
school to dip into real processing power or to explore the
global networks that could be reached with a phone call
and the squeal of a modem. So they began illicit forays into
corporate, government, and academic systems and took
their first tentative steps into the ARPANET, the Internet’s
forerunner.

When those first young intruders began getting busted in
1983, the national press cast about for a word to describe
them and settled on the one the kids had given themselves:
“hackers.” Like the previous generation of hackers, they
were pushing the limits of technology, outwitting the
establishment, and doing things that were supposed to be
impossible. But for them, that involved breaching corporate
computers, taking over telephone switches, and slipping
into government systems, universities, and defense
contractor networks. The older generation winced at the
comparison, but from that point on, the word “hacker” would
have two meanings: a talented programmer who pulled
himself up by his own bootstraps, and a recreational
computer intruder. Adding to the confusion, many hackers
were both.
Now, in the mid-1990s, the hacking community was
dividing again. The FBI and the Secret Service had staged
arrests of high-profile intruders like Kevin Mitnick and Mark
“Phiber Optik” Abene, a New York phone phreak, and the
prospect of prison stigmatized recreational intrusion while
raising the risk far beyond the rewards of ego and
adventure. The impetus for cracking computers was fading
as well: The Internet was open to anyone now, and personal
computers had grown powerful enough to run the same
operating systems and programming languages that fueled
the big machines denied to amateurs. Most of all, there
was real money to be made defending computers and
none attacking them.
Cracking systems was becoming uncool. Those
possessed of a hacker’s mind-set were increasingly
rejecting intrusion and going right into legitimate security
work. And the intruders started hanging up their black hats
to join them. They became the “white-hat hackers”—
referencing the square-jawed heroes in old cowboy films—
applying their computer skills on the side of truth and
justice.
Max thought of himself as one of the white hats. Watching

Max thought of himself as one of the white hats. Watching
for new types of attacks and emerging vulnerabilities was
now in his job description, and as Max Vision, he was
beginning to contribute to some of the computer-security
mailing lists where the latest developments were
discussed. But he couldn’t completely exorcise Ghost23
from his personality. It was an open secret among Max’s
friends that he was still cracking systems. When he saw
something novel or interesting, he saw no harm in trying it
out for himself.
Tim was at work one day when he got a call from a
flummoxed system administrator at another company who’d
traced an intrusion back to Hungry.com—the online home
of the Hungry Programmers, where they hosted their
projects, hung their résumés, and maintained e-mail
addresses that would remain steady through job changes
and other upheavals. There were dozens of geeks on the
shared system, but Tim knew at once who was responsible.
He put the sysadmin on hold and phoned up Max.
“Stop. Hacking. Now,” he said.
Max stammered out an apology—it was the burning lawn
all over again. Tim switched back to the other line, where
the system administrator happily reported that the attack
had stopped in its tracks.
The complaint surprised and confused Max—if his
targets knew what a good guy he was, they wouldn’t take
issue with some harmless intrusions. “Max, you gotta get
permission,” Tim explained. He offered some life advice.
“Look, just sort of imagine that everyone’s looking at you.
That’s a good way to ensure that what you’re doing is
correct. If I was standing there, or your dad was standing
there, would you still feel the same about doing it? What
would we say?”
If there was one thing Max was missing in his new life, it
was a partner to share it with. He met twenty-year-old Kimi
Winters at a rave called Warmth, held on an empty

warehouse floor in the city—Max had become a fixture in
the rave scene, dancing with a surprising, fluid grace,
whirling his arms like a Brazilian flame dancer. Kimi was a
community college student and part-time barista. A foot
shorter than Max, she sported an androgynous appearance
in the shapeless black hoodie she liked to wear when she
went out. But on a second look, she was decidedly cute,
with apple cheeks and her Korean mother’s copper-tinted
skin. Max invited Kimi to a party at his place.
The parties at Hungry Manor were legendary, and when
Kimi arrived the living room was already packed with
dozens of party guests from Silicon Valley’s keyboard class
—programmers, system administrators, and Web
designers—mingling under the glass chandelier. Max lit up
when he spotted her. He led her on a tour of the house,
pointing out the geeky accoutrements the Hungry
Programmers had added.
The tour ended in Max’s bedroom in Hungry Manor’s
east wing. For all of the grandeur of the house, Max’s room
had the charm of a monk’s cell—no furniture but a futon on
the floor, no comforts except a computer. For the party, Max
had trained blue and red spotlights on a bottle of
peppermint schnapps—his only vice. Kimi returned for
dinner the next night, and there was a single item on his
vegetarian menu: raw cookie dough. Max shaved the
sugary sludge off in slices and served it to his date with the
schnapps. Why, after all, would anyone not eat raw cookie
dough for dinner, given the option?
Kimi was intrigued. Max needed so little to be happy. He
was like a child. When his birthday came soon after the
party, she sent a decorated box of balloons to his office at
MPath, and Max was moved nearly to tears by the gesture.
She was his “dream girl,” he told her later. They began to
talk about committing to a life together.
In September, Hungry Manor’s landlord, unhappy with the
programmers’ upkeep of the estate, reclaimed the house,

and after a final bash to bid farewell to their communal
mansion, the Hungries scattered to rentals throughout the
Bay Area. Max and Kimi landed in their own place in
Mountain View, a cramped studio in a barracks-like
apartment complex alongside the 101 freeway, Silicon
Valley’s congested main artery.
Max resumed his work for the FBI, and his haunting of
IRC led him to a new opportunity—his chance to break out
as a white-hat hacker. He’d made a friend in the chat
rooms who was starting a real consulting business in San
Francisco and was interested in bringing Max on board.
Max went up to the city to visit Matt Harrigan, aka, “Digital
Jesus.”
Harrigan, just twenty-two, was one of four white hats who’d
been profiled in a Forbes cover story the previous year,
and he’d cannily used his fifteen minutes of fame to win
some seed money for a business: a professional hacking
shop in San Francisco’s financial district.
The idea was simple: Corporations would pay his
company, Microcosm Computer Resources, to put their
networks through a real hack attack, culminating in a
detailed report on the client’s security strengths and
weaknesses. The business of “penetration testing”—as it
was called—had been dominated by the Big Five
accounting firms, but Harrigan was already signing up
clients by admitting something that no accounting firm
would ever announce: that his experience came from real-
life hacking, and he was freely hiring other ex-hackers.
MCR would be billing out between $300 and $400 an
hour, Harrigan explained. Max would work as a
subcontractor, making $100 to $150. All for doing two of
the things he liked most in the world: hacking into shit and
writing reports.
Max had found his niche. It turned out his single-
mindedness made him a natural at penetration testing: He

was immune to frustration, hammering at a client’s network
for hours, moving from one attack vector to another until he
found a way in.
With Max making real money at MCR, Kimi quit her job
as a barista and found more rewarding work teaching
autistic students. The couple moved from the cramped
apartment in Mountain View to a duplex in San Jose. In
March, they got married in a church on a college campus in
Lakewood, Washington, where Kimi’s family lived.
Tim Spencer and most of the Hungry Programmers went
up to Washington to see their problem child married off.
Max’s parents, his sister, Kimi’s family, and scores of
friends and extended family showed up for the ceremony.
Max wore a tuxedo and a broad grin, and Kimi glowed in
her white wedding dress and veil. Surrounded by family and
beloved friends, they were a picture-perfect young couple
beginning a life together.
They posed outside: Kimi’s father, a military man, stood
proudly in his dress uniform, her mother in a traditional
Korean hanbok. Flanked by his own parents, Max beamed
at the camera, while storm clouds gathered overhead in the
Pacific Northwest sky.
It was three years almost to the day since Max walked
out of prison, and he had everything now—a devoted wife,
a promising career as a white-hat hacker, a nice home. In
just a few weeks, he’d throw it all away.

5

Cyberwar!
ack home in San Francisco, a temptation was waiting
for Max, written in computer code.
bcopy (fname, anbuf, alen = (char *)*cpp - fname);
It was one line of nine thousand comprising the Berkeley
Internet Name Domain, an ancient girder in the Internet’s
infrastructure, as important as any router or fiber-optic
cable. Developed in the early 1980s with a grant from the
Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA), BIND implemented the scalable Domain Name
System, a kind of distributed telephone directory that
translates strings like Yahoo.com, which humans
understand, into the numeric addresses the network
comprehends. Without BIND, or one of the competing
programs that followed, we’d be getting our online news
from 157.166.226.25 instead of CNN.com and visiting
74.125.67.100 to perform a Google search.
BIND was one of the innovations that made the explosive
growth of the Internet possible—it replaced a crude
mechanism that couldn’t have expanded with the Net. But in
the 1990s, it was also one of the legacy programs that
were shaping up as the modern Internet’s biggest security
problem. The code was a product of a simpler time, when
the network was cloistered and threats were few. Now
hackers were plumbing its depths and coming back with a
seemingly endless supply of security holes.
A high priesthood of network experts called the Internet
Software Consortium appointed themselves keepers of the

code and had begun furiously rewriting it. But in the
meantime, the most modern, sophisticated networks in the
world, with sparkling new servers and workstations, were
running a buggy computer program from another age.
In 1998, security experts discovered the latest flaw in the
code. It boiled down to that single line. It accepted an
inquiry from the Internet, as it should, and copied it byte for
byte into the temporary buffer “anbuf” in the server’s
memory. But it didn’t properly check the size of the
incoming data. Consequently, a hacker could transmit a
deliberately overlong query to a BIND server, overflow the
buffer, and spill data into the rest of the computer’s memory
like oil from the Exxon Valdez.
Performed haphazardly, such an attack would cause the
program to crash. But a careful hacker could do much
worse. He could load the buffer with his own small snippet
of executable computer code, then he could keep going,
tripping cautiously all the way to the top of the program’s
memory space, where a special short-term storage area
called the “stack” resides.
The stack is where the computer’s processor keeps
track of what it’s doing—every time a program diverts the
computer off to a subroutine, the processor pushes its
current memory address onto the stack, like a bookmark,
so it knows where to return to when it’s done.
Once a hacker is in the stack, he can overwrite the last
return address with the location of his own malicious
payload. When the computer is done with the current
subroutine, it returns not to where it began, but to the
hacker’s instruction—and because BIND runs under the all-
powerful administrative “root” account, the attacker’s code
does as well. The computer is now under the hacker’s
control.
Two weeks after Max and Kimi’s wedding, the
government-funded Computer Emergency Response Team
at Carnegie Mellon University—which runs a kind of

Emergency Broadcast System for security holes—issued
an alert about the BIND flaw, along with a link to the simple
fix: two additional lines of computer code that rejected
overlong queries. But CERT packaged its alert with two
other BIND vulnerabilities that were of little consequence
and understated the importance of the hole. Consequently,
not everyone appreciated the gravity of the situation.
Max understood perfectly.
He read the CERT advisory with amazement. BIND
came installed standard with Linux, and it ran on servers on
corporate, ISP, nonprofit, educational, and military
networks. It was everywhere. And so was the defective line
of code. The only thing holding back a feeding frenzy of
attacks was that nobody had written a program to exploit
the security hole. But that was just a matter of time.
Sure enough, on May 18, an exploit program showed up
on Rootshell.com, a computer security news site run by
hobbyists. Max picked up the phone and called his FBI
contact, Chris Beeson, at home. The situation was serious,
he explained. Anybody who hadn’t installed the BIND patch
could now be hacked by any script kiddy capable of
downloading a program and typing a command.
If history was a guide, government computers would be
particularly vulnerable. Just a month earlier, a less serious
bug in the Sun Solaris operating system had led to a
hacker cracking computers at a dozen U.S. military bases,
in what a deputy defense secretary called “the most
organized and systematic attack to date” on American
defense systems. Those attacks had set off a full-blown
cyberwarfare false alarm: The Pentagon gave the intrusions
the code name “Solar Sunrise” and considered Saddam
Hussein the prime suspect until investigators traced the
attacks to a young Israeli hacker who was just playing
around.
Max called Beeson again the next day, when a hacker
group named ADM released a weaponized version of the
BIND exploit designed to scan the Internet at random

BIND exploit designed to scan the Internet at random
looking for unpatched servers, then break in, install itself,
and use the newly compromised computer as a platform for
still more scans and break-ins. It was a certainty now that
someone was going to own the entire Internet. It was just a
question of who.
He hung up and pondered. Someone was going to do it.
…
He shared his plans with his new wife in boyish, excited
tones. Max would author his own BIND attack. His version
would close the hole everywhere it found it, like releasing
sterile fruit flies to tamp down an infestation. He would limit
his attack to the targets most in need of an emergency
security upgrade: U.S. military and civilian government
sites.
“Don’t get caught,” said Kimi, who’d learned not to argue
with Max when he was like this, his mind hostage to an
idea.
Max was struggling with the binary nature of his
personality: the professional married man with a stake in
the world around him, and the impulsive child tempted by
every call to mischief. The child won. He sat at his keyboard
and plunged into furious programming.
His code would operate in three rapid-fire stages. It
would begin by flinging a virtual grappling hook through the
BIND hole, executing commands that forced the machine to
reach out over the Internet and import a 230-byte script.
That script, in turn, would connect it to a different host
infiltrated by Max, where it would download a hefty package
of evil called a “rootkit.”
A rootkit is a bundle of standard system programs that
have been corrupted to secretly serve the hacker: A new
login program operates just like the real thing but now
includes a back door through which the intruder can reenter
the machine. The “passwd” program still lets users change
their passwords but also quietly records and stores the new

password where it can be retrieved later. The new list
program lists the contents of a directory, as it should, but
takes care to conceal any files that are part of the rootkit.
Once the rootkit was in place, Max’s code would
accomplish what the government failed to do: It would
upgrade the hacked computer to the latest version of BIND,
closing the security hole through which it had entered. The
computer would now be safe from any future attacks, but
Max, the benevolent meddler, would still be able to reenter
the system at will. Max was at once fixing the problem and
exploiting it; he was a black hat and a white hat at the same
time.
The whole attack would take just a couple of minutes
each time. One moment, the computer would be controlled
by the system administrators; then, grappling hook,
download script, rootkit, and it was in Max’s pocket.
Max was still programming when the FBI got back to him
and asked for a full report on the BIND hole. But the feds
had had their chance; Max’s code would speak for him
now. He took a moment to crack a couple of college
machines to use as a staging ground, then, on May 21, a
Tuesday, he dialed the Internet through a stolen Verio
account … and launched.
The results were instant and highly satisfying. Max’s
grappling-hook code was designed to signal its success to
his computer over the Verio dial-up, so he could watch the
attack spread. Hacked machines around the country
reported back to him, an Xterm window popping up on his
screen for each one. Brooks Air Force Base—now
property of Max Vision. Mc-Chord, Tinker, Offutt, Scott,
Maxwell, Kirtland, Keesler, Robins. His code wormed into
Air Force servers, Army computers, a machine in the office
of a cabinet secretary. Each machine now had a back door
that Max could use any time he wanted.
Max was notching up military conquests like points in a

video game. When his code swept into the Navy’s Internet
space, it found so many unpatched BIND servers that the
stream of pop-ups turned into a torrent. His own computer
struggled under the strain, then crashed.
After some fine-tuning, he relaunched. For five days he
was absorbed in his growing dominion over cyberspace.
He ignored e-mail from the FBI, who still wanted that report.
“Where’s the stuff?” Agent Beeson wrote. “Please call.”
There had to be more he could do with the power to
crack almost any network he wanted. Max trained his BIND
exploit on the servers of Id Software in Mesquite, Texas, a
gaming company developing a third installment of the
enormously popular first-person shooter Quake. Max loved
first-person shooters. He was on the network in a flash, and
after some exploring, he emerged with his trophy. He
announced to Kimi that he’d just obtained the source code
—the virtual blueprints—for Quake III, the most anticipated
game of the year.
Kimi was unmoved. “Can you put it back?”
Max soon realized that his attacks were getting some
attention. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a
researcher named Vern Paxson spotted Max’s scanning
using a new system he’d developed called BRO, for Big
Brother. BRO was an experiment in a relatively new kind of
security countermeasure called an intrusion detection
system—a cyber burglar alarm with the sole function of
sitting quietly on a network and sifting through all the traffic
for suspicious activity, alerting administrators when it spots
something that doesn’t look right.
Paxson wrote a full report on the attack for CERT. Max
intercepted it and was impressed. The researcher had not
only detected his attack, he’d compiled a list of servers that
Max’s code was attacking through Lawrence Berkeley’s
network—Max was using the network as one of his
secondary launch points. He sent Paxson an anonymous
note from the lab’s root account.

Vern,
I’m sorry to have caused you any inconvenience, but I
single-handed fixed a MAJOR GAPING SECURITY
HOLE in many of your systems. I admit there were new
holes but these were all passworded, and I would
never cause damage to someone’s computer system.
If I didn’t hit these, someone else would have, and
they would have been dirty. These kids leave warez
and IRC BS laying everywhere, and /bin/rm systems
when they are unhappy. Lame.
You might not appreciate what I was doing, but it
was for the greater good. I am abandoning all hosts on
that list that you captured.… I am not touching those
systems since I know you turned them over to CERT.
CERT should hire people with my skill. Of course, if
paid I would never leave rootkits or such.
Pretty clever though? Heh. It was a blast. Owning
hundreds, nay thousands of systems, and knowing that
you were FIXING them on the way …
Uhm, I’m not ever doing this sort of shit again. You
have my tools now. That pisses me off …
Hrm. Anyway I just don’t want this to happen again,
so I’m going to let it lie …
“The Cracker”
With that, Max shut down his five-day attack on the
government, with more cracked systems behind him than
he could count. He was satisfied that he’d made the Internet
safer than it was before; thousands of computers that had
been vulnerable to every hacker in the world were now
vulnerable to only one: Max Vision.
Max immediately jumped into a new, more socially
acceptable project: He would write a Web application that
would let anyone on the Internet request an automatic real-
time scan of their network to assess whether or not they
were open to the BIND attack. He also conceived a benign

variant of the siege he’d just concluded. Like before, he
would scan government and military networks. But instead
of cracking the vulnerable computers, he’d automatically
send an e-mail warning to the administrators. There’d be
no need to hide behind a hacked dial-up account this time.
Both services would live on his brand-new public website:
Whitehats.com.
After two days and nights of work, he was knee-deep in
his new, legal hacking project when Beeson e-mailed
again. “What happened? Thought you’d send me e-mail.”
Max could hardly explain to his FBI friend that he’d been
busy staging one of the largest government computer
breaches in history. So he emphasized his new project
instead. “I am almost finished creating a public service
vulnerability scanner and patch site—but there are some
parts that aren’t ready for release,” he wrote back.
“Oh, and here is the ADM worm program,” he added. “I
don’t think it will spread very far.”

6

I Miss Crime
n the afternoon of June 2, Max opened the door of his
San Jose duplex to greet Chris Beeson and registered
instantly that he was in trouble: There were three other suits
with the FBI agent, including Beeson’s surly boss, Pete
Trahon, head of the computer crime squad.
The month after the BIND attack had been a busy time
for Max. He launched Whitehats.com, and it was an instant
success in the security world. In addition to housing his
scanning tool, the site collected the latest CERT advisories
and links to BIND software patches, as well as a paper Max
had written dissecting the ADM worm with the clarity and
the discerning eye of a connoisseur. Nobody in the
community suspected that Max Vision, the rising star
behind Whitehats.com, had personally provided the
brightest example of the seriousness of the BIND security
hole.
He was also continuing to file reports to the FBI. After his
last one, Beeson began e-mailing to arrange a casual
meeting, supposedly to go over Max’s latest findings. “How
’bout if we just meet at your place?” Beeson wrote. “I know I
have the address somewhere around here.”
Now that he was on Max’s doorstep, Beeson explained
why they were really there. He knew all about Max’s attack
on the Pentagon. One of the men with him, a young
Washington, DC–based Air Force investigator named Eric
Smith, had traced the BIND intrusions to Max’s house.
Beeson had a search warrant.
Max let them in, already apologizing. He only meant to
help, he explained.

They chatted amicably. Max, happy for an audience,
grew expansive, describing the twists and turns of his
attack and listening with interest as Smith described how
he’d tracked Max through the pop-up messages Max had
used to alert himself when a system was subverted: The
messages went to a Verio dial-up, and a subpoena to the
ISP produced Max’s phone number. It hadn’t been difficult.
Max had convinced himself he was doing something
positive for the Internet, so he hadn’t done much to cover
his tracks.
The feds asked if anyone had known what Max was up
to, and he said his boss was involved. Matt Harrigan—
Digital Jesus—had not completely given up hacking
himself, Max said, adding that Harrigan’s company was
about to get a contract with the National Security Agency.*
At the agents’ behest, Max wrote out a confession. “My
motives were purely for research and ‘to see if it could be
done,’ ” Max wrote. “I know this is no excuse, and believe
me, I am sorry for it, but it’s the truth.”
Kimi came home from school to find the feds still tossing
the house. Like grazing deer, they looked up in unison as
she entered, dismissed her as unthreatening, and turned
wordlessly back to their work. When they left, they hauled
Max’s computer equipment with them.
The door closed, leaving the newlyweds alone in what
was left of their home. An apology formed on Max’s lips.
Kimi cut him off angrily.
“I told you not to get caught!”
The FBI agents saw an opportunity in Max’s crime. Trahon
and Beeson returned to Max’s home and gave their former
ally the score. If Max hoped for leniency, he’d have to work
for them—and writing reports wasn’t going to cut it
anymore.
Eager to make amends and determined to salvage his
life and career, Max didn’t ask for anything in writing. He

took it on faith that if he helped the FBI agents, they would
help him.
Two weeks later, Max got his first assignment. A gang of
phone phreaks had just hijacked the phone system at the
networking company 3Com and were using it as their own
private teleconferencing facility. Beeson and Trahon could
dial into the illicit chat line, but they doubted their ability to
blend in with the hackers and gain any useful intelligence.
Max studied up on the latest phone phreaking methods,
then dialed into the system from the FBI’s field office while
the bureau recorded the call.
Dropping the names of hackers he knew and drawing on
his own expertise, Max easily persuaded the phone
phreaks that he was one of them. They opened up and
revealed that they were an international gang of about thirty-
five phone hackers called DarkCYDE, living mostly in
Britain and Ireland. DarkCYDE aspired to “unite Phreakers
and Hackers all over the world into one big digital army,”
according to the group’s blustery manifesto. But at root they
were just kids playing with the phone, just as Max had done
in high school. After the call, Beeson asked Max to stay
close to the gang. Max chatted them up on IRC and turned
over the logs to his handlers.
Pleased with Max’s work, the agents summoned him to
the federal building in San Francisco a week later to brief
him on a new assignment. This time, he’d be going to
Vegas.
Max’s eyes moved over the nest of linen-clad card tables in
the gaudy exhibit hall of the Plaza Hotel and Casino.
Dozens of young men in T-shirts and shorts or jeans—the
hacker’s uniform—were at the tables hunkered over a bank
of computer workstations or standing on the sidelines,
occasionally pointing at something on a screen.
To the untrained eye, it was a strange way to spend a
weekend in Sin City—banging on keyboards like some

anonymous cubical drone, far from the pool, the slots, and
the shows. But the hackers were in pitched competition,
working in teams to penetrate a clutch of computers
hanging off a hastily erected network. The first team to
leave their virtual marker in one of the targets would claim a
$250 prize and valuable bragging rights—with points also
awarded for hacking other competitors. New attacks and
ruses were flowing from the hackers’ fingers, and secret,
stockpiled exploits were being pulled from virtual armories
to be used in public for the first time.
At Def Con, the world’s largest hacking convention, the
Capture the Flag competition was Fischer vs. Spassky
every year.
Kimi wasn’t impressed, but Max was in heaven. Across
the floor, more tables were cluttered with vintage computer
gear, odd electronics, lock-picking tools, T-shirts, books,
and copies of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Max spotted
Elias Levy, a famous white-hat hacker, and pointed him out
to Kimi. Levy, aka Aleph One, was the moderator of the
Bugtraq mailing list—the New York Times of computer
security—and the author of a seminal tutorial on buffer
overflows called “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit”
that had appeared in Phrack. Max didn’t dare approach the
luminary. What would he say?
Max wasn’t the only law enforcement mole at Def Con, of
course. From its humble beginnings in 1992 as a one-off
conference pulled together by a former phone phreak, Def
Con had grown into a legendary gathering that drew nearly
two thousand hackers, computer security professionals,
and hangers-on from around the world. They came to party
in person with comrades they’d befriended online, present
and attend technical talks, buy and sell merchandise, and
get very, very drunk in all-night bashes in the hotel rooms.
Def Con was such an obviously target-rich environment
for the government that the organizer, Jeff “the Dark
Tangent” Moss, had invented a new convention game

called Spot the Fed. A hacker who thought he’d identified a
G-man in the crowd could point him out, make a case, and,
if the audience concurred, take home a coveted I SPOTTED
THE FED AT DEF CON T-shirt. Often the suspected fed would
just give up and good-naturedly whip out a badge, giving
the hacker an easy win.
Max’s mission was broad. Trahon and Beeson wanted
him to chum up to his fellow hackers and try to get their real
names, then lure them into exchanging public PGP
encryption keys, which security-minded geeks use like
sealing wax to encrypt and sign their e-mail. Max’s heart
just wasn’t in it. Writing reports for the bureau was one
thing, and he’d had no qualms about getting the goods on
the DarkCYDE phreaks, who were too young to get in real
trouble. But this assignment smelled like snitching.
Personal loyalty was written deep into Max’s firmware, and
one look at the Def Con crowd told him these were his
people.
Many of the hackers were reluctantly giving up childish
things, migrating into legitimate dot-com jobs or starting
security companies. They were becoming white hats, like
Max. A popular T-shirt at the conference summed up the
mood: I MISS CRIME.
Max shrugged off the FBI’s edict and began attending
the parties and the talks. On the roster this year was a
much-anticipated software release by the Cult of the Dead
Cow. The cDc were the rock stars of the hacker world—
literally: They recorded and performed music and infused
their conference presentations with over-the-top theatrics
that made them media darlings. At this Def Con the group
was unleashing Back Orifice, a sophisticated remote-
control program for Windows machines. If you could trick
someone into running Back Orifice, you could access their
files, see what was on their screen, and even look through
their webcam. It was designed to embarrass Microsoft for
the shoddy security in Windows 98.
The crowd at the Back Orifice presentation was ecstatic,

The crowd at the Back Orifice presentation was ecstatic,
and Max found the energy infectious. But of more
pragmatic interest to Max was a talk on the legalities of
computer hacking by a San Francisco criminal defense
attorney named Jennifer Granick. Granick opened her
presentation by describing the recent landmark prosecution
of a Bay Area hacker named Carlos Salgado Jr., a thirty-
six-year-old computer repairman who, more than any other
hacker, represented the future of computer crime.
From his room in his parents’ house in Daly City, a few
miles south of San Francisco, Salgado had cracked a
major technology company and stolen a database of eighty
thousand credit card numbers, with names, ZIP codes, and
expiration dates. Credit card numbers had been hacked
before, but what Salgado did next assured him a place in
the cybercrime history books. Using the handle “Smak,” he
jumped into the #carding chat room on IRC and put the
entire list up for sale.
It was like offering a 747 for sale at a flea market. At the
time, the online credit card fraud underground was a
depressing bog of kids and small timers who’d barely
advanced beyond the previous generation of fraudsters
fishing receipt carbons from the Dumpsters behind the
mall. Their typical deals were in the single digits, and their
advice to one another was tainted by myth and idiocy. Much
of the conversation unfolded in an open channel where
anyone in law enforcement could log in and watch—the
carders’ only security was the fact that nobody would
bother.
Remarkably, Salgado found a prospective buyer in
#carding—a San Diego computer science student who’d
been putting himself through college by counterfeiting credit
cards, getting the account numbers from billing statements
pilfered from the U.S. mail. The student had mob contacts
who, he believed, would buy Smak’s entire stolen database
for six figures.
The deal went south when Salgado, looking to perform a

little due diligence, hacked his customer’s ISP and poked
through his files. When the student found out, he got mad
and secretly began working with the FBI. On the morning of
May 21, 1997, Salgado showed up at a meeting with his
buyer at the smoking lounge at San Francisco International
Airport, where he expected to trade a CD-ROM containing
the database for a suitcase packed with $260,000 in cash.
Instead, he was arrested by the San Francisco computer
crime squad.
The foiled plot was an eye-opener for the FBI: Salgado
represented the first of a new breed of profit-oriented
hacker, and he posed a threat to the future of e-commerce.
Surveys showed that Web users were anxious about
sending credit card numbers into the electronic ether—it
was the number one thing holding them back from Internet
purchasing. Now, after years of struggling to gain
consumers’ trust and reward the faith of investors, e-
commerce companies were starting to win over Wall
Street. Less than two weeks before Salgado’s arrest,
Amazon.com had launched its long-awaited initial public
offering and ended the day $54 million richer.
Salgado’s IPO was higher: The credit card companies
determined the total spending limits on his eighty thousand
cards amounted to over a billion dollars—$931,568,535 if
you subtracted the legitimate owners’ outstanding
balances. The only thing he’d been missing was a
NASDAQ to trade on. Once the underground figured out
that part of the equation, it would be an industry of its own.
As soon as Salgado was arrested, he’d confessed
everything to the FBI. That, Granick told the Def Con
hackers in her presentation, was his big mistake. Despite
his cooperation, Salgado had been sentenced to thirty
months in prison earlier that year.
“Now, the FBI wanted me to tell you that it was good for
Mr. Salgado that he talked.” Granick paused. “That’s

bullshit.
“Just say no!” she said, and cheers and whistles swelled
from the audience. “There’s never any good reason to talk
to a cop.… If you’re going to cooperate, you’re going to
cooperate after consulting with a lawyer and cutting a deal.
There’s never any reason to give them information for free.”
In the back of the room, Kimi prodded Max in the ribs
with her elbow. Everything Granick was advising computer
intruders not to do, Max had done. Everything.
Max was having second thoughts about his arrangement
with the feds.
• • •
“We need to make some changes in the way we do
business.”
Max could feel the frustration radiating from his screen as
he read the latest note from Chris Beeson. Max had
returned from Def Con empty-handed and then blown off a
meeting at the federal building at which he was supposed
to get a new assignment, pissing off Beeson’s supervisor,
Pete Trahon. Continuing his e-mail, Beeson warned Max of
dark consequences for continued flakiness. “In the future,
missed appointments without exceptional reasons will be
considered uncooperative on your part. If you are not willing
to cooperate then we HAVE to take the appropriate
actions. Pete is meeting with the prosecutor on YOUR case
Monday. He wants to meet with you promptly in our office at
10:00am sharp, MONDAY 8/17/98. I am not available next
week (that is why I wanted to meet with you this week) so
you’re going to have to deal directly with Pete.”
This time, Max showed up. Trahon explained that he’d
become interested in Max’s boss at MCR, Matt Harrigan.
The agent was alarmed at the idea of a hacker running a
cybersecurity shop staffed with other hackers, like Max, and
vying for a contract with the NSA. If Max wanted to make
the FBI happy, he had to get Harrigan to admit he was still

hacking and had played a role in Max’s BIND attack.
The agent gave Max a new form to sign. It was Max’s
written consent to wire him for sound. Trahon handed him a
bureau-issued recording device disguised as a pager.
On the way home, Max pondered the situation. Harrigan
was a friend and fellow hacker. Now the FBI was asking
Max to perform the ultimate betrayal—to become Digital
Jesus’s real-life Judas.
The next day, Max met Harrigan at a Denny’s diner in
San Jose, without the FBI wire. His eyes scanned over the
other diners and looked out the window into the parking lot.
There could be feds anywhere.
He pulled out a piece of paper and slipped it across the
booth. “Here’s what’s going on.…”
Max phoned Jennifer Granick after the meeting—he’d
gotten her card at the conclusion of her Def Con talk—and
she agreed to represent him.
When they learned Max had lawyered up, Beeson and
Trahon wasted no time in officially dropping him as an
informant. Granick began phoning the FBI and the
prosecutor’s office to find out what the government had
planned for her new client. Three months later she finally got
an answer from the government’s top cybercrime
prosecutor in Silicon Valley. The United States was no
longer interested in Max’s cooperation. He could look
forward to going back to prison.
* Harrigan’s involvement is in dispute. Max says he planned
the BIND attack with Harrigan at the MCR office and that
Harrigan wrote the program that built the target list of
government computers. Harrigan says he was not involved
but was aware of what Max was up to.

7

Max Vision
ith his government service at an end, Max went to
work building his reputation as a white-hat hacker, even as
he lived under the sword of Damocles of a pending federal
indictment.
The BIND vulnerability and the resultant success of
Whitehats.com had given him a running start. Now Max
hung up his own shingle as a computer security consultant,
erecting a new website touting his services as a hacker for
hire at one hundred dollars an hour—or free to nonprofit
groups. His chief selling point: a 100 percent success rate
in penetration tests. He had never once confronted a
network he couldn’t crack.
It was an exciting time to be a white hat. The rebellious
spirit that drove the open-source software movement was
planting itself in the computer security world, and a new
crop of college graduates, dropouts, and former and
current black hats was upending the conservative
assumptions that had dominated security thinking for
decades.
First to be dustbinned was the tenet that security holes
and attack methods should be kept quiet, held privately
among a cadre of trusted responsible adults. The white
hats called this notion “security through obscurity.” The new
generation preferred “full disclosure.” Discussing security
problems widely not only helped get them fixed, but it also
advanced the science of security, and hacking, as a whole.
Keeping bugs private only benefited two groups: the bad
guys who were exploiting them, and vendors like Microsoft
that preferred to fix security holes without confessing the

details of their screwups.
The full-disclosure movement spawned the Bugtraq
mailing list, where hackers of any hat color were
encouraged to send in detailed reports of security flaws
they’d found in software. If they could provide an “exploit”—
code that demonstrated the flaw—so much the better. The
preferred path to full disclosure was to first notify the
software maker and give that company time to issue a
patch before releasing the flaw or exploit on Bugtraq. But
Bugtraq didn’t censor, and it was common for a bug finder
to drop a previously unknown exploit onto the list, releasing
it simultaneously to thousands of security researchers and
hackers in the span of minutes. The maneuver was all but
guaranteed to kick a software company into rapid
response.
Bugtraq provided hackers with a way to show off their
expertise without breaking the law. The ones who were still
cracking systems had an invigorated white-hat community
to deal with, armed with a growing arsenal of defensive
tools.
In late 1998, a former NSA cybersecurity contractor
named Marty Roesch developed one of the best. Roesch
thought it would be fun to see what random attacks were
crossing his home cable modem connection while he was
at work. As a weekend project, he cranked out a packet
sniffer called Snort and released it as an open-source
project.
At first, Snort was nothing special—a packet sniffer is a
common security tool that eavesdrops on the traffic
crossing a network and dumps it to a file for analysis. But a
month later, Roesch turned his program into a full-blown
intrusion detection system (IDS), which would alert the
operator whenever it spotted network traffic that matched
the signature of a known attack. There were a number of
proprietary IDSs on the market, but Snort’s versatility and
open-source licensing instantly appealed to the white hats,
who loved nothing more than tinkering with a new security

who loved nothing more than tinkering with a new security
tool. Volunteer programmers jumped in to add functionality
to the program.
Max was excited by Snort. The software was similar to
BRO, the Lawrence Berkeley lab project that had helped
sniff out Max’s BIND attack, and Max knew it could be a
game changer for online security. Now white hats could
watch in real time for anyone trying to exploit the
vulnerabilities discussed on Bugtraq and elsewhere. Snort
was like an early-warning system for a network—the
computer equivalent of the NORAD radar mesh that
monitors America’s airspace. All it was lacking was a
comprehensive and up-to-date list of attack signatures, so
the software would know what to look for.
In the first few months after Snort’s release, a
disorganized trickle of user-created signatures put the total
number at about 200. In a single sleepless night, Max more
than doubled the count, whipping up 490 signatures. Some
were original, others were improved versions of the existing
rules or ports from Dragon IDS, a popular proprietary
system. Writing a rule meant identifying unique
characteristics in the network traffic produced by a
particular attack, like the port number or a string of bytes.
For instance, the incantation alert udp any any -> $INTERNAL
31337 (msg:“BackOrifice1-scan”; content:“|ce63 d1d2 16e7 13cf 38a5
a586|”;) detected black hats trying to use the Cult of the
Dead Cow’s Back Orifice malware that had so transfixed
the crowd at Def Con 6.0. It told Snort that an incoming
connection to port 31337, with a particular string of twelve
bytes in the network traffic, was someone trying to exploit
the back door.
Max put the signatures online as a single file on
Whitehats.com, crediting a handful of other security geeks
for their contributions, including Ghost23—a nod to his alter
ego. Later, he converted the file to a full-fledged database
and invited other experts to contribute their own rules. He
gave the project the catchy name arachNIDS, for Advanced
Reference Archive of Current Heuristics for Network

Intrusion Detection Systems.
ArachNIDS was a hit and helped Snort surge to new
levels of popularity in the security community, with Max
Vision riding the swell to security stardom. As more white
hats contributed to the project, it became the computer-
security equivalent of the FBI’s fingerprint database,
capable of identifying virtually every known attack technique
and variant. Max built on his success by writing papers
dissecting Internet worms with the same clear eye he’d
applied to the ADM worm. The technology press started
seeking him out for comment on the latest attacks.
In 1999, Max injected himself into another promising
venture aimed directly at tricking black-hat hackers. The
Honeynet Project, as it would later be called, was the work
of a former Army officer who applied his interest in military
tactics to erect network “honeypots”—decoy computers that
served no purpose but to be hacked. The Honeynet Project
would secretly wire a packet sniffer to the system and place
it unprotected on the Internet, like an undercover vice cop
decked out in pumps and a short skirt on a street corner.
When a hacker targeted a honeypot, his every move
would be recorded and then analyzed by security experts,
with the results released to the world in the spirit of full
disclosure. Max delved into the forensic work,
reconstructing crimes from raw packet data and producing
cogent analyses that blew the lid off some of the
underground’s concealed techniques.
But Max knew his rising recognition as a white hat
wouldn’t save him from the federal grand jury. In quiet
moments, he fantasized with Kimi about escaping his fate.
They could run off together, to Italy or some remote island.
They’d start over. He’d find a benefactor, someone with
money who recognized Max’s talent and would pay him to
hack.
The couple’s relationship was suffering under the weight
of the government’s silent looming presence in their life.

Before the raid, they hadn’t much planned for the future.
Now they couldn’t. The future had been taken out of their
control, and the uncertainty was toxic. They fought in private
and snipped at each other in public. “The reason I signed
the confession is because we’d just gotten married, and I
didn’t want to hurt you,” Max said. He blamed himself, he
added. By getting married, he’d given his enemies a
weapon to use against him, a fatal flaw.
Kimi transferred from De Anza, a community college, to
UC Berkeley, and the couple moved across the bay to live
just off campus. The move proved fortuitous for Max. In the
spring of 2000, a Berkeley company named Hiverworld
offered him a long-awaited shot at the dot-com success
that had already graced other Hungry Programmers. The
company’s plan was to create a new antihacking system
that would detect intrusions, like Snort, but also actively
scan the user’s network for vulnerabilities, allowing it to
ignore malicious volleys that had no chance of success.
Snort author Marty Roesch was employee number 11. Now
the company wanted Max Vision as number 21.
Max’s first day was set for March 21. It was an early
position at a promising technology start-up. The American
dream, circa 2000.
On the morning of March 21, 2000, the FBI knocked on
Max’s door.
At first he thought it was a Hiverworld hazing, a practical
joke. It wasn’t. “Just don’t answer it!” he said to Kimi. He
grabbed a phone and found a hiding place, in case the
agents peered through the windows. He dialed Granick and
told her what was happening. The indictment must have
finally come down. The FBI was there to take him to jail.
What should he do?
The agents left—their arrest warrant didn’t authorize
them to crash into Max’s home, so he’d temporarily
thwarted them by the simple act of not answering the door.

On her end, Granick called the prosecutor to try to arrange
for a civilized self-surrender at the FBI field office in
Oakland. Max contacted Hiverworld’s CTO, his new boss,
to report that he wouldn’t be showing up for his first day at
work. He’d be in touch in a day or two to explain everything,
he said.
The evening news beat him to the punch: Alleged
computer hacker Max Butler had just turned himself in on a
fifteen-count indictment charging illegal interception of
communications, computer intrusion, and possession of
stolen passwords.
After two nights in jail, Max was brought in front of a
federal magistrate in San Jose for arraignment. Kimi, Tim
Spencer, and a dozen Hungry Programmers filled the
gallery. Max was released on a $100,000 bond—Tim
signed for half, and a fellow Hungry who’d struck it rich at a
dot-com put down the remainder in cash.
The arrest sent shock waves through the computer
security world. Hiverworld canceled its job offer on the spot
—no security start-up could hire a man facing current
computer intrusion charges. The community fretted over
what would happen to the arachNIDS database without
Max’s curatorship. “It’s his stuff,” Roesch ruled in a post on
a security mailing list. “So barring him explicitly ceding it to
someone, it’s still his to maintain.”
Max responded personally in a long message sweeping
through his early love of computers and the future direction
of intrusion detection. Whitehats.com and arachNIDS would
continue no matter what, he predicted. “My family and
friends have been incredibly supportive and there are offers
to maintain the sites to a certain degree should tragedy
occur.”
Casting himself as a victim, he railed against the “frenzy
of the hacker witch-hunt” and slammed Hiverworld for
disloyalty. “After the smoke cleared and I was in the press,
Hiverworld decided not to continue our relationship,” he
wrote. “The corporation expressed cowardice that is

wrote. “The corporation expressed cowardice that is
deplorable. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to feel
the complete lack of support from the Hive.
“I am innocent until proven guilty,” he wrote. “And would
appreciate the recognition of this by our community.”
Six months later, Max pleaded guilty. The news was
nearly lost amid a flurry of federal hacker prosecutions. The
same month, Patrick “MostHateD” Gregory, the leader of a
hacker gang called globalHell, was sentenced to twenty-six
months in prison and ordered to pay $154,529.86 in
restitution for a string of website defacements. At the same
time, prosecutors charged twenty-year-old Jason “Shadow
Knight” Diekman of California with cracking NASA and
university systems for fun, and sixteen-year-old Jonathan
James, known as “C0mrade,” received a six-month
sentence for his recreational intrusions into Pentagon and
NASA computers—the first term of confinement ever
handed down in a juvenile hacking case.
To all appearances, federal law enforcement now had
firm control of the computer intrusions that had for so long
struck fear into corporate America and government
officials. In truth, all these victories were battles in
yesterday’s cyberwar against bedroom hackers, a dying
breed. Even as Max copped his plea in a San Jose
courtroom, the FBI was discovering a twenty-first-century
threat gathering five thousand miles away—one intimately
entwined with Max Vision’s future.

8

Welcome to America
he two Russians made themselves at home in the
small office in Seattle. Alexey Ivanov, twenty, typed on a
computer keyboard while his associate, nineteen-year-old
Vasiliy Gorshkov, stood by and watched. They were
straight off a flight from Russia and already knee-deep into
the biggest job interview of their lives—negotiating for a
lucrative international partnership with the U.S. computer-
security start-up Invita.
Office workers milled around them, and tinny pop music
spilled from the computer’s speaker. After a few minutes,
Gorshkov drifted off to another computer across the room,
and Michael Patterson, Invita’s CEO, struck up a
conversation.
It had been Patterson who’d invited the Russians to
Seattle. Invita, he’d told them in an e-mail, was a young
company, but it was gaining customers through contacts
the founders had made while working at Microsoft and Sun.
Now the company wanted help expanding into Eastern
Europe. Ivanov, who claimed to have as many as twenty
talented programmers working with him, seemed perfect
for the job; Gorshkov was a tag-along, invited by Ivanov to
act as the duo’s spokesman. He had a fiancée waiting
back home, pregnant with his first child.
Patterson began casually asking Gorshkov about a
recent rash of computer intrusions into U.S. companies,
some of whom paid money to the attackers to make them
stop. “Just so I know you guys are as good as I think you
are,” Patterson said, “could any of that have been you
guys?”

Gorshkov—bundled in the heavy jacket he wore back
home in Chelyabinsk, a bleak, polluted industrial city in the
Ural Mountains—hedged for a minute and finally answered.
“A few months ago we tried, but we found it’s not so
profitable.”
The Russian was being modest. For nearly a year, small
to midsized Internet companies around the United States
had been plagued by extortionate cyberattacks from a
group calling itself the Expert Group of Protection Against
Hackers—a name that probably sounds better in Russian.
The crimes always unfolded the same way: Attackers from
Russia or Ukraine breached the victim’s network, stole
credit card numbers or other data, then sent an e-mail or a
fax to the company demanding payment to keep quiet
about the intrusion and to fix the security holes the hackers
exploited. If the company didn’t pay up, the Expert Group
would threaten to destroy the victim’s systems.
The gang had lifted tens of thousands of credit card
numbers from the Online Information Bureau, a financial
transaction clearinghouse in Vernon, Connecticut. The
Seattle ISP Speakeasy had been hit. Sterling
Microsystems in Anaheim, California, had been hacked,
along with a Cincinnati ISP, a Korean bank in Los Angeles,
a financial services company in New Jersey, the electronic
payment company E-Money in New York, and even the
venerable Western Union, which had lost nearly sixteen
thousand customer credit card numbers in an attack that
came with a $50,000 extortion threat. When music-seller
CD Universe didn’t give in to a $100,000 ransom demand,
thousands of its customers’ credit card numbers showed
up on a public website.
Several companies wound up paying the Expert Group
small amounts to go away, while the FBI did its best to
track the intrusions. They finally zeroed in on one of the
ringleaders, “subbsta,” whose real name was Alexey
Ivanov. It wasn’t that hard—the hacker, convinced he was
out of reach of American justice, had given his résumé to

out of reach of American justice, had given his résumé to
Speakeasy during the extortion negotiations there.
Russian police had ignored a diplomatic request to
detain and question Ivanov, and that was when the feds
created Invita, a full-blown undercover business designed
to lure the hacker into a trap. Now Ivanov and Gorshkov
were surrounded by undercover FBI agents posing as
company employees, along with a white-hat hacker from
the nearby University of Washington who was playing the
role of a computer geek named Ray. Hidden cameras and
microphones recorded everything in the office, and FBI-
installed spyware captured every keystroke typed on the
computers. In the parking lot outside, around twenty FBI
agents were standing by to help with the arrest.
The agent playing CEO Patterson tried to draw Gorshkov
out some more. “What about credit cards? Credit card
numbers? Anything like that?”
“When we’re here, we’ll never say that we got access to
credit card numbers,” the hacker replied.
The FBI agent and Gorshkov laughed conspiratorially. “I
understand. I hear ya, I hear ya,” said Patterson.
When the two-hour meeting concluded, Patterson
ushered the men into a car, ostensibly to take them to the
temporary housing arranged for their visit. After a short
drive, the car stopped. Agents threw open the doors and
arrested the Russians.
Back at the office, an FBI agent realized the keystroke
logger installed on the bureau computers at Invita
presented him with a rare opportunity. What he did next
would make him the first FBI agent to be accused by the
Russian federal police of committing a computer crime. He
went into the keystroke logs and retrieved the password the
pair had used to access their computer in Chelyabinsk.
Then, after checking with his supervisor and a federal
prosecutor, he logged in to the hackers’ Russian server
over the Internet and started scrounging through the
directory names, looking for the files belonging to Ivanov

and Gorshkov.
When he found them, he downloaded 2.3 gigabytes of
compressed data and burned it onto CD-ROMs, only later
obtaining a warrant from a federal judge to search through
the information he’d grabbed. It was the first international
evidence seizure through hacking.
When the feds dug into the data, the breathtaking scope
of Ivanov’s activity became clear. In addition to the extortion
plots, Ivanov had developed a frighteningly effective method
for cashing out the cards he stole, using custom software to
automatically open PayPal and eBay accounts and bid on
auctioned goods with one of the half-million stolen credit
cards in his collection. When the program won an auction, it
had the goods shipped to Eastern Europe, where an
associate of Ivanov picked them up. Then the software did
it all again and again. PayPal checked the stolen credit
card list against its internal databases and found it had
absorbed a stunning $800,000 in fraudulent charges.
It was the first tremor in a tectonic shift that would
fundamentally change the Internet for the next decade.
Maybe forever. With top-flight technical colleges but few
legitimate opportunities for their graduates, Russia and the
former Soviet satellite states were incubating a new breed
of hacker.
Some, like Ivanov, were amassing personal fortunes by
looting consumers and companies, protected by corrupt or
lazy law enforcement in their home countries and poor
international cooperation. Others, like Gorshkov, were
driven into crime by tough economic circumstances. The
hacker graduated from Chelyabinsk State Technical
University with a degree in mechanical engineering and
sank a small inheritance from his father into a computer-
hosting and Web-design business. Despite his swaggering
hacker machismo at Invita, Gorshkov had been a late
addition to Ivanov’s gang, and he’d paid his own way to
America in the hope of improving his fortunes. In a way, he
did: After his arrest in Seattle, he was earning more in

did: After his arrest in Seattle, he was earning more in
prison doing janitorial and kitchen work at eleven cents an
hour than his fiancée was drawing on public assistance
back home.
After his arrest, Ivanov began cooperating with the FBI,
rattling off a list of friends and accomplices still hacking
back home. The bureau realized there were dozens of
profit-oriented intruders and fraud artists from Eastern
Europe already reaching their tentacles into Western
computers.
In the years to come, the number would grow to
thousands. Ivanov and Gorshkov were Magellan and
Columbus: Their arrival in America instantly redrew the
global cybercrime map for the FBI and placed Eastern
Europe indisputably at its center.

9

Opportunities
ax wore a blazer and rumpled cargo pants to his
sentencing hearing and watched silently as the lawyers
sparred over his fate.
Jennifer Granick, the defense attorney, told Judge James
Ware that Max deserved a lowered sentence for his service
as the Equalizer. The prosecutor took the opposite
position. Max, he argued, had pretended to be an FBI
informant while secretly committing crimes against the U.S.
government. It was worse than if he had never cooperated
at all.
It was a strange sentencing hearing for a computer
criminal. A dozen of Max’s colleagues in the security world
—people devoted to thwarting hackers—had written to
Judge Ware on Max’s behalf. Dragos Ruiu, a prominent
security evangelist in Canada, called Max “a brilliant
innovator in this field.” French programmer Renaud
Deraison credited Max’s early support with making
possible Nessus, Deraison’s vulnerability scanner and one
of the most important free security tools then available.
“Given Max’s potential and his clear vision of Internet
security … it would be more useful for society as a whole
that he stays among us as a computer security
specialist … rather than spend time in a cell and see his
computing talent go through a slow but sure decay.”
From a technology worker in New Zealand: “Without the
work that Max has done … it would be so much harder for
my company and countless others to protect themselves
from hackers.” From a fan in Silicon Valley: “Taking Max
out of the security community would greatly hurt our ability to

protect ourselves.” A former Defense Department worker
wrote, “To imprison this individual would be a travesty.”
Several of the Hungries wrote letters as well, as did
Max’s mother and sister. In her note, Kimi pleaded
eloquently for Max’s freedom. “He saved my life by helping
me out of an abusive relationship and teaching me the
meaning of self-respect,” she wrote. “He gave me shelter
when I had no place to live. He took very good care of me
when I was seriously ill, saving my life again by taking me to
the emergency room when I protested that I was ‘fine’ even
as I was dying.”
When the lawyers finished their arguments, Max spoke
for himself, with the earnest politeness he always exhibited
away from his computer. His attack, he explained, had
been born of good intentions. He’d just wanted to close the
BIND hole and had lost his head.
“I got swept up,” he said softly. “It’s hard to explain the
feelings of someone who’s gotten caught up in the
computer security field.… I felt at the time that I was in a
race. That if I went in and closed the holes quickly, I could
do it before people with more malicious intentions could
use them.
“What I did was reprehensible,” Max continued. “I’ve hurt
my reputation in the computer security field. I’ve hurt my
family and friends.”
Judge Ware listened attentively but had already made up
his mind. Letting Max off without a prison term would send
the wrong message to other hackers. “There’s a need for
those who would follow your footsteps to know that this can
result in incarceration,” the judge said.
The sentence: eighteen months in prison, followed by
three years of supervised release in which Max wouldn’t be
allowed on the Internet without the permission of his
probation officer.
The prosecutor asked the judge to order Max
immediately taken into custody, but Ware denied the
request and gave the hacker a month to put his affairs in

request and gave the hacker a month to put his affairs in
order and turn himself in to the U.S. marshals.
• • •
Max and Kimi had moved to Vancouver, near her family,
after his guilty plea. When they returned home, Max wasted
no time arranging for Whitehats.com and arachNIDS to
survive his incarceration. He set up automatic bill payments
for his bandwidth and wrote out a list of items for Kimi to
take care of in his absence. She was in charge of
arachNIDS now, he said, indicating the server squatting on
the floor of their apartment.
The couple adopted two kittens to keep Kimi company
while he was gone, named for the swords from Elric of
Melniboné. The orange boy-cat was Mournblade; the gray
female was Stormbringer.
Max spent his last weekend of freedom in front of his
keyboard, getting arachNIDS ready for Kimi’s stewardship.
When Monday came he turned himself in on schedule. On
June 25, 2001, he was locked in the county jail pending his
shipment to his new home, Taft Federal Prison, a
corporate-run facility owned by Wackenhut, positioned near
a small town in central California.
As far as Max was concerned, it was another injustice,
just like back in Idaho. He’d been sent back to prison not
for his hacking but for refusing to set up Matt Harrigan. He
was being punished for his loyalty, once again a victim of a
capricious justice system. He doubted Judge Ware had
even looked at the details of his case.
Kimi was adrift, alone for the first time since she’d met
Max. For all his talk about staying with her forever, he’d
chosen a course of action that guaranteed their separation.
Two months later, Kimi was talking to him on the phone
from prison when she heard a pop! and the smell of acrid
smoke filled her nostrils. The motherboard on Max’s server
had burst into flames. Max tried to calm her—all she had to
do was replace the motherboard. He could do it in his

sleep. Max talked her through the process, but Kimi was
realizing she wasn’t cut out for life as the prison wife of a
hacker.
In August, she went to the Burning Man festival in Nevada
to forget her troubles. When she got home, she broke some
bad news to Max over the phone. She’d met someone else.
It was another betrayal. Max took the news with eerie
calm, interrogating her about every detail: What drugs was
she on when she cheated on him? What sexual positions
did they use? He wanted to hear her ask for his forgiveness
—he’d have given it to her in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t
what she was asking for. She wanted a divorce. “I don’t
know if you even think about the future anymore,” she said.
In search of closure, Kimi caught a flight to California and
drove to Taft, where she sat nervously in the waiting room,
her eyes playing over a wall of posters depicting
Wackenhut’s network of hivelike prisons around the
country. When Max was brought in, he took his place
across the stainless steel picnic table in the visiting room
and launched into an appeal. He did think of the future, he
told her, and he’d been making plans in the joint.
“I’ve been talking to some people,” he said, lowering his
voice to a hush. “People I think I could work with.”
Jeffrey James Norminton was at the tail end of a twenty-
seven-month stretch when Max met him in Taft. At thirty-
four, Norminton had the stolid physical presence of a
brawler, thick necked with an oversized forehead and a
Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin. An alcoholic and an
accomplished con man, he was a financial wizard who did
his best work half-sober. He’d start chain-chugging Coors
Lights as soon as he rolled out of bed, and by the end of
the day he’d be useless, but in that sweet spot between the
morning’s sobriety and the blurriness of midafternoon,
Norminton was a master of the high-stakes con—a criminal
rainmaker who could produce seven-figure sums from thin

air.
Norminton’s latest caper had required little more than a
telephone and a fax machine. The target had been the
Entrust Group, a Pennsylvania investment brokerage
house. On a summer day in 1997, Norminton picked up the
phone and called a vice president at Entrust, adopting the
persona of an investment manager at Highland Federal
Bank, a real bank in Santa Monica, California.
Oozing confidence and charm, the swindler persuaded
Entrust to buy into the bank’s high-yield certificates of
deposit, promising the VP a healthy 6.20 percent return on
a one-year investment. When Entrust eagerly wired
$297,000 to Highland, the cash wound up in the account of
a dummy corporation Norminton’s accomplice had set up
under Entrust’s name. To the bank, the transaction looked
like an investment house moving money from one branch to
another.
The grifters promptly withdrew all but $10,000 of the cash
and then ran the scam again, this time with Norminton’s
partner making the phone call to the same VP and
pretending to be from a different bank, City National,
offering an even higher return. Entrust promptly sent two
more transfers totaling $800,000.
Norminton was undone by his ambition. He sent his
accomplice into City National to pull out $700,000 in a
single cashier’s check. An investigator at the bank got
suspicious and backtracked the incoming wire transfers to
the real Entrust. At the next withdrawal, FBI agents were
waiting. The financial mastermind was now cooling his
heels in Taft. The only silver lining to his incarceration was
that he’d met a talented hacker looking to get back at the
system.
Norminton made it clear that he saw real potential in
Max, and the pair took to walking the yard every day,
swapping war stories and fantasizing about how they might
work together when they hit the streets. With Norminton’s
guidance, Max could easily learn to crack brokerage

guidance, Max could easily learn to crack brokerage
houses, where they’d tap into overstuffed trading accounts
and drain them into offshore banks. One big haul and they’d
have enough cash for the rest of their lives.
After five months, Norminton and his schemes were sent
home to sunny Orange County, California, while Max
remained at Taft with another year left on his sentence—
long, tedious days of bad food, standing for count, and the
sound of chains and keys.
In August 2002, Max was granted early release to a sixty-
one-bed halfway house in Oakland, where he shared a
room with five other ex-cons. Kimi met with Max to present
him with divorce papers. She was getting serious with the
guy she’d met at Burning Man; it was time, she said, for
Max to let her go. Max refused to sign.
Max’s relative freedom at the halfway house was tenuous
—the facility demanded that he obtain gainful employment
or go back to prison, and telecommuting wasn’t allowed.
He reached out to his old contacts in Silicon Valley and
found his employability had been shattered by his high-
profile hacking conviction and over a year in prison.
Desperate, he borrowed a laptop from one of the Hungry
Programmers and banged out a message to an
employment list watched by the computer security experts
who had once admired him. “I have been showing up at
places that farm out manual labor, 5:30 am, and still haven’t
found any work,” he wrote. “My situation is just ridiculous.”
He offered his services at fire-sale prices. “I am willing to
work for minimum wage for the next few months. Surely
there is some open position at a security company in the
area.… The last half dozen employers I have had paid me
at least $100/hr for my time, now I am only asking for
$6.75.”
A consultant answered the plea, agreeing to let Max work
out of his home office in Fremont, a short BART ride from
the halfway house. He’d pay ten dollars an hour for Max to
help build servers, a throwback to Max’s first job for his

father as a teen. Tim Spencer loaned Max a bike to pedal
to the train station every day. Max was freed from the
halfway house after two months, and the Hungry
Programmers once again stepped up to provide him with
shelter. He moved into an apartment in San Francisco
shared by Chris Toshok, Seth Alves—a veteran of the
Meridian master-key adventure—and Toshok’s ex-girlfriend
Charity Majors.
Despite the jailhouse fantasies he and Norminton had
hatched, Max was determined to go straight. He resumed
his search for work. But the job offers failed to pour in for
the ex-con. Even the Honeynet Project, to which he’d
donated his expertise just a couple of years earlier,
shunned him.
His lot began improving in other ways: He started dating
his housemate Charity Majors, a fellow Idaho refugee who
designed herself like an avatar from a virtual world, painting
her fingernails like Skittles—each a different color—and
wearing contact lenses that tinted her eyes an impossible
emerald. Money was tight for both of them: Charity worked
as a system administrator for a porn website in Nevada,
earning Silver State wages that were stretched thin in San
Francisco. Max was nearly broke.
One of Max’s former clients in Silicon Valley tried to help
by giving Max a $5,000 contract to perform a penetration
test on the company’s network. The company liked Max
and didn’t really care if he produced a report, but the
hacker took the gig seriously. He bashed at the company’s
firewalls for months, expecting one of the easy victories to
which he’d grown accustomed as a white hat. But he was in
for a surprise. The state of corporate security had improved
while he was in the joint. He couldn’t make a dent in the
network of his only client. His 100 percent success record
was cracking.
“I’ve never failed to get into a system before,” Max told
Charity in disbelief.
“Sweetie, you haven’t touched a computer for years,” she

“Sweetie, you haven’t touched a computer for years,” she
said. “It’ll take you a little while. Don’t feel like you have to
get in today.”
Max pushed harder, only becoming more frustrated over
his powerlessness. Finally, he tried something new. Instead
of looking for vulnerabilities in the company’s hardened
servers, he targeted some of the employees individually.
These “client side” attacks are what most people
experience of hackers—a spam e-mail arrives in your in-
box, with a link to what purports to be an electronic greeting
card or a funny picture. The download is actually an
executable program, and if you ignore the warning
message on your Windows machine and install the
software, your computer is no longer your own.
In 2003 the dirty secret of these attacks was that even
savvy users who knew better than to install foreign software
could be broadsided. “Browser bloat” was largely to blame.
In the nineties a fierce battle with Netscape for control of the
browser market had driven Microsoft to stuff Internet
Explorer with unnecessary features and functionality. Every
added capability expanded the attack surface of the
browser. More code meant more bugs.
Now Internet Explorer holes were constantly surfacing.
They were usually discovered by one of the good guys first:
Microsoft’s own programmers or a white hat who often, but
not always, warned the company before detailing the hole
on Bugtraq.
But once a hole was public, the race was on. Black hats
worked to exploit the bug by setting up Web pages serving
the attack code and then tricking victims into visiting them.
Just looking at the Web page would yield control of the
victim’s computer, without any outward sign of infection.
Even if the bugs were not made public, the bad guys could
figure them out by reverse-engineering the vulnerability
from Microsoft’s patches. Security experts had been
watching with dismay as the time between a vulnerability’s
announcement and its exploitation by black hats shrank

from months to days. In the worst-case scenario, the black
hats found a bug first: a “zero day” vulnerability that left the
good guys playing catch-up.
With new Microsoft patches coming out nearly every
week, even vigilant corporations tended to lag in installing
them, and average users often didn’t patch at all. A global
survey of one hundred thousand Internet Explorer users
conducted around the time of Max’s effort found that 45
percent suffered from unpatched remote access
vulnerabilities; narrowing the field to American users
cooled the number only slightly, to 36 percent.
Max’s attack was effective. After securing access to an
employee’s Windows machine, he hopped on the
company’s network from the inside, grabbed some
trophies, and popped out like the chest-bursting monster in
Alien.
“It was then that I decided to scrap my old model of
penetration testing and include client-centric attack as a
mandatory part of the exercise,” he later wrote a white-hat
colleague. “I’ve been confident about the 100 percent rate
ever since.”
But instead of gratitude, Max’s final report was greeted
with outrage. Using a client-side attack in a penetration test
was almost unseemly; if you were hired to test physical
security at a company’s corporate headquarters, you
wouldn’t necessarily feel free to burglarize an employee’s
home to steal the keys. The client gave him a tongue-
lashing; they’d paid Max to attack their servers, not their
employees.
Max began to wonder if he had a future in computer
security at all. His former friends in the community had all
moved on. Hiverworld, where Max had nearly been
employee 21, revamped its executive team and won $11
million in venture capital, changing its name to nCircle
Network Security. Marty Roesch left the company to build
on the success of Snort—to which Max had contributed—

starting a firm of his own called Sourcefire in Maryland.
Both companies were on a path to success, nCircle kicking
off an expansion that would take it to 160 employees in the
years to come and Sourcefire heading to an IPO on the
NASDAQ.
In some alternate universe in which Max had never
hacked the Pentagon, or never used that Verio dialup, or
had simply kept his mouth shut and worn a wire on Matt
Harrigan, the hacker would have been riding one of those
companies to financial success and rewarding, challenging
work. Instead, he could only watch from the sidelines.
He was itinerant, grasping for cash, and flailing for
something to do with his freedom. That was when he
checked his Whitehats.com e-mail in-box and found an
anonymous note from “an old friend from Shaft.” It was the
code phrase Max had worked out with Jeff Norminton.
Max met Jeff Norminton in a room at the St. Francis Hotel,
and they caught up. Norminton hadn’t taken well to
supervised release: His sentencing judge required him to
submit monthly urine samples, so his probation officer
could make sure he hadn’t started drinking again. That was
a problem, since he was drinking again. After he’d refused
two piss tests, the court had ordered him to check into
Impact House, a drug and alcohol rehab center in
Pasadena. He walked away after three weeks and was
now looking to scam enough zeroes to flee to Mexico.
It was time to act on the plans they’d made in prison,
Norminton said. He was ready to bankroll Max in his new
career as a professional hacker.
Max was ready. He’d struggled long enough trying to
make an honest living, and he was tired of being punished.
He knew he was wearing out his welcome at the Hungry
Programmers’ house, even if they’d never complain. His
diet was down to noodles and vegetables. He had no
health insurance and dental problems that would cost

thousands to fix.
Room service interrupted the conversation to deliver a
hospitality basket. Norminton made a show of carrying the
delivery into the bathroom, turning on the shower, and
closing the door—in case the basket was bugged, he said.
When they were done laughing, Max gave Norminton a
short shopping list of gear he’d need to get started, a high-
performance Alienware laptop, for one. And an antenna. A
big one.
There was just one little hitch. Norminton was broke.
They’d need to bring in someone else for seed money.
Fortunately, Jeff knew just the guy.

10

Chris Aragon
ax met his future friend and criminal partner Chris
Aragon in North Beach, San Francisco’s little Italy, where
seedy strip clubs and fortune tellers coexist with a row of
pleasantly gaudy restaurants serving warm bread and hot
pasta to sidewalk diners. The meeting was set for a coffee
shop near the City Lights bookstore, cradle of the Beat
Generation in the 1950s, and kitty-corner from Vesuvio
Café, a saloon announced by colorful wall murals with wine
bottles and a peace sign. Down the hill the Transamerica
Pyramid stood sentry over the financial district, stabbing
the sky.
Norminton introduced Chris to Max over the muted clatter
of coffee cups and dishes. The two hit it off immediately.
The forty-one-year-old Chris was a student of eastern
spirituality, a vegetarian who practiced meditation to center
his mind. Max, with his hippie values, seemed a kindred
spirit on the road of life. They’d even read some of the
same books.
And like Max, Chris had been arrested more than once.
It had all started in Colorado, when Chris was twenty-one
years old. He was working as a masseuse at a hot springs
resort, earning enough to cover his rent and support a
modest cocaine habit, when he hooked up with a troubled
veteran named Albert See whom he’d met in the joint while
serving a juvenile sentence. See had just escaped from a
minimum-security prison camp and needed money to get
out of the country.
Chris came from a privileged background—his mother,
Marlene Aragon, worked in Hollywood as voice talent, and

she’d recently enjoyed a run on ABC’s Saturday morning
cartoon Challenge of the Superfriends, voicing Wonder
Woman’s feline nemesis the Cheetah. But he also had
romantic notions of crime and criminals; on the wall of his
condo hung a poster of the cover art from the Waylon
Jennings album Ladies Love Outlaws. He took Albert in,
and the two embarked on a series of bold, and mostly
botched, bank robberies in the resort towns dotting
Colorado.
The first robbery, at the Aspen Savings and Loan, started
off well enough: Chris, wearing a blue and white bandana
over his mouth to conceal his braces, pulled an Army-issue
.45 automatic on the bank manager as he unlocked the
door in the morning. He and Albert forced the manager
inside, where they found a cleaning woman hiding under
one of the desks, phoning the police. They left in a hurry.
The second robbery, at the Pitkin County Bank and Trust,
was over before it even began. Chris’s partner hid in a
Dumpster by the back door, planning to jump out with his
shotgun when the first employees came into work in the
morning. The plan was aborted when Chris, watching from
across the street, saw a garbage truck pull into the alley to
empty the Dumpster.
The third robbery was better planned. On July 22, 1981,
Chris and Albert visited Voit Chevrolet in Rifle and
declared they wanted to test-drive a new Camaro. The
luckless salesman insisted on going with them, and when
they cleared the town limit, Chris steered to the side of the
road, and Albert pulled the salesman from the car at
gunpoint. They tied him up with rope, gagged him, and left
him in a field before peeling away in the silver sports car.
The next day at 4:50 p.m., Chris drove the stolen Camaro
up to the Valley Bank and Trust in Glenwood Springs,
where the town locals parked the cash they earned from a
flourishing tourist industry. Chris himself was a customer
there. He waited outside behind the wheel of the car while

Albert walked in wearing tinted sunglasses and toting a
leather briefcase. Albert ran out minutes later with $10,000
in cash and jumped into the Camaro, and Chris sped away.
Chris drove them south out of town on an unpaved road
that snaked through the rocky red hills surrounding
Glenwood Springs, then transferred to a jeep trail where his
girlfriend was waiting with the switch car. Jubilant and
excited, Chris drove past her and spun the Camaro into a
triumphant fishtail, sending a plume of dust twenty feet into
the air.
He was jumping up and down and shouting, “We did it!”
when a police cruiser, drawn by the dust cloud, rolled up on
the robbers. Chris and Albert made a mad dash on foot
over the craggy, tree-dotted terrain. Chris tumbled down a
ridge and landed on a cactus, and the two cops caught up
with them. Chris dropped his shotgun and surrendered.
Chris learned a valuable lesson from his experience: not
that crime didn’t pay, but that guns and getaway cars were
a stupid way to rob a bank. When he made parole in 1986,
after five years in federal prison, he delved into credit card
fraud and enjoyed some modest success. Then he hooked
up with a Mexican drug smuggler he’d met in the joint. Chris
helped with the delivery of two thousand pounds of
marijuana to a twenty-acre ranch near Riverside, California,
only to be busted in a nationwide DEA undercover
operation. He went back to prison in September of 1991.
When he got out in 1996, he was thirty-five years old and
had spent more than half his adult life, and a portion of his
childhood, behind bars. He vowed to go straight. With his
mother’s help, he founded a legitimate business called
Mission Pacific Capital, a leasing firm providing computer
and business equipment to start-up companies hustling to
claim their place in the dot-com race.
Clean-cut and handsome with an empathetic gaze, Chris
fit easily into the role of a Southern California entrepreneur.
After a lifetime of crime and uncertainty, the charms of a
normal, middle-class existence had an exotic and satisfying

normal, middle-class existence had an exotic and satisfying
appeal. He loved traveling to conventions, interviewing and
hiring employees, schmoozing with colleagues. At a
marketing convention in New Orleans, he met Clara Shao
Yen Lee, a stylish woman of Chinese descent who’d
emigrated from Brazil. Taken by Clara’s beauty and
intelligence, he promptly married her.
Under Chris’s leadership, Mission Pacific built a
reputation as an innovative leasing broker, one of the first
to offer instant contracts through the Web, which helped the
firm gain tens of thousands of clients around the country.
The former bank robber and drug smuggler had two
prominent Orange County businessmen as partners and
twenty-one employees working in a spacious office a block
from the Pacific Coast Highway. Clara dropped in
periodically to help out with the look and feel of the
company’s website and marketing material. By 2000, the
couple had an upscale condo in Newport Beach, a son,
and had staked a claim in a business that seemed as
limitless in its potential as the Internet itself.
That spring, the dream died; the dot-com bubble burst,
and the torrent of new companies that had been Mission
Pacific’s lifeblood started to dry up. Then larger companies
like American Express entered the leasing arena,
squeezing out smaller firms. Chris’s company was one of
dozens of leasing brokers to crash and burn. He began
shedding employees and finally had to tell the stragglers
that Mission Pacific wouldn’t be able to cut their next payroll
checks.
Chris went to work for another leasing company but was
cut in a round of layoffs when a large bank acquired the
firm. Meanwhile, his wife gave birth to a second boy. So
when Jeff Norminton showed up talking about the
superhacker he’d met in Taft, Chris was ready to listen.
By the time he and Max met in that North Beach
restaurant, Chris had already been funding Norminton’s
scheme, providing some of the specialized equipment

Norminton said his hacker needed. Now that Chris had met
Max in person, he was eager for a demonstration. After
talking for hours, the three of them left the coffee shop to
find someplace to hack from.
They wound up at the twenty-seven-story Holiday Inn in
Chinatown, a few blocks away. At Max’s direction, they
asked for a room high above the street. Max positioned
himself at the window, booted his laptop, plugged in the
antenna, and began scanning for Wi-Fi networks.
In 2003, the world was going wireless in a big way and
bringing a massive security hole with it. The revolution had
begun with Apple’s AirPort wireless access point and then
was joined by hardware makers like Linksys and Netgear.
As hardware prices dropped, more and more companies
and home users began breaking free of the tethers of their
blue Ethernet cables.
But the wireless gear being ushered into homes and
offices around the country was a hacker’s dream. It
overwhelmingly employed a wireless standard called
802.11b, which included an encryption scheme that, in
theory, would make it difficult to jump onto someone’s
wireless network without authorization or to passively
eavesdrop on computer traffic. But in 2001, researchers at
the University of California at Berkeley revealed a number
of severe weaknesses in the encryption scheme that made
it crackable with ordinary off-the-shelf equipment and the
right software. And as a practical matter that technical
black magic was usually not even needed. To speed
adoption, manufacturers were shipping wireless access
points with encryption turned off by default. Businesses
small and large simply plugged in the boxes and forgot
about them—sometimes assuming falsely that their office
walls would keep their networks from seeping out onto the
street.
A few months before Max went to jail, a white-hat hacker
had invented a sport called “war driving” to highlight the
prevalence of leaky networks in San Francisco. After

prevalence of leaky networks in San Francisco. After
slapping a magnetically mounted antenna to the roof of his
Saturn, the white hat cruised the city’s downtown streets
while his laptop scanned for beaconing Wi-Fi access
points. After one hour in the financial district, his setup
would find close to eighty networks. A year and a half had
passed since then, and San Francisco, like other large
cities, was now blanketed in an invisible sea of network
traffic, available to anyone who cared to dip in.
Hacking from home was for idiots and teenagers—Max
had learned that lesson the hard way. Thanks to Wi-Fi, he
could now work from almost anywhere with complete
anonymity. This time, if the police traced back one of Max’s
hack attacks, they’d wind up on the doorstep of whatever
poor sap Max had used for connectivity.
The antenna Max used was a monster, a two-foot-wide
wire-grid parabolic that quickly teased out dozens of
networks from the ether surrounding the Holiday Inn. He
jumped on one and showed Chris how it all worked.
Wielding a vulnerability scanner—the same kind of tool
he’d used in his pen tests—he could quickly scan huge
chunks of Internet address space for known vulnerabilities,
like sending a drift net into the Web. Security holes were
everywhere. He was confident he’d be in financial
institutions and e-commerce sites in no time. It was up to
Norminton and Chris to decide what kind of data they
needed and how they’d exploit it.
Chris was blown away. This six-foot-five, semi-
vegetarian hacker knew his stuff, even if he was rusty from
the joint.
Chris introduced Max to one of his prison contacts, a real
estate fraudster named Werner Janer whom Chris had met
in Terminal Island in ’92. Janer offered to pay Max $5,000
to penetrate the computer of a personal enemy. He wrote
the check out to Charity so Max wouldn’t have to explain the
income to his probation officer.
The money gave Max some breathing room. He began

flying to Orange County, misspelling his name on the ticket
so there’d be no record of his violating his supervised
release by leaving the Bay Area. He and Norminton began
crashing at Chris’s place for a week at a stretch, hacking
from Chris’s garage.
He downloaded a list of small-sized financial institutions
from the FDIC’s website, figuring they’d be most
vulnerable, and launched a script to scan each bank for
known security holes. An electronic chime rang out through
the garage whenever it scored a hit. He wormed into the
banks and pulled out customer names, financial data, and
checking account numbers.
The scattershot approach meant Max would be spared
the frustration he’d felt in his last legitimate penetration test.
Hacking any one particular target can be difficult;
depending on the target, maybe even impossible. But scan
hundreds or thousands of systems, and you’re guaranteed
to find some that are soft. It was a numbers game, like
trying car doors as you walk through a parking lot.
Charity had only the broadest notion of what Max was up
to, and she didn’t like it. In an effort to win her over, Chris
and Norminton invited the couple down to Orange County
for a short vacation, paying their way for a weekend at
Disneyland. Charity could see that Max and Chris were
clicking, but something about Chris didn’t smell right. He
was too slick, too polished.
Max’s hacking moved to small e-commerce sites, where
he grabbed transaction histories, some with credit card
numbers. But his efforts were unfocused, and neither Chris
nor Norminton was sure what to do with all the data he was
stealing.
Fortunately, Chris had some money coming in. Werner
Janer owed him $50,000 and was ready to wire-transfer
the money to a bank account of Chris’s choosing.
Determined to get his hands on cold, hard, unreported
cash, Chris asked Norminton to do what he did best;
Norminton agreed to have one of his friends receive the

Norminton agreed to have one of his friends receive the
transfer and pull it out over the course of a few days.
The first round of withdrawals went as planned, and
Norminton and his friend showed up at Chris’s and handed
over $30,000 in $100 bills. The following day, though,
Norminton reported that his friend had taken ill and would
have to take the day off.
In truth, Norminton had discovered the source of the
windfall: It was Chris’s cut from a real estate scam he’d
helped Janer pull off. The money was dirty, and Norminton
was now implicated in the scheme. The next morning, Chris
found the Honda he’d loaned Norminton parked outside his
office, one tire flat and a fresh dent in the fender. There was
a note from Norminton inside: The FBI is after me. I’m
skipping town.
Chris phoned Norminton’s cash mule, already knowing
what the score would be: Norminton’s associate was in
perfect health and had withdrawn the other $20,000 the day
before, as planned. He’d given it to Norminton. Didn’t Chris
get it?
Chris tracked down Max through Charity and demanded
answers: What did Max know about Norminton’s
whereabouts? Where was Chris’s money? Max was as
surprised as Chris at Norminton’s disappearance, and
eventually the two agreed to continue their partnership
without Norminton.
Max and Chris fell into a routine. Once a month, Chris flew
or drove north and met Max in downtown San Francisco,
where they checked into a hotel. They’d carry Max’s
massive antenna up the fire stairs to their room and mount
it on a tripod near the window. Then Max would putter for a
while to locate a high-speed Wi-Fi with a strong signal.
They learned that altitude wasn’t as important in Wi-Fi
hacking as the sprawl of buildings visible out the window. If
they came up dry, Chris would run down to the front desk to
ask for a different room, explaining earnestly that he

couldn’t get a cell phone signal or was too afraid of heights
to remain on the twentieth floor.
Max treated it like a job, saying good-bye to Charity and
then vanishing for up to a week into one of the city’s finest
hotels, the Hilton, Westin, W, or Hyatt. While the clang of
cable car bells rose from the streets below, Max cast his
net over cyberspace, scooping up whatever data he could
find—not really sure what he was looking for.
On a whim, he cracked Kimi’s computer and that of her
boyfriend, with whom she’d moved in. Max contemplated
plundering her address book and sending out a mass e-
mail in her name, detailing how she betrayed him. He
thought everyone should know that Kimi’s new life was built
on a foundation of infidelity.
He didn’t go through with it. He had Charity now. Kimi
had moved on, and nothing would be gained by trying to
shame her, he realized. Shortly thereafter, he signed the
divorce papers.
Returning to his work, he began performing Google
searches for guidance in his targeting: What were other
fraudsters doing? How were they monetizing stolen data?
That was when he discovered where the real criminal
action was online: two websites called CarderPlanet and
Shadowcrew.

11

Script’s Twenty-Dollar Dumps
n the spring of 2001, some 150 Russian-speaking
computer criminals convened a summit at a restaurant in
the Ukraine port city of Odessa to brainstorm the launch of
a revolutionary website. Present were Roman Vega, a
thirty-seven-year-old man who sold counterfeit credit cards
to the underground through his online storefront BOA
Factory; a cybercrook known as “King Arthur”; and the man
who would emerge as their leader, a Ukrainian credit card
seller known by the handle “Script.”
The discussion was sparked by the success of a UK-
hosted website erected in 2000 called Counterfeit Library,
which solved one of the fundamental weaknesses of
conducting criminal business in IRC chat rooms, where the
wisdom and experience of years of crime vanished into the
air as soon as the chat was over. Founded by a handful of
Western cybercrooks, Counterfeit Library collected
underground tutorials onto a single website and attached
an online discussion forum where identity thieves could
gather to swap tips and buy and sell “novelty” identification
cards—a euphemism distilled from the same spirit in which
hookers go on “dates.”
Counterfeit Library had more in common with the
electronic bulletin board systems of the pre-Web days than
with IRC. Members could post in permanent discussion
threads and build personal reputations and brands. As
criminals around the globe discovered this patch of dry land
in the murky ephemeral sea of underground commerce, the
site collected hundreds, then thousands, of members from
across North America and Europe. They were identity

thieves, hackers, phishers, spammers, currency
counterfeiters, credit card forgers, all of whom had been
slaving away in their apartments and warehouses, blind,
until now, to the vastness of their secret brotherhood.
The carders of Eastern Europe had watched Counterfeit
Library with envy. Now they wanted to apply the same
alchemy to their own underground.
In June 2001, the result of the Odessa summit was
unveiled: the International Carders Alliance, or simply
Carderplanet.com, a tightly organized reinvention of
Counterfeit Library catering to the underworld of the former
Soviet empire. While Counterfeit Library was a
freewheeling discussion board and BOA Factory a
straightforward storefront operation, CarderPlanet was a
disciplined online bazaar, charged with the excitement of a
commodities exchange.
Unabashed in its purpose, the site adopted the
nomenclature of the Italian Mafia for its rigid hierarchy. A
registered user was a “sgarrista”—a soldier, without
special privileges. One step up was a “giovane d’honore,”
who helped moderate the discussions under the
supervision of a “capo.” At the top of the food chain was
CarderPlanet’s don, Script.
Russian-speaking vendors flocked to the new site to
offer an array of products and services. Credit card
numbers were a staple, naturally, but only the beginning.
Some sellers specialized in the more valuable “full infos”—
a credit card number accompanied by the owner’s name,
address, Social Security number, and mother’s maiden
name, all for around $30. Hacked eBay accounts were
worth $20. Ambitious buyers could spend $100 for a
“change of billing,” or COB, a stolen credit card account
where the billing address could be changed to a mail drop
under the buyer’s control. Other vendors sold counterfeit
checks or money orders, or rented drop addresses in the
United States where merchandise ordered on American
credit cards could be delivered without raising alarms and

credit cards could be delivered without raising alarms and
then reshipped to the scammer.
Physical products like blank plastic “magstripe”
(magnetic stripe) cards were in the offering, as well as
“novelty” IDs, complete with holograms, which sold for
anywhere from $75 to $150, depending on the quality. One
could purchase a package of ten identification cards with
the same photo but different names for $500.
CarderPlanet’s registration was open to anyone, but to
sell on the site, vendors first had to submit their products or
services to an approved reviewer for inspection. New
vendors would sometimes be required to escrow their
transactions through Script or to post a bond with the site’s
emergency fund, used to pay out buyers in case an
approved vendor went out of business with unfilled orders
in his queue. Vendors were expected to keep the board
apprised of any vacation plans, safeguard buyers’
information from hacker attacks, and respond promptly to
customer complaints. “Rippers,” vendors who failed to
deliver on a sale, were subject to banishment, as was any
vendor who accumulated five customer complaints.
CarderPlanet was soon imitated by a second site, this
one aimed at the English-speaking world: Shadowcrew. In
September 2002, after witnessing the stunning success of
CarderPlanet’s regimented hierarchy, a carder named
“Kidd” brought over the heaviest hitters from Counterfeit
Library to do business the Russian way. News of the site
spread through IRC chat rooms and prison yards alike, and
by April 2003, Shadowcrew had four thousand registered
users.
With the motto “For Those Who Like to Play in the
Shadows,” Shadowcrew was at once a study-at-home
college and an online supermarket for nearly anything
illegal. Its tutorials offered lessons on how to use a stolen
credit card number, forge a driver’s license, defeat a
burglar alarm, or silence a gun. It boasted a wiki that
tracked which state driver’s licenses were forgeable. And

its approved vendors around the world could provide a
dizzying array of illicit products and services: credit reports,
hacked online bank accounts, and names, birth dates, and
Social Security numbers of potential identity theft targets.
As on CarderPlanet, each product had its own
specialists, and every vendor had to be reviewed by a
trusted site member before they were allowed to sell.
Disputes were handled judiciously, with administrators and
moderators working overtime to expose and ban rippers
selling bunk products.
The trading wandered beyond data into tangible items
like ATM skimmers, prescription drugs, and cocaine, and
into services like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)
attacks—take down any website for $200—and malware
customization to evade antivirus products. One well-
reviewed vendor offered a test-taking service that
promised to get customers technical certifications within
days. A vendor called UBuyWeRush sprang up to flood the
underground with magnetic stripe writers, as well as must-
haves like safety paper and magnetic ink cartridges for
counterfeiting checks.
Child porn was forbidden, and one vendor who asked to
be reviewed for exotic animal sales was laughed off the
board. But nearly anything else was fair game on
Shadowcrew.
By this time, CarderPlanet had launched subforums for
criminals from Asia, Europe, and the States, but it was
Shadowcrew that forged a true international marketplace: a
cross between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Star
Wars’s Mos Eisley cantina, where criminals of varying
disciplines could meet up and collaborate on heists. An
identity thief in Denver could buy credit card numbers from
a hacker in Moscow, send them to Shanghai to be turned
into counterfeit cards, then pick up a fake driver’s license
from a forger in Ukraine before hitting the mall.

Max shared his discovery with Chris, who was fascinated.
Chris logged on to the forums and studied the content like a
textbook. A lot of things hadn’t changed since he’d dealt in
credit card fraud in the 1980s. Other things had changed a
lot.
There was a time when crooks could literally pull credit
card numbers from the trash by Dumpster-diving for
receipts or the carbon-paper slips left over from retailers’
sliding imprint machines. Now mechanical imprinting was
dead, and Visa and MasterCard insisted that receipts not
include full credit card account numbers. Even if you got the
numbers, that was no longer enough to make counterfeit
cards. The credit card companies now added a special
code to every magnetic stripe—like a PIN, but unknown
even to the cardholder.
Called a Card Verification Value, or CVV, the code is a
number distilled from other data on the stripe—primarily the
account number and expiration date—and then encrypted
with a secret key known only to the issuing bank. When the
magstripe is swiped at the point-of-sale terminal the CVV
is sent along with the account number and other data to the
issuing bank for verification; if it doesn’t match, the
transaction is declined.
When it was introduced by Visa in 1992, the CVV began
driving down fraud costs immediately, from nearly .18
percent of Visa transactions that year to around .15 percent
a year later. In the 2000s, the innovation proved a strong
bulwark against phishing attacks, in which a spammer
spews thousands of falsified e-mails aimed at luring
consumers into entering their credit card numbers into a
fake bank website. Without the CVV on the magnetic stripe
—which consumers didn’t know, and thus couldn’t reveal—
those stolen numbers were useless at real-world cash
registers. Nobody could walk into a Vegas casino, slap
down a card derived from a phishing attack, and get a pile
of black chips to carry to the roulette table.
MasterCard followed Visa’s lead with its own Card

MasterCard followed Visa’s lead with its own Card
Security Code, or CSC. Then in 1998, Visa introduced the
CVV2, a different secret code printed on the backs of
cards for consumers to use exclusively over the phone or
the Web. That further reduced crime losses and completed
the Chinese wall between fraud on the Internet and in real
life: Accounts stolen from e-commerce sites or in phishing
attacks could only be used online or over the phone, while
magstripe data could be used in-store but not on the Web,
because it didn’t include the printed CVV2.
By 2002, the security measure had turned raw magstripe
data into one of the underground’s most valuable
commodities and pushed the point of compromise closer
to the consumer.
Hackers began breaching transaction-processing
systems for the data, but the most straightforward way for
ordinary crooks to steal the information was to recruit a
cash-hungry restaurant employee and equip him with a
pocket-sized “skimmer,” a magstripe reader with built-in
memory. As small as a cigarette lighter and readily
concealed in the apron pocket of a fast-food worker or the
suit jacket of an upscale maître d’, a skimmer can hold
hundreds of cards in its memory for later retrieval through a
USB port. A server needs only a second of privacy to swipe
a customer’s card through the device.
In the late 1990s, thieves began fanning out in big cities
across the United States, eyeing waiters, waitresses, and
drive-through attendants who might be interested in a little
extra cash, typically $10 a swipe. Though it was riskier, gas
station managers and retail workers could get in on the
action as well by installing tiny skimming circuit boards in
pay-at-the-pump readers and point-of-sale terminals. Some
of the data would be exploited locally, but much of it was
sent to Eastern Europe, where the swipes were sold over
the Internet ten, twenty, a hundred, or even thousands at a
time.
The carders call these “dumps”; each contained just two

lines of text, one for each track on a credit card’s three-
inch-long magstripe.
Track 1: B4267841463924615^SMITH/
JEFFREY^04101012735200521000000
Track 2: 4267841463924615=041010127352521
A dump was worth about $20 for a standard card, $50
for a gold card, and $80 to $100 for a high-limit corporate
card.
Chris decided to try some carding himself. He
determined that Script, the godfather of CarderPlanet, was
the most reliable source of dumps in the world. He paid the
Ukrainian $800 for a set of twenty Visa Classic numbers
and elsewhere parted with around $500 for an MSR206,
the underground’s favorite magnetic stripe encoder.
Once the shoebox-sized MSR206 was plugged into his
computer and the right software installed, he could take an
anonymous Visa gift card, or one of his own credit cards,
and encode it in two quick swipes with one of Script’s
dumps.
With the reprogrammed card burning a hole in his
pocket, Chris browsed his local Blockbuster and some
retailers to scope out the opportunities. Simple magstripe
fraud might be cheap and easy, but it had severe
limitations. Through observation, Chris quickly determined
that shopping for consumer electronics or expensive
clothes would be tough: To guard against what Chris was
contemplating, many high-end stores require the checkout
clerk to physically type the last four digits from the face of
the credit card; the point-of-sale terminal rejects the card,
or worse, if the digits don’t match what’s on the stripe. A
reprogrammed card was only good at spots where
employees never get to lay their hands on the plastic, like
gas stations or drugstores.
Chris made his move at a local supermarket. He loaded
his cart indiscriminately and checked out, sliding his plastic

through the point-of-sale terminal. After a moment, the word
“Approved” flickered across the display, and somewhere in
America a random consumer was charged for $400 in
groceries.
Chris delivered his ill-gotten groceries to an Orange
County couple in worse financial shape than himself and
then took the husband—a contractor who’d recently had his
tools stolen—to a local Walmart to purchase new
construction gear. Word spread that Chris had credit cards,
and he began doling out his reprogrammed plastic to a few
friends, who were always thoughtful enough to make small
purchases for Chris as a thank-you.
He could see the outlines of a business plan in his
circulating plastic. Drop everything else, he told Max. The
real money is in dumps.

12

Free Amex!
ax broached his plan obliquely with Charity over the
rare indulgence of a sushi dinner. “Which institutions would
you say deserve to be punished the most?” he asked.
He had the answer ready: the moneylenders. The greedy
banks and credit card companies who saddle consumers
with $400 billion in debt each year while charging usurious
interest and hooking kids on plastic before they’ve
graduated college. And because consumers were never
held directly liable for fraudulent charges—by law they could
only be billed for the first $50, and most banks waived even
that—credit card fraud was a victimless crime, costing only
these soulless institutions money.
Credit wasn’t real, Max reasoned, just an abstract
concept; he would be stealing numbers in a system, not
dollars in someone’s pocket. The financial institutions
would be left holding the bag, and they deserved it.
Charity had learned to accept the bitterness Max brought
back from prison: Living with him meant never again
watching a crime drama on TV, because any depiction of
the police as good guys set Max fuming. She wasn’t
entirely sure what Max had in mind now, and she didn’t
want to know. But one thing was clear. Max had decided he
was going to be Robin Hood.
• • •
Max knew exactly where to get the magstripe data Chris
wanted. There were thousands of potential sources sitting
in plain sight, right on CarderPlanet and Shadowcrew. The

carders themselves would be his prey.
Most of them weren’t hackers, they were just crooks; they
knew a bit about fraud but little about computer security.
They certainly wouldn’t be much harder to hack than the
Pentagon. It was also a morally palatable proposition: He
would be stealing credit card numbers that had already
been stolen—a criminal was going to use them, so it might
as well be Chris Aragon, his criminal.
He started by choosing his weapon, picking out the slick
Bifrost Trojan horse program already circulating online and
customizing it to evade antivirus detection. To test the
results, he used the computer emulation software VMware
to run a dozen different virtual Windows boxes on his
computer at once, each loaded with a different flavor of
security software.
When the malware went undetected on all, he moved to
the next step: harvesting a list of carders’ ICQ numbers and
e-mail addresses from public forum posts, collecting
thousands of them into a database. Then, posing as a well-
known dumps vendor named Hummer911, he fired off a
message to the entire list. The note announced that
Hummer911 had acquired more American Express dumps
than he could use or sell, so he was giving some away.
Click here, Max wrote, to get your free Amex.
When a carder clicked on the link, he found himself
looking at a list of fake Amex dumps Max had generated,
while invisible code on the Web page exploited a new
Internet Explorer vulnerability.
The exploit took advantage of the fact that Internet
Explorer can process more than just Web pages. In 1999,
Microsoft added support for a new type of file called an
HTML Application—a file written in the same markup and
scripting languages used by websites but permitted to do
things on a user’s computer that a website would never be
allowed to do, like creating or deleting files at will and
executing arbitrary commands. The idea was to let
developers already accustomed to programming for the

developers already accustomed to programming for the
Web use the same skills to craft fully functional desktop
applications.
Internet Explorer recognizes that HTML Applications can
be deadly and won’t execute them from the Web, only from
the user’s hard drive. In theory.
In practice, Microsoft had left a hole in the way the
browser screened content embedded on a Web page.
Many Web pages contain OBJECT tags, which are simple
instructions that tell the browser to grab something from
another Web address—typically a movie or music file—and
include it as part of the page. But it turned out you could
also load an HTML Application through the OBJECT tag
and get it to execute. You just had to disguise it a little.
While Max’s victims salivated over the bogus American
Express dumps, an unseen OBJECT tag instructed their
browsers to pull in a malicious HTML Application that Max
had coded for the occasion. Crucially, Max had given the
file a name ending in “.txt”—a superficial indication that it
was an ordinary text file. Internet Explorer saw that file
name and decided it was safe to run.
Once the browser started downloading the file, however,
Max’s server transmitted a content type indicator of
“application/hta”—identifying it now as an HTML
Application. Essentially, Max’s server changed its story,
presenting the file as a harmless document for the
browser’s security check, then correctly identifying it as an
HTML Application when it came time for the browser to
decide how to interpret the file.
Having judged the file safe based on the name, Internet
Explorer didn’t reevaluate that conclusion once it learned
the truth. It just ran Max’s code as an HTML Application
instead of a Web page.
Max’s HTML Application was a tight Visual Basic script
that wrote out and executed a small grappling-hook
program on the user’s machine. Max named the grappling
hook “hope.exe.” Hope was Charity’s middle name.

The grappling hook, in turn, downloaded and installed his
modified Bifrost Trojan horse. And just like that, Max was in
control.
• • •
The carders converged like hungry piranhas on his
poisoned page: Hundreds of their machines reported back
to Max for duty. Excited, he began poking around the
criminals’ hard drives at random. He was surprised by how
small-time it all looked. Most of his victims were buying
small batches of dumps, ten or twenty at a time—even less.
But there were lots of carders, and there was nothing to
keep him from returning to their machines over and over
again. In the end, the Free Amex attack would score him
about ten thousand dumps.
He siphoned the dumps to Chris as he found them and
vacuumed other useful data from his victims: details on
their scams, stolen identity information, passwords, mailing
lists used in phishing schemes, some real names, photos,
and e-mail and ICQ addresses of their friends—useful for
future attacks on the underground.
With a single well-constructed ruse, he was now invisibly
embedded in the carders’ ecosystem. This was the start of
something big. He’d be a stick-up man among the carders,
living off whatever he could skim from their illegal economy.
His victims couldn’t call the cops, and with his anonymous
Internet connection and other precautions, he’d be immune
to reprisal.
It wasn’t long, though, before Max discovered that not all
of the carders were what they seemed to be.
The victim was in Santa Ana. When Max strolled into the
computer through his back door and began poking around,
he saw at once that something was very wrong.
The computer was running a program called Camtasia

that keeps a video record of everything crossing the
computer’s screen—not the kind of information a criminal
normally wants to archive. Max foraged through the hard
drive, and his suspicions were confirmed: The disk was
packed with FBI reports.
Chris was shaken by the discovery of an FBI cybercrime
agent in his own backyard, but Max was intrigued—the
agent’s hard drive offered potentially useful insight into the
bureau’s methods. They talked about what to do next.
Some of the files indicated the agent had an informant who
was providing information on Script, the CarderPlanet
leader who sold Chris his first dumps. Should they warn
Script that there was an informant in his circle?
They decided to do nothing; if he were ever busted, Max
figured, he might be able to play this as a trump card. If it
got out that he’d accidentally hacked an FBI agent, it could
embarrass the bureau, maybe even cost them some
convictions.
He returned to his work hacking the carders. But he knew
now that he wasn’t the only outsider worming into the crime
forums.

13

Villa Siena
alm trees rose at the entrance of Villa Siena, a
sprawling gated community in Irvine, half a mile from John
Wayne Airport. Beyond the front gate, European-inspired
fountains bubbled in the manicured courtyards, and four
swimming pools sparkled blue beneath the sunny Southern
California sky. Residents were enjoying the clubhouse,
relaxing in the spas, getting in a workout at one of the three
fitness rooms, or perhaps visiting the full-time concierge to
make plans for the evening.
In one of the spacious apartments, Chris Aragon was
running his factory. The drapes were drawn over the giant
picture window to hide the riot of machinery crowding the
Ikea tables and granite countertops. He flipped on his card
printer, and it awakened with a whining rumble, wheels
spinning up to speed, motors pulling the ribbons taut as a
hospital bedsheet.
Max was snagging dumps regularly now, and when he
got a new haul, there was no time to waste—the swipes
were stolen property twice over, and Chris had to burn
through them before the crooks who’d purchased or
hacked the numbers maxed them out first or blundered and
got them flagged by the credit card companies. Chris had
tapped the last of his reserves to invest in about $15,000
worth of credit card printing gear and the apartment to
house it. Now the investment was paying dividends.
Chris loaded blank PVC cards into the hopper of an
unwieldy oblong machine called a Fargo HDP600 card
printer, a $5,000 device used to print corporate ID cards.
With a click on his laptop, the machine drew a card into its

maw and hummed once, twice, a third, and a fourth time,
each sound marking another color as it moved to a clear
transfer ribbon and was rapidly vaporized by heating
elements and fused to the surface of the card. A final low
grinding from the Fargo meant a clear laminate coat was
settling over the plastic.
It was forty-four seconds from start to finish, and then the
machine spat out the card—a glossy, brightly colored
consumer objet d’art. A bald eagle staring purposefully at a
Capitol One logo, or the grim American Express centurion,
or the simple smudge of sky blue across the white face of a
Sony-branded MasterCard. For the high-limit cards, the
process was the same, except sometimes Chris would
start with gold- or platinum-colored PVC stock, purchased,
like the white cards, in boxes of hundreds.
Once he had a pile of freshly printed plastic in hand,
Chris moved to a second stop in the assembly line: a
monochrome printer for the fine print on the back of the
card. Then if the design called for a hologram, he’d pluck a
sheet of Chinese-produced counterfeits from a stack, align
it carefully in a die punch, and pull the lever to cut out an
oval or rounded rectangle the size of a postage stamp. A
$2,000 Kwikprint Model 55 heat stamper, resembling a drill
press crossed with a medieval torture instrument, fused the
metal foil to the surface of the PVC.
The embosser was next: a giant motorized carousel
wheel of letters and numbers that sounded like an IBM
Selectric as it banged the name, account number, and
expiration date one character at a time into the plastic,
tipping each with silver or gold foil. From a Chinese
supplier, Chris had obtained the special security keys for
Visa’s “flying V” and MasterCard’s joined “MC”—two
distinctive raised characters found only on credit cards, real
and fake.
Credit card verification systems don’t check the
customer’s name, which meant Chris had the luxury of
choosing whatever moniker he liked for the front of his

choosing whatever moniker he liked for the front of his
plastic; he preferred “Chris Anderson” for the cards he
used himself. On his computer, Chris edited Max’s dumps
to make the name on the magstripe match the alias—
conveniently, the name was the one piece of magstripe
data not used in calculating the CVV security code, so it
could be altered at will.
Finally, it was two swipes through the trusty MSR206 to
program Max’s dump onto the magstripe, and Chris had a
counterfeit credit card that duplicated in nearly every way
the plastic nestled in a consumer’s wallet or purse
somewhere in America.
He wasn’t done yet.
Driver’s licenses were a must for high-end purchases,
and there, too, Chris’s assembly line and Shadowcrew’s
tutorials got the job done. For licenses, he’d switch from
PVC to Teslin, a thinner, more flexible material sold in 8½ ×
11 inch sheets. It was one sheet for the front, another for the
back, ten licenses to a sheet.
California licenses include two security features that took
some extra hacking. One is a translucent image of the
California state seal, set in a repeating pattern in the clear
laminate over the face of the license. To simulate it, Chris
used Pearl Ex, a fine colored powder sold at arts-and-
crafts stores for less than three dollars a jar. The trick was
to dust a sheet of laminate with a mix of gold and silver
Pearl Ex, feed it into a printer loaded with a clear ink
cartridge, and print a mirror image of the California pattern
with the transparent ink. It didn’t matter that the ink was
invisible—it was the heat from the print head he was after.
When the sheet came out, the printer had heat-fused the
pattern onto the surface, and the extra Pearl Ex was easily
washed away in a cold rinse.
The ultraviolet printing on the face of the license was no
more difficult. An ordinary ink-jet printer would do the trick,
as long as one drained the ink from the cartridge reservoirs
and replaced it with multicolored UV ink bought in tubes.

After all the dusting, printing, and washing, Chris was left
with four sheets of material. He would sandwich the two
sheets of printed Teslin between the laminate and run it
through a pressure laminator. After die-cutting, the result
was impressive: Run your fingers over the license and feel
the flawless silken surface; hold it at an angle and witness
the ghostly state seal; put it under a UV bulb, and the state
flag glowed eerily, the words “California Republic” in red,
above them a brown bear walking on four legs across a
yellow hilltop.
With cards and licenses complete, Chris got on the
phone and summoned his girls. He’d figured out that
attractive college-aged women made the best cashers.
There was Nancy, a five-foot-three-inch Latina with “love”
tattooed on one wrist; Lindsey, a pale girl with brown hair
and hazel eyes; Adrian, a young Italian woman; and Jamie,
who’d worked as a waitress at the Hooters in Newport
Beach.
He’d met the twin brunettes Liz and Michelle Esquere at
Villa Siena, where they lived. Michelle was just hanging
around with the group, but Liz was invaluable: She had
worked in the mortgage industry and was whip-smart, well
educated, and responsible enough to take over some of
the administrative work, like maintaining the spreadsheet of
payouts, in addition to making in-store purchases.
Chris had a talent for recruitment. He might meet a new
prospect at a restaurant and invite her to go partying with
his friends. She’d join them at the clubs and expensive
dinners, ride in the back of the rented limousine when one
of them had a birthday to celebrate. She’d see money
everywhere. Then, when the time was right, maybe months
later, maybe when the girl confessed she had bills to pay or
was behind on her rent, he would casually mention that he
knew a way she could earn quick and easy money. He’d tell
her how it worked. It was a victimless crime, he’d explain.
They’d be “sticking it to the man.”
None of the girls knew where Chris got his credit card

None of the girls knew where Chris got his credit card
data. When he referred to Max, it was as “the Whiz,” an
unnamable superhacker whom they’d never have the
privilege of meeting. Chris’s code name was “the Dude.”
Now that his operation was purring, the Dude was paying
the Whiz around $10,000 a month for the dumps—
transferring the payments through a prepaid debit card
called Green Dot.
Marketed to students and consumers with poor credit, a
Green Dot Visa or MasterCard is a credit card without the
credit: The consumer funds the card in advance with direct
payroll deposits, transfers from a bank account, or cash.
The last option made it an ideal money pipeline between
Chris in Orange County and Max in San Francisco: Chris
would drop in at a neighborhood 7-Eleven or Walgreens
and purchase a Green Dot recharge number, called a
MoneyPak, for any amount up to $500. He’d then IM or e-
mail the number to Max, who’d apply it to one of his Green
Dot cards at the company’s website. He could then use the
card for everyday purchases or make withdrawals from San
Francisco ATMs.
Once his crew arrived, ready for work, Chris passed out
their cards, separated into low-limit classic cards and high-
limit gold and platinum. They should stick to small
purchases for the classics, he’d remind them—$500 or so.
With the high-limit plastic they should go for the big bucks,
purchases from $1,000 to $10,000 dollars. The girls were
all young, but affecting the privileged bearing of stylish
Orange County youth they could walk into a Nordstrom’s
and snatch up a couple of $500 Coach bags without raising
eyebrows, then cross to the other side of the mall and do
the same thing at Bloomingdale’s.
New cashers were always nervous at first, but once the
first fake card was approved at the register, they were
hooked. In no time they’d be sending Chris excited text
messages from their shopping excursions: “Can we use
amex at new bloomingdales?” or “I did over 7k on a mc!

yeah!”
At the end of the day, they met Chris in a parking lot and
transferred the purses trunk-to-trunk. He paid them on the
spot, 30 percent of the retail value, and carefully recorded
the transaction on a payout sheet like a real businessman.
The handbags—elegant cloth and suede and gleaming
buckles—would go in boxes until Chris’s wife, Clara, could
sell them on eBay.
As night fell over Villa Siena, the lights went on above the
tennis courts and the outdoor fireplaces ignited. Miles away
Chris and his crew were at a restaurant, ordering a
celebratory dinner and a bottle of wine. As always, it was
Chris’s treat.

14

The Raid
ice TV!” said Tim, admiring the sixty-one-inch
Sony plasma hanging on the wall. Charity, a compulsive
reader, hated the new flat-screen, the way it dominated the
living room in their new apartment, but Max loved his
gadgets, and this one was more than a high-def toy. It was
a symbol of the couple’s newfound financial security.
Max’s friends knew that he was into something, and not
just because he was no longer struggling to make ends
meet. Max had begun slipping Tim CD-ROMs burned with
the latest exploits from the underground, giving the system
administrator an edge in protecting his work machines.
Then there were the odd comments at the monthly Hungry
Programmers’ dinner at Jing Jing in Palo Alto. When
everyone was done describing their latest projects, Max
would only offer a cryptic note of envy. “Wow, I wish I was
doing something positive.”
But nobody was pressing Max for the details of his new
gig; they could only hope it was something quasilegitimate.
The hacker scrupulously avoided burdening his friends with
the knowledge of his double life, even as he slipped farther
to the edge of their circle. Until the day one of his hacks
followed him home.
• • •
It was 6:30 a.m. and still dark out when Chris Toshok
awoke to the sound of his doorbell buzzing, the long
continuous drone of someone holding their thumb on the
button. Figuring it for a neighborhood drunk, he rolled over

and tried to get back to sleep. Then the buzz broke into an
insistent rhythm, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, like a busy signal. He
reluctantly crawled out of bed, grabbed his pants and a
sweatshirt, and moved groggily down the stairs.
When he opened the door he found himself squinting into
the glare of a flashlight.
“Are you Chris Toshok?” said a woman’s voice.
“Uh, yes.”
“Mr. Toshok, we’re with the FBI. We have a warrant to
search the premises.”
The agent—a long-haired blonde—showed Toshok her
badge and pressed a thin sheaf of papers into his hands.
Another agent put a firm hand on his arm and guided him
outside to the porch, clearing the doorway to admit a flood
of suits into the house. They roused Toshok’s roommate,
then began tossing Chris’s bedroom, riffling through his
bookshelves and pawing through his underwear drawer.
The blonde, joined by a Secret Service agent, sat down
with Toshok to explain why they were there. Four months
earlier the source code for the unreleased first-person
shooter Half-Life 2 had been stolen from the computers of
Valve Software in Bellevue, Washington. It was swapped in
IRC for a while and then showed up on file-sharing
networks.
Half-Life 2 was perhaps the most anticipated game of all
time, and the emergence of the secret source code had
electrified the gaming world. Valve announced it would
have to delay the launch of the game, and the company
CEO issued a public call for Half-Life fans to help track
down the thief. Based on sales of the original game, Valve
valued the software at a quarter of a billion dollars.
The FBI had traced some of the hacking activity to
Toshok’s Internet IP address at his old house, the agent
explained. The judge would go easier on Toshok if he told
them where he’d stashed the source code.
Toshok protested his innocence, though he

acknowledged that he knew about the breach. His old
friend Max Vision was staying with him at the time of the
intrusion, and he got very excited when the source code
popped up online.
Hearing Max Vision’s name sent the agents into double
time—they nearly tripped over themselves to finish the
search and get back to the office to prepare a warrant
application for Max’s new apartment. Chris watched
gloomily as they gathered his nine computers, some music
CDs, and his Xbox. The blonde agent registered the look
on his face. “Yeah,” she said, “this is going to be hard for
you.”
When Max heard about the raid, he knew he didn’t have
much time. He ran around his apartment stashing his gear.
He hid an external hard drive in a stack of sweaters in the
closet, another in a cereal box. One of his laptops fit under
the sofa cushions; he hung a second one out the bathroom
window in a garbage bag. Everything sensitive on his
computers was encrypted, so even if they found his
hardware, the agents wouldn’t get any evidence of his
hacking. But under the terms of his supervised release, he
wasn’t supposed to be using encryption at all. Moreover, it
would be incredibly inconvenient to let the FBI take all of his
computers.
The feds arrived in force, as many as twenty agents
swarming like ants through the apartment. They found only
the routine trappings of a San Francisco computer geek
with hippie leanings: a bookshelf with Orwell’s 1984,
Huxley’s Brave New World, Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi
classic Ender’s Game, and a smattering of Asimov and
Carl Sagan. There was a bicycle, and stuffed penguins
were strewn everywhere. Max loved penguins.
They discovered not one of Max’s slapdash hiding spots,
and this time, the hacker had nothing to say. The agents left
without any evidence linking Max to the Valve intrusion,
much less any hints of the crimes he was committing with

Chris. Just a stack of CDs, a broken hard drive, and a
vanilla Windows machine he’d left out as diversions.
But Charity had just learned what it meant to be in Max
Vision’s world. Max insisted he was innocent of the source
code theft. It was probably the truth. There’d been several
first-person shooter fans crawling around Valve’s Swiss
cheese network in anticipation of Half-Life 2. Max
happened to be one of them.
The FBI later settled on a different Valve hacker: a
twenty-year-old German hacker named Axel “Ago” Gembe,
who admitted to his intrusions in e-mails to Valve’s CEO,
though he too denied stealing the code.
Gembe was already notorious for creating Agobot, a
pioneering computer worm that did more than just spread
from one Windows machine to another. When Agobot took
over a machine, the user might not notice anything but a
sudden sluggishness in performance. But deep in the PC’s
subconscious, it was joining a hacker’s private army. The
malware was programmed to automatically log in to a
preselected IRC room, announce itself, and then linger to
accept commands broadcast by its master in the chat
channel.
Thousands of computers would report at once, forming a
kind of hive mind called a botnet. With one line of text, a
hacker could activate keystroke loggers on all the
machines to capture passwords and credit card numbers.
He could instruct the computers to open secret e-mail
proxies to launder spam. Worst of all, he could direct all
those PCs to simultaneously flood a targeted website with
traffic—a distributed denial-of-service attack that could
take down a top site for hours while network administrators
blocked each IP address one at a time.
DDoS attacks started as a way for quarreling hackers to
knock each other out of IRC. Then one day in February
2000, a fifteen-year-old Canadian named Michael
“MafiaBoy” Calce experimentally programmed his botnet to
hose down the highest-traffic websites he could find. CNN,

hose down the highest-traffic websites he could find. CNN,
Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Dell, and E-Trade all buckled under
the deluge, leading to national headlines and an
emergency meeting of security experts at the White House.
Since then, DDoS attacks had grown to become one of the
Internet’s most monstrous problems.
Bots like Ago’s marked the decade’s major innovation in
malware, inaugurating an era where any pissed-off script
kiddie can take down part of the Web at will. Gembe’s
confession in the Valve hack provided the FBI with a
golden opportunity to snare one of the innovators most
responsible. The FBI tried to lure Gembe to America with
an Invita-style job offer from Valve. After months of
negotiations and telephone interviews with Valve
executives, the hacker seemed ready to hop a flight to the
States.
Then the German police intervened, arrested the hacker,
and charged him locally as a youthful offender. Gembe was
sentenced to one year of probation.
The raid on Max’s house shook him, filling his head with
unpleasant memories of the FBI’s search warrant over the
BIND attacks. Max decided he needed a safe house in the
city, a place where he could ply his trade and store his data
free from the threat of search warrants—something like
Chris’s Villa Siena plant.
Under an alias, Chris rented a second apartment for
Max, a spacious penthouse in the Fillmore District, with a
balcony and a fireplace—Max liked working by an open
fire, and he’d joked that he could burn the evidence in an
emergency.
Max tried to get home to Charity daily, but with a
comfortable hacker safe house to retreat to, he began
disappearing for days at a stretch, sometimes only
emerging when his girlfriend interrupted his work with a
prodding phone call.
“Dude, time to come home. I miss you.”

As money started to flow into Max and Chris’s joint
operation, so did the mistrust. Some of the cashers in
Chris’s crew liked to party, and the constant presence of
cocaine, ecstasy, and pot called to Chris like a forgotten
melody. In February, he was pulled over near his home and
arrested for driving under the influence. He began routinely
vanishing with his comely employees for weekend-long
bacchanals in Vegas: The day was for shopping; at night,
Chris would snort some coke and take the girls out to the
Hard Rock to party or snag a VIP table at the sleek
Ghostbar atop the Palms, where he’d blow $1,000 on
dinner and another grand on wine. Back in Orange County,
he took a mistress—an eighteen-year-old woman he met
through one of his cashers.
Max found both drugs and marital infidelity distasteful.
But what really irked him was the financial arrangement.
Chris was paying Max haphazardly—in whatever amount
he felt like turning over at any given moment. Max wanted a
straight 50 percent of Chris’s profits. He was certain that
Chris was making serious bank from their joint operation.
Chris tried to set him straight, and he e-mailed Max a
detailed spreadsheet showing where the profits were
going. Out of a hundred cards, maybe fifty worked, and only
half of those could buy anything worth selling—the others
were seeds and stems, cards with $500 security limits that
were good only for trifles like gas and meals. Chris had
expenses, too—spreading his hustle meant flying his crew
to far-flung cities, and airline seats weren’t getting any
cheaper. Meanwhile, he was paying rent at Villa Siena for
his credit card factory.
Max was unconvinced. “Call me back when you’re not
stoned.”
The last straw came when Chris, three months after the
Half-Life raid, suffered a close call himself. He’d driven up
to San Francisco to meet with Max and make some
carding runs at Peninsula malls. He and his crew were
checked into adjacent rooms at the W, a posh hotel in the

checked into adjacent rooms at the W, a posh hotel in the
Soma district, when Chris got a call from the front desk. His
credit card had been declined.
Hungover and fuzzy-headed from the flu, Chris took the
elevator to the marbled lobby and pulled a new fake card
from his swollen wallet. He watched as the clerk swiped it. It
was declined. He produced another one, and it failed too.
The third one worked, but by then the clerk was suspicious,
and as the elevator was carrying Chris back to the twenty-
seventh floor, she was picking up the phone and calling the
credit card company.
The next knock on Chris’s door was the San Francisco
Police Department. They cuffed him and searched his
rooms and car, seizing his Sony laptop, an MSR206, and
his SUV, which had a fake VIN tag—Chris had
experimented with renting cars using his plastic in Las
Vegas, then sending them to Mexico to be fitted with clean
VINs.
Chris was thrown in the county jail. His disappearance
worried Max, but Chris bailed out quickly and confessed his
blunder to his partner. Fortunately for him the police
investigation went no further. Chris was sentenced a month
later to three years of probation and ordered not to return to
the W. He boasted afterward that he’d been a beneficiary
of San Francisco’s liberal justice system.
It was the kind of bullshit local bust that happened to
Chris’s girls all the time; that was why Chris kept a bail
bondsman on retainer and even let him crash at his Villa
Siena factory. But Max was furious. It was unforgivably
sloppy for someone at Chris’s level to be arrested carding
a hotel room.
Max decided he could no longer rely exclusively on his
partner. He needed a Plan B.

15

UBuyWeRush
he run-down strip mall was plunked down in that vast,
flat interior of Los Angeles County that doesn’t make it onto
postcards, far from the ocean and so distant from the hills
that the squat stucco buildings could be a Hollywood set,
the featureless sky behind them a blue screen to be filled in
with mountains or trees in post-production.
Chris pulled his car into the trash-strewn parking lot. A
marquee at the entrance gave top billing to the Cowboy
Country Saloon, and below that it was the usual south Los
Angeles mix: a liquor store, a pawnshop, a nail salon. And
one more that was less usual: UBuyWeRush—the only
retail sign in Los Angeles that was also a handle on
CarderPlanet and Shadowcrew.
He walked into the front office, where an empty reception
window suggested the sixty-cent-per-square-foot space
had once been a medical clinic. On the wall a Mercator
projection map of the world bristled with pushpins. Then
Chris was greeted warmly by UBuy himself, Cesar
Carrenza.
Cesar had come to the underground by a circuitous
course. He graduated from the DeVry Institute in 2001 with
a degree in computer programming, hoping to get an
Internet job. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to try his
hand as an independent businessman on the Web.
From an ad in the Daily Commerce, he learned about an
upcoming auction at a public storage facility in Long
Beach, where the owners were selling off the contents of
abandoned lockers. When he showed up he found the
auction observed a very specific ritual. The manager,

wielding an imposing bolt cutter, would snip off the
defaulting renter’s lock while the bidders watched, and then
open the door. The bidders, about twenty of them, were
expected to evaluate the contents from where they stood
several feet away. The winner would then secure the unit
with his own padlock and clear out the contents within
twenty-four hours.
The experienced bidders were easy to spot: Padlocks
hung from their belts, and they held flashlights to peer into
the dark lockers. Cesar was less prepared but no less
eager. He was the only bidder on the first lot, claiming a
locker full of old clothes for $1.
He sold the clothes at a yard sale and on eBay for about
$60. Figuring he’d found a nice little niche, Cesar started
going to more auctions at storage facilities and business
liquidations, breaking down large lots and moving them on
eBay for a tidy profit. He put the money back into the
business and opened his storefront in the Long Beach strip
mall to accept consignments from neighbors with office
furniture, lawn chairs, and unbranded jeans to sell online.
It was good, honest work—not like his last independent
business. For most of the 1990s Cesar had been into
credit card fraud. He was happier selling on eBay, but
thinking about the past made him wonder if there was a
market for the kind of gear he’d used as a crook. He
ordered some MSR206s from the manufacturer and
offered them for sale through the UBuyWeRush eBay store.
He was impressed by how fast they were snapped up.
Then one of his new customers told him about a website
where he could really sell. He introduced Cesar to Script,
who approved UBuyWeRush as a CarderPlanet vendor.
Cesar posted his introduction on August 8, 2003. “I
decided to supply all you guys making the real big bucks,”
he wrote. “So if you need me I sell card printers, card
embossers, tippers, encoders, small readers and more. I
know it sounds like advertising, but it’s for you, a SAFE
place to shop.”

place to shop.”
Business exploded overnight. Cesar built his own
website, began vending on Shadowcrew, got an 800
number, and started accepting e-gold, an anonymous
online currency favored by carders. He developed a
reputation for excellent customer service. With customers in
every time zone, he was scrupulous about answering the
phone whenever it rang, day or night. It was always money
on the other end of the line.
A canny businessman, he guaranteed same-day
shipping and forged relationships with his rivals, so if he
was caught short on an item, he could buy stock from a
competitor to fill his orders and keep his customers happy.
Strategic moves like that soon turned UBuyWeRush into
the top supplier of hardware to a worldwide community of
hackers and identity thieves. “Really good person, great to
deal with,” wrote a carder named Fear, advising a
Shadowcrew newbie. “Don’t scam UBuyWeRush cause
he’s a cool guy, and he’ll keep your info on the downlow.”
Cesar soon expanded his offerings to include hundreds
of different products: skimmers, passport cameras, foil
stampers, blank plastic, barcode printers, embossers,
check paper, magnetic ink cartridges, even cable TV
descramblers. Selling equipment wasn’t in and of itself
illegal, as long as he wasn’t conspiring in its criminal
applications. He even had some law-abiding customers
who bought his gear to make corporate ID cards and
school lunch vouchers.
Inundated with orders, Cesar ran a help-wanted ad in the
classifieds and began hiring workers to inventory, pack,
and ship his gear. As adjoining offices opened up, he
annexed them for the extra storage space, doubling and
then tripling his square footage. Fascinated by the global
reach of his low-rent strip-mall operation, he bought a wall
map, and every time he shipped to a new city he’d sink a
pin into the location. After six months, the map was
porcupined with pins throughout the United States,

Canada, Europe, Africa, and Asia. An impenetrable forest
of metal grew southwest of Russia on the Black Sea.
Ukraine.
Chris had become friends with Cesar. He’d even had
him over for dinner, along with Mrs. UBuyWeRush, Clara,
and Chris’s two boys—well-mannered kids who stayed at
the dinner table all the way through dessert. Chris
particularly liked hanging out at Cesar’s office. You never
knew who would show up at UBuyWeRush. Carders too
paranoid to have counterfeiting gear shipped even to a
drop would make a pilgrimage to Los Angeles to pick up
their items in person, opening the front door through their
shirtsleeve to leave no prints and paying in cash. Foreign
carders vacationing in California would stop by just to see
the legendary warehouse with their own eyes and shake
Cesar’s hand.
On this day, the man walking in to pick up an MSR206
was the last person Chris expected to see in Cesar’s shop,
a six-foot-five hacker with a long ponytail.
Chris was stunned; Max rarely left San Francisco these
days, and he hadn’t said anything about coming to town.
Max was equally surprised to see Chris. They exchanged
pleasantries awkwardly.
There was only one reason Max would sneak into Los
Angeles to buy his own magstripe encoder, Chris knew.
Max had decided to stop sharing his most valuable data.
Max had become privy to one of the biggest security
blunders in banking history, one that most consumers would
never hear about, even as it enriched carders to the tune of
millions of dollars.
The midsized Commerce Bank in Kansas City, Missouri,
may have been the first to figure out what was going on. In
2003, the bank’s security manager was alarmed to find that
customer accounts were being sacked for $10,000 to
$20,000 a day from cash machines in Italy—he would

come in on a Monday and find his bank had lost $70,000
over the weekend. When he investigated, he learned that
the victim customers had all fallen for a phishing attack
aimed specifically at their debit card numbers and PINs.
But something didn’t make sense: CVVs were supposed
to prevent exactly this kind of scam. Without the CVV
security code programmed onto the magnetic stripe of the
real cards, the phished information shouldn’t have worked
at any ATM in the world.
He dug some more and discovered the truth: His bank
simply wasn’t checking the CVV codes on ATM
withdrawals, nor on debit card purchases, where the
consumer enters the PIN at the register. In fact, the bank
couldn’t perform such a check consistently if it wanted to;
the third-party processing network used by the bank didn’t
even forward the secret code. The Italian phishers could
program any random garbage into the CVV field, and the
card would be accepted as the real thing.
The manager moved the bank to another processing
network and reprogrammed his servers to verify the CVV.
The mysterious withdrawals from Italy halted overnight.
But Commerce Bank was just the beginning. In 2004,
nearly half America’s banks, S&Ls, and credit unions still
weren’t bothering to verify the CVV on ATM and debit
transactions, which is why America’s in-boxes were being
flooded with phishing e-mails targeting PIN codes for what
the carders called “cashable” banks.
Citibank, the nation’s largest consumer bank by holdings,
was the most high-profile victim. “This e-mail was sent by
the Citibank server to verify your e-mail address,” read a
message spammed from Russia in a September 2003
campaign. “You must complete this process by clicking on
the link below and entering in the small window your
Citibank ATM/Debit Card number and PIN that you use on
ATM.”
A more artful message in 2004 capitalized on
consumers’ well-founded fears of cybercrime. “Recently

consumers’ well-founded fears of cybercrime. “Recently
there have been a large number of identity theft attempts
targeting Citibank customers,” read the spam, emblazoned
with Citi’s iconography. “In order to safeguard your account,
we require that you update your Citibank ATM/Debit card
PIN.” Clicking on the link took customers to a perfect
simulacrum of a Citibank site, hosted in China, where the
victim would be prompted for the data.
Good for direct cash, PINs were the holy grail of carding.
And it was CarderPlanet’s King Arthur who was most
successful in the quest. King, as he was known to his
friends, ran an international ring that specialized in hitting
Citibank customers, and he was a legend in the carding
world. One of King Arthur’s lieutenants, an American expat
in England, once let it slip to a colleague that King was
making $1 million a week from the global operation. And he
was just one of many Eastern Europeans running cash-outs
in America.
Max plugged himself into the Citibank cash-outs in his
own way: He Trojaned an American mule named Tux, and
started intercepting the PINs and account numbers the
carder was getting from his supplier. After a while, he
contacted the source—an anonymous Eastern European
whom Max suspected of being King Arthur himself—and
told him candidly what he’d done: Tux, he said, had been
guilty of the crime of slipshod security. For good measure,
Max claimed falsely that the mule had been ripping off the
supplier.
The supplier cut off Tux on the spot and began providing
Max with his PINs directly, anointing the hacker as his
newest cash-out mule.
When the PINs first started rolling in, Max had passed
them all to Chris, who tore into them with a vengeance.
Chris would pull $2,000 in cash—the daily ATM withdrawal
limit—and then send his girls out to make in-store debit
purchases with the PINs until the account was drained dry.
He was raping the cards. Max didn’t like it. The whole point

of a cash-out was to get cash, not merchandise that sold
for a fraction of its worth. With a little finesse, the PINs could
be producing a lot more liquid.
Then it occurred to him he didn’t need his partner at all
for this particular operation.
When he returned from UBuyWeRush with his very own
MSR206, Max went into business for himself. He
programmed a stack of Visa gift cards with the account
data and wrote each card’s PIN on a sticky note affixed to
the plastic. Then he’d get on his bicycle or take a long
meandering walk through the city, visiting small, customer-
owned cash machines at locations free of surveillance
cameras.
He’d enter the PIN, then the withdrawal amount, and
chump, chump, chump, chump, the ATM spat out cash
like a slot machine. Max would pocket the money, write the
new, lower account balance on the Post-it, then look around
discreetly to make sure he hadn’t drawn any attention
before drawing the next card from his deck. To keep his
prints off the machines, he’d press the buttons through a
piece of paper or with his fingernails, or coat the pads of
his fingers with hydroxyquinoline—a clear, tacky antiseptic
sold in drugstores as the liquid bandage New-Skin.
Max dutifully sent a fixed percentage of his take to
Russia via Western Union MoneyGram, per his agreement
with the supplier. He was an honest criminal now, doing
straightforward business in the underground. And even
after getting his own magstripe writer, Max continued to
give some of his PINs to Chris, who continued tapping his
crew to burn through the cards aggressively.
On the surface, Max’s ATM visits weren’t much of a
Robin Hood operation, but Max took moral solace in the
fact that the cash-outs always ended with the cards being
canceled. That meant the fraudulent withdrawals were
being discovered, and Citibank would be forced to
reimburse its customers for the thefts.

After some months, Max built a nice nest egg from
Citibank’s losses: He moved with Charity to a $6,000-a-
month house rental in San Francisco’s Cole Valley and
installed a safe for his profits: $250,000 in cash.
His earnings were just a tiny piece of the losses from the
CVV gaffe. In May 2005, a Gartner analyst organized a
survey of five thousand online consumers and, extrapolating
the results, estimated that it had cost U.S. financial
institutions $2.75 billion. In just one year.

16

Operation Firewall
here was something fishy going on with Shadowcrew.
Max kept his presence on the Internet’s top crime site
low-key; to him, Shadowcrew was just a hunting ground
conveniently stocked with hackable carders. But in May
2004, a Shadowcrew administrator made an offer on the
board that got Max’s attention. The admin, Cumbajohnny,
was announcing a new VPN service just for Shadowcrew
members.
A VPN—virtual private network—is typically used to
provide telecommuters with access to their employer’s
network from home. But a trustworthy underground VPN
appealed to carders for another reason. It meant every byte
of traffic from their computers could be encrypted—immune
to sniffing by a nosy ISP or a law enforcement agency with
a surveillance warrant. And any attempt to trace their
activities would get no farther than Cumbajohnny’s own
data center.
Cumbajohnny was a recent addition to Shadowcrew’s
leadership—a former moderator who was growing in
power and influence and changing the mood on the board.
Some other admins were complaining about a new mean-
spiritedness on the forum. Banner ads appeared at the top
of the site: “Stop talking. Do Business. Advertise here.
Contact Cumbajohnny.” Shadowcrew was taking on the feel
of the Las Vegas strip, with flashy ads promising a lifestyle
of partying, beautiful women, and piles and piles of cash.
Gollumfun, an influential founder, had already publicly
retired from the site when another founder named
BlackOps announced he was leaving as well. “Shadowcrew

has been reduced from its once lustrous form to a
degrading environment of children who lack knowledge, the
skills or desire to interact with other members in a positive
way,” he wrote. “Gone are the well thought out tutorials;
gone are the well-respected members; and gone is the
civility. No longer do we help the newbies find their way, we
simply flame them to death until they leave and then
complain that there aren’t any new members.”
“BlackOps, you will be missed, thank you for your
services,” Cumbajohnny wrote tactfully. “SC is changing,
and for the best.”
Max paid little attention to the politics of the carding
scene. But the VPN announcement made him uneasy. It
turned out Cumbajohnny had been privately selling his VPN
service to Shadowcrew’s leaders for three months. Now,
Cumbajohnny wrote, any Shadowcrew member in good
standing could buy the same peace of mind for $30 to $50
a month.
But VPNs have one well-known weakness: everything
transpiring over the network has to be funneled through a
central point, unencrypted and vulnerable to
eavesdropping. “If the FBI, or whoever, really wanted to they
could get into the datacenter and change some of the
configs on the VPN box and start logging, and then you
would be kinda screwed,” one member noted. “But that is
just straight paranoia,” he conceded.
Cumbajohnny reassured him. “No one can touch the VPN
without me knowing about it.”
Max wasn’t convinced. In his white-hat days, he’d written
a program for the Honeynet Project called Privmsg—a
PERL script that took the data from a packet sniffer and
used it to reconstruct IRC chats. When an intruder was
lured into cracking one of the project’s honeypots, the
attacker would often use the system to hold online
conversations with his fellow hackers. With Privmsg, the
white hats could see the whole thing. It had been a strong
innovation in hacker tracking, turning passive honeypots

innovation in hacker tracking, turning passive honeypots
into digital wiretaps and opening a window into the
underground’s culture and motives.
Max could see the same wiretap tactic at play now in
Cumbajohnny’s VPN offer. There was other evidence, too;
while hacking random carders, he saw a message to a
Shadowcrew administrative account that read like a federal
agent giving orders to an informant. Max couldn’t shake the
feeling that someone was turning Shadowcrew into the
ultimate honeypot.
After talking it over with Chris, Max posted several
messages to Shadowcrew summarizing his doubts. The
posts disappeared at once.
Max’s suspicions were right on the money.
The NYPD had nabbed Albert “Cumbajohnny” Gonzalez
nine months earlier pulling cash out of a Chase ATM on
New York’s Upper West Side. Originally from Miami,
Gonzalez was twenty-one years old and the son of two
Cuban immigrants. He was also a longtime hacker who’d
been dedicated enough to trek to Vegas for the 2001 Def
Con.
The Secret Service interviewed Gonzalez in custody and
quickly ascertained his worth. The hacker was living in a
$700-a-month garden apartment in Kearny, New Jersey,
had $12,000 in credit card debt, and was officially
unemployed. But as “Cumbajohnny,” he was a trusted
confidant and colleague of carders around the world and,
most importantly, a moderator at Shadowcrew.
He was in the belly of the beast, and properly handled, he
might strike a deathblow against the forum.
The Secret Service took over the case and sprang
Gonzalez to use him as an informant. The VPN was the
agency’s masterstroke. The equipment was bought and
paid for by the feds, and they’d obtained wiretap warrants
for all the users. Cumbajohnny’s carder-only VPN service
was an invitation to an Internet panopticon.

Shadowcrew’s biggest players were drawn inexorably
into the Secret Service’s surveillance net. The tapped VPN
laid bare all the wheeling and dealing the carders kept off
the public website—the hard negotiating that unfolded
mostly in e-mail and over IM.
There were deals every day and every night, with a
weekly surge in trading Sunday evenings. The transactions
ranged from the petty to the gargantuan. On May 19, agents
watched Scarface transfer 115,695 credit card numbers to
another member; in July, APK moved a counterfeit UK
passport; in August, Mintfloss sold a fake New York driver’s
license, an Empire Blue Cross health insurance card, and a
City University of New York student ID card to a member in
need of a full identification portfolio. A few days later,
another sale by Scarface, just two cards this time; then
MALpadre bought nine. In September, Deck sold off
eighteen million hacked e-mail accounts with user names,
passwords, and dates of birth.
The Secret Service had fifteen full-time agents combing
through the activity—every purchase would be another
“underlying offense” in a grand jury indictment. And the best
part was, many of Shadowcrew’s denizens were unwittingly
paying the Secret Service for the privilege of being
monitored.
But running a game against hackers was never cut-and-
dried, as the agency learned on July 28, 2004. That was
when Gonzalez informed his handlers that a carder named
Myth, one of King Arthur’s cashers, had somehow obtained
one of the agency’s confidential documents about
Operation Firewall. Myth had been boasting about it in an
IRC chat room.
The feds told Gonzalez to find the source of the leak, and
fast. As Cumbajohnny, Gonzalez made contact with Myth
and learned that the documents represented just a few
droplets in a full-blown Secret Service data spill. Myth knew
about subpoenas issued in the Shadowcrew probe and
had even discovered that the agency was monitoring his

had even discovered that the agency was monitoring his
own ICQ account. Fortunately, the documents didn’t
mention an informant.
Myth refused to tell Gonzalez who his source was but
agreed to arrange an introduction. The next day, Gonzalez,
Myth, and a mystery hacker using the temporary handle
“Anonyman” met on IRC. Gonzalez worked to gain
Anonyman’s trust, and the hacker finally revealed himself as
Ethics, a vendor whom Cumba already knew on
Shadowcrew.
The leak was starting to make sense. In March, the
Secret Service had noticed Ethics was selling access to
the database of a major wireless carrier, T-Mobile. “I am
offering reverse lookup of information for a T-Mobile cell
phone, by phone number,” he wrote in a post. “At the very
least, you get name, SSN, and DOB. At the upper end of
the information returned, you get Web username/password,
voicemail password, secret question/answer.”
T-Mobile had failed to patch a critical security hole in a
commercial server application it had purchased from the
San Jose, California, company BEA Systems. The hole,
discovered by outside researchers, was painfully simple to
exploit: An undocumented function allowed anyone to
remotely read or replace any file on a system by feeding it
a specially crafted Web request. BEA produced a patch for
the bug in March 2003 and issued a public advisory rating
it a high-severity vulnerability. In July of that year, the
researchers who discovered the hole gave it more attention
by presenting it at the Black Hat Briefings convention in Las
Vegas, an annual pre–Def Con gathering attended by
1,700 security professionals and corporate executives.
Ethics learned of the BEA hole from the advisory, crafted
his own twenty-line exploit in Visual Basic, then began
scanning the Internet for potential targets who had failed to
patch. By October 2003, he hit pay dirt at T-Mobile. He
wrote his own front end to the customer database to which
he could return at his convenience.

At first, he used his access to raid the files of Hollywood
stars, circulating grainy candid photos of Paris Hilton, Demi
Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and Nicole Richie stolen from their
Sidekick PDAs. It was evident now that he’d gotten into a
Secret Service agent’s Sidekick as well.
A simple Google search on Ethics’s ICQ number turned
up his real name on a 2001 résumé seeking computer
security work. He was Nicholas Jacobsen, a twenty-one-
year-old Oregonian who’d recently relocated to Irvine,
California, to take a job as a network administrator. All that
was left was to confirm which Secret Service agent was
violating policy by accessing sensitive material on his PDA.
That’s where Gonzalez proved his worth again. Now that
he was buddies with Cumbajohnny, Ethics hit up the
Shadowcrew leader for an account on his much-touted
VPN, figuring it would be a safer way to access T-Mobile.
Gonzalez happily obliged, and his Secret Service
handlers got to watch as Ethics surfed to T-Mobile’s
customer service website and logged in with the user name
and password of New York agent Peter Cavicchia III, a
veteran cybercrime officer who’d distinguished himself by
busting a former AOL employee for stealing ninety-two
million customer e-mail addresses to sell to spammers.
The leak had been found. Cavicchia would quietly retire a
few months later, and Ethics was added to the list of
Operation Firewall targets.
There was just one more threat to the investigation, and,
bizarrely, it was coming from one of the FBI’s underground
assets.
David Thomas was a lifelong scammer who’d
discovered the crime forums in the Counterfeit Library days
and soon became addicted to the high-speed deal making
and criminal camaraderie. Now forty-four years old, El
Mariachi, as he styled himself, was one of the most
respected members in the carding community, assuming

the role of mentor to younger scammers and dispensing
advice on everything from identity theft to basic life lessons
gleaned from decades on the fringe.
His experience, though, didn’t immunize him from the
hazards of his profession. In October 2002, Thomas
showed up in an office park in Issaquah, Washington,
where he and his partner had rented a drop for one of
CarderPlanet’s founders. They were hoping to claim
$30,000 in Outpost.com merchandise ordered by the
Ukrainian. Instead, they found local police waiting for them.
The police arrested Thomas, and a detective read him
his Miranda rights and gave him a form to sign
acknowledging he understood them. Thomas scoffed at the
idea of a local cop trying to question him. “You don’t know
who you have here,” he said. He urged the detective to call
in the feds; the Secret Service would know who El Mariachi
was, and he could give them a case involving Russians and
“millions of dollars.”
A Secret Service agent visited him in the county jail but
wasn’t impressed by Thomas’s $30,000-drop business.
Then an FBI agent from the Seattle field office showed up.
On the second meeting, the agent brought along an
assistant U.S. attorney and an offer: The feds couldn’t help
Thomas with his local case, but when he got out he could
go to work for the Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force in
Seattle.
It would be an intelligence-gathering mission, an official
designation for an FBI operation with no predetermined
targets. The bureau would get Thomas a new computer, put
him up in a nice apartment, pay all of his expenses, and
give him $1,000 a month in spending money. In return,
Thomas would gather information on the underground and
report it back to the task force.
Thomas hated snitches, but he liked the idea of being
paid to observe and comment on the underground with
which he’d become obsessed. Intelligence gathering
wasn’t the same as snitching, he reasoned, and he could

wasn’t the same as snitching, he reasoned, and he could
use the material he collected to write a book about the
carding scene, something he’d been thinking a lot about
lately.
He also knew exactly how to gather the information the
task force was after.
Thomas was released from jail five months after his
arrest. And in April, the FBI gained a new asset in the war
on cybercrime: El Mariachi and his brand-new government-
funded crime forum, the Grifters.
From his bureau-rented corporate apartment in Seattle,
El Mariachi was soon gathering information on his fellow
carders, particularly the Eastern Europeans. But though
Thomas was working for the FBI, he didn’t exactly feel
kinship with other government assets, and the VPN
announcement convinced him—correctly—that
Cumbajohnny was a federal informant.
Thomas became fixated on exposing his rival. Ignoring
admonishments from his FBI handler, he continuously
called out Gonzalez on the forums. Gonzalez, too, seemed
to have it in for El Mariachi—he dug up a copy of the police
report from Thomas’s Seattle arrest and circulated it
among the Eastern European carders, drawing their
attention to the part where Thomas offered to help catch
Russians. A full-blown proxy war had broken out between
the FBI and Secret Service, by way of two informants.
It was a bad time to be distracting the Eastern
Europeans with American carder drama. In May 2004, one
of CarderPlanet’s Ukrainian founders was extradited to the
United States, after being arrested on vacation in Thailand.
The next month, the British national police moved in on the
site’s only native English-speaking administrator in Leeds.
Script, getting heat from the Orange County FBI and the
U.S. Postal Inspection Service, had already retired from the
site, leaving King Arthur in charge. On July 28, 2004, King
made an announcement.
“It is time to tell you the bad news—the forum should be

closed,” he wrote. “Yes, it really means closed and there
are a lot of reasons for that.”
In broken English he explained that CarderPlanet had
become a magnet for law enforcement agencies around
the world. When carders were busted, police interrogators
badgered them with questions about the forum and its
leaders. Under the relentless pressure, he implied, even he
might slip up. “All of us are just people and all of us can
make mistakes.”
By closing CarderPlanet, he would be depriving his
enemies of their greatest asset. “Our forum held them well
informed and up to date, and on our forum they and the
bank employees just have been raising their level of
proficiency and knowledge,” he wrote.
“Now all of thing will be the same but they will not know
where the wind blows from and what to do.”
With that farewell note, King Arthur, almost certainly a
millionaire ten times over, became a carder legend. He
would be remembered as the one who gently folded the
great CarderPlanet before anyone else could enjoy the
pleasure of taking it down.
Shadowcrew’s leaders wouldn’t be so lucky. In September,
the FBI pulled the plug on Thomas’s operation and gave
him a month to move out of his apartment—ending his war
with Cumbajohnny. The next month, on October 26, sixteen
Secret Service agents gathered in a Washington command
center to drop the hammer on Operation Firewall. Their
targets were marked on a map of the United States filling a
wall of computer displays. Every one of them would be at
home, the agents knew; at the Secret Service’s behest,
Gonzalez had called an online meeting for that evening, and
nobody said no to Cumbajohnny.
At nine p.m., agents armed with MP5 semiautomatic
assault rifles burst into Shadowcrew members’ homes
around the country, grabbing three founders, T-Mobile

hacker Ethics, and seventeen other buyers and sellers. It
was the biggest crackdown on identity thieves in American
history. Two days later, a federal grand jury handed down a
sixty-two-count conspiracy indictment and the Justice
Department went public with Operation Firewall.
“This indictment strikes at the heart of an organization
that is alleged to have served as a one-stop marketplace
for identity theft,” Attorney General John Ashcroft boasted in
a press release. “The Department of Justice is committed
to taking on those who deal in identity theft or fraud,
whether they act online or off.”
With Gonzalez’s help, the Secret Service locked
Shadowcrew’s remaining four thousand users out of the
site and swapped in a new front page featuring a Secret
Service banner and an image of a prison cell. The new
page struck the Shadowcrew tagline, “For Those Who Like
to Play in the Shadows,” and substituted a new motto: “You
Are No Longer Anonymous!!”
Panicked carders around the around the world soaked
up the news reports and watched the television coverage,
worrying for themselves and their fallen compatriots. They
collected on a small forum called Stealth Division to assess
the damage and take a head count of survivors. “I am
scared to death for my family right now—for my children,”
wrote one cyberthief. “I just learned that my every move has
been recorded.”
Slowly, they realized that Cumbajohnny wasn’t on the list
of defendants. That’s when he logged in to make a final
appearance.
“I want everyone to know I’m on the run and I had no
fucking idea the USSS had the capabilities of doing what
they did,” Gonzalez wrote. “From the news articles I can tell
they’ve wiretapped my VPN and wiretapped the
Shadowcrew server. This is my last post, good luck
everyone.”
Nick Jacobsen, Ethics, was kept out of the press release
and quietly indicted separately in Los Angeles—his

and quietly indicted separately in Los Angeles—his
intrusion into the Secret Service’s e-mail wouldn’t emerge
until well after the agency had collected its accolades for
Operation Firewall. Even then, the dragnet was a clear
victory for the government. CarderPlanet was shuttered,
and now Shadowcrew was closed for good, and its leaders
—save Gonzalez—were in jail.
The carders were confused, paranoid, and, for the
moment, homeless. “It will take years and years for any
message board like Shadowcrew to build up,” wrote one.
“And when or if it does, law enforcement will bust it again.
“And knowing what can be done, I doubt anyone will take
the risk of putting another one up.”

17

Pizza and Plastic
n the top floor of the Post Street Towers, Max’s
computers sat on the wood-veneer floor, silent and cool.
Outside the bay window, shops and apartments were ready
to unwittingly feed him bandwidth through his oversized
antenna.
Max had gone dormant for a few months after
accumulating a pile of cash from the Citibank operation;
he’d abandoned his penthouse apartment and put his
hacking on the back burner. But he couldn’t stay away long.
He’d asked Chris to rent him a new safe house, one with
more neighborhood Wi-Fi options than the last. “I just need
a closet, I don’t need any space,” he’d said.
Chris had delivered. There was ample Wi-Fi swimming
around the Post Street Towers, and the apartment was
indeed a closet: a three-hundred-square-foot studio that
seemed scarcely larger than a prison cell. Decked out in
blond wood, with a Formica counter, a full-sized fridge, and
a bed that unfolded from the wall, it was a clean and
functional McApartment, bare of all distractions and able to
provide the necessities for Max’s all-night hacking sprees.
The high turnover in the building made him anonymous.
Chris just had to flash a fake ID at the rental office, pay a
$500 deposit, and sign the six-month lease.
Once his computers were plugged in and his antenna
was latched on to some patsy’s network, Max wasted little
time in getting back on the job. As ever, he targeted
fraudsters, and he developed some novel ways to steal
from them. He monitored the alerts put out by an
organization called the Anti-Phishing Working Group,

staying on top of the latest phishing attacks. The alerts
included the Web addresses of the phishing sites linked to
the forged e-mails, allowing Max to hack the phishers’
servers, resteal the stolen data, and erase the original
copy, frustrating the phishers and grabbing valuable
information at the same time.
Other attacks were less focused. Max was still plugged
into the white-hat scene, and he was on the private mailing
lists where security holes often appeared for the first time.
He had machines scanning the Internet day and night for
servers running vulnerable software, just to see what he’d
turn up. He was scanning for a Windows server-side buffer
overflow when he made the discovery that would lead to his
public entry into the carding scene.
His scanning put him inside a Windows machine that, on
closer inspection, was in the back office of a Pizza
Schmizza restaurant in Vancouver, Washington; he knew
the place, it was near his mother’s house. As he looked
around the computer, he realized the PC was acting as the
back-end system for the point-of-sale terminals at the
restaurant—it collected the day’s credit card transactions
and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit
card processor. Max found that day’s batch stored as a
plain text file, with the full magstripe of every customer card
recorded inside.
Even better, the system was still storing all the previous
batch files, dating back to when the pizza parlor had
installed the system about three years earlier. It was some
fifty thousand transactions, just sitting there, waiting for him.
Max copied the files, then deleted them—they weren’t
needed by Pizza Schmizza; in fact, just storing them in the
first place was a violation of Visa’s security standards.
After sorting and filtering out the duplicate and expired
cards, he was left with about two thousand dumps.
For the first time, Max had a primary source, and they
were virgin cards, almost guaranteed to be good.
Chris had been complaining about the staleness of some

Chris had been complaining about the staleness of some
of Max’s dumps. That would end now. A customer could
walk into the Pizza Schmizza and order a twelve-inch pie
for his family, and his credit card could be on Max’s hard
drive while the leftovers were still cooling in the garbage.
Once he was done organizing his numbers, Max gave
Chris a taste. “These are extremely fresh,” he said. “They’re
from two days ago.”
There was no way that Chris and his crew could metabolize
the fifty dumps a day coming from the Pizza Schmizza. So
Max decided to make his first forays into vending in the
carding scene.
Chris offered to handle the sales in exchange for half the
profits. Chris’s recklessness still concerned Max—Chris
had nearly been arrested buying gold in, of all places, India,
fleeing the country one step ahead of the police. But Chris
knew too much about Max for the hacker to just cut him
loose, so he agreed to let Chris act as his representative to
the underground. Chris soon claimed success in marketing
Max’s dumps, until Max—who had a back door on Chris’s
computer—figured out that Chris was actually using the
magstripe data himself, getting a 50 percent price break by
claiming to have resold them. Economically, it was all the
same. But Max couldn’t help feeling cheated yet again.
Max turned to someone who might be easier to control: a
teenage carder from Long Island named John Giannone
who had become Chris’s sidekick.
Giannone was a smart middle-class kid with a coke habit
and burning desire to be a ruthless, badass cyberpunk. His
early ops failed to impress: He boasted to another carder
that he’d once pushed all the buttons on an elevator before
getting off, so the next passenger would have to stop at
every floor. On another occasion, he claimed, he walked
into a bank and wrote a note on the back of a deposit slip:
“This is a robbery. I have a bomb. Give me money or I’ll
blow the bank.” Then he put the slip back on the pile as a

surprise for the next customer.
When he was seventeen, Giannone joined Shadowcrew
and CarderPlanet under the handle MarkRich, and started
participating in small operations. His reputation went south
when he was busted carding plane tickets and a rumor
spread that he’d snitched on a forum regular while in
juvenile hall.
Undaunted, Giannone paid a more established carder
for the exclusive right to take over his handle and
reputation. As “Enhance,” the teen became more bold but
not more successful. In May 2003, copying an extortion
tactic perfected by the Russians, he borrowed a hacker’s
botnet and launched a DDoS attack against JetBlue, taking
down the airline’s website for some twenty-five minutes
before sending an e-mail demanding $500,000 in
protection money. But JetBlue paid him neither cash nor
the respect a cybergangster deserved. “We will forward this
to the appropriate law enforcement agencies,” the
company wrote. “Yesterday’s outage was due to a system
upgrade.”
When Max found Giannone with his Free Amex hack, the
teen was running his operations from the computer in his
mother’s bedroom. But Max and Chris had looked over
Giannone’s files and decided he could be partner material.
Chris in particular may have seen something of himself in
the young, coke-snorting gangster wannabe. Giannone was
already a regular visitor to Orange County—he liked
vacationing in the sun—and the two began partying
together. Chris called his apprentice “the Kid.”
Max knew everything about Giannone, while Giannone
knew virtually nothing about him. For Max, it was an ideal
arrangement for a partnership. Giannone made some sales
of Max’s dumps and then introduced Max to other carders
interested in making buys over ICQ. Max set up a new
online identity for his vending: “Generous.”
Dealing with strangers was a big step for Max, and he
took elaborate precautions to stay safe. When using carder

took elaborate precautions to stay safe. When using carder
forums or instant-messaging services, he’d bounce his
connection through his private network of hacked PCs
around the world—ensuring nobody could easily trace him
even as far as his hacked WiFi. He disguised his writing
style online for fear that some ill-considered turn of phrase
or choice of punctuation might be matched to one of Max
Vision’s security white papers or Bugtraq posts—the FBI
had once remarked on the copious ellipses in his
anonymous note to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during
the BIND attacks.
To collect revenue, he accepted payment through an
anonymous e-gold account linked to an ATM card.
Giannone helped him with a second remittance system.
The teenager established a business account at Bank of
America for a car repair shop called A&W Auto Clinic, then
sent Max the magstripe data and PIN code for his ATM
card, allowing Max to clone the card with his MSR206.
Dumps buyers in the United States could make a cash
deposit for A&W at their nearest Bank of America branch,
which Max could then withdraw at his leisure with his cloned
ATM card.
Max didn’t need the money the way he used to. He’d
squandered most of his nest egg from the Citibank cash-
outs, frittering it away on everything from handouts for the
homeless to a $1,500 Sony AIBO robotic dog. But he
wasn’t broke yet, and Charity had just started a well-paying
job as a system administrator at Linden Lab, the brick-and-
mortar home of Second Life—a fully realized three-
dimensional online universe growing by thousands of
inhabitants a month.
There was just one reason he was upping the ante now.
He’d become addicted to life as a professional hacker. He
loved the cat-and-mouse games, the freedom, the secret
power. Cloaked in the anonymity of his safe house, he
could indulge any impulse, explore every forbidden corridor
of the Net, satisfy every fleeting interest—all without fear of

consequence, fettered only by the limits of his conscience.
At bottom, the master criminal was still the kid who couldn’t
resist slipping into his high school in the middle of the night
and leaving his mark.

18

The Briefing
n a briefing room near Washington, two dozen male faces
filled a computer monitor on the wall, some scowling for a
mugshot, others smiling for a passport photo. A couple of
them looked like teenagers barely out of puberty; others
were older, unkempt and vaguely dangerous in
appearance.
Around the table a handful of FBI agents in suits and ties
stared back at the faces of the international computer
underground. For one of the agents, a lot of things were
suddenly making sense.
At thirty-five years old, J. Keith Mularski had been an FBI
agent for seven years. But he’d been on the computer
crime beat for just four months, and he had a lot to learn.
Enthusiastically friendly and quick to laugh, Mularski had
wanted to be an FBI agent since his freshman year at
Pennsylvania’s Westminster College, when a bureau
recruiter came in to speak to one of his classes. He’d held
on to the list of qualifications even as he walked a more
pedestrian career path, starting as a furniture salesman in
Pittsburgh, then working his way up to a position as
operations manager for a national furniture chain with fifty
employees reporting to him at four stores.
In 1997, after eight years of waiting, he finally decided he
was ready for the FBI. After a yearlong application process
and sixteen weeks of training at the FBI academy in
Quantico, he was sworn in as an agent in July 1998.
As part of the bureau’s graduation ritual, the newly
minted agent was instructed to rank all the FBI field offices
in order of assignment preference. He rated his hometown

of Pittsburgh as number one—it was where Mularski had
grown up, gone to school, and met his wife. His chances of
transferring there evaporated the next month, when Islamic
terrorists bombed U.S. embassy buildings in Kenya and
Tanzania. Veteran FBI agents were dispatched from the
Washington, DC, field office to investigate the attacks, and
Mularski was one of fifteen fresh recruits sent to fill the
vacancies in DC—the city marked thirty-second on his list.
Almost overnight Mularski went from managing furniture
stores to working on some of the FBI’s most important, and
highly classified, investigations. When, in 1999, a listening
device was found in an office on the top floor of the State
Department’s headquarters, he was part of the team that
identified a Russian diplomat monitoring the transmitter
from outside. In 2001, he helped bring down Robert
Hanssen, a fellow counterespionage agent who’d been
secretly spying for the KGB and its successor agency for
twenty years.
It was heady work, but the secrecy chafed Mularski: He
held a top-secret clearance and couldn’t talk about his job
with outsiders—even his wife. So when headquarters
announced openings for two experienced agents to kick-
start an ambitious cybercrime initiative in Pittsburgh, he
saw a chance to go home and step out of the shadows at
the same time.
His new job wouldn’t be in an FBI office. He was
assigned to the civilian office of an industry nonprofit group
in Pittsburgh called the National Cyber Forensics and
Training Alliance. The NCFTA had been formed by banks
and Internet companies a couple of years earlier to track
and analyze the latest scams targeting consumers online—
mostly phishing attacks. Mularski’s job wouldn’t consist of
chasing individual scams—in isolation, each round of
phishing was too small to meet the FBI’s minimum loss
threshold of $100,000. Rather, he would be looking for
trends that pointed to a common culprit—a group or a
single hacker—responsible for a large number of

single hacker—responsible for a large number of
cyberthefts. Then he’d shop the results to the various FBI
field offices and, hopefully, hand off the investigation.
It was passive intelligence gathering, meticulous but
unexciting. Mularski wasn’t in charge of the cases, and he
never got the satisfaction of putting handcuffs on a bad guy.
But for the first time in seven years, he could talk about his
work with his wife over dinner.
Now he was back in the DC area for his first briefing on
the carding scene. At the head of the room was Postal
Inspector Greg Crabb, a solidly built man with world-weary
eyes who worked in the post office’s international fraud unit.
Crabb had stumbled upon the carding underground in 2002
while tracking a software counterfeiter with a sideline in
credit card fraud. Since then, he’d been on the ground in
twenty-five countries, working with local police to make
busts and building a massive database of raw intelligence
on the growing community: nicknames, IP addresses,
instant messages, and e-mails of more than two thousand
people. He’d become the government’s top expert on the
scene, but the enormity of his crusade now threatened to
overwhelm him. So he’d come to the FBI for help.
The briefing for about half a dozen FBI agents was held
at a nondescript Calverton, Baltimore, office where the
bureau ran its Innocent Images anti–child porn operation.
Speaking slowly in a rumbling, midwestern twang, the
postal inspector weighed each word like a parcel as he ran
through the history of the scene: CardersLibrary spawning
CarderPlanet, the legend of King Arthur, the influence of the
Russians and Ukrainians, and the rise and fall of
Shadowcrew. He threw up a screenshot of CarderPlanet to
show the underground’s structure: A site operator was the
don. Admins were capos. It was a metaphor to which the
FBI was institutionally attuned; hackers were the new mafia.
Operation Firewall, Crabb explained, had left the carders
scattered, paranoid, and disorganized. But they were
rebuilding. And unlike before, with Shadowcrew, there was

no singular target to go after. Instead, a slew of new,
smaller forums was popping up. Crabb didn’t say it, but the
Secret Service had treated the carders with half a dose of
penicillin; the survivors were immune and plentiful.
Mularski hung on every word. In his brief time at the
NCFTA, the agent had seen patterns in the raw intelligence
bubbling up from the underground: references to
nicknames, coded messages, and forums. It made sense
now. It was the carders organizing themselves again.
When Crabb wrapped up his talk and the other agents
began to file out, Mularski approached the postal inspector
at the head of the table and extended his hand
enthusiastically. “This stuff is fascinating,” he said. “I’d love
to work with you. I’d love to partner up with you.”
Crabb was surprised by the suggestion; in his
experience, a more typical proposal from an FBI agent
might take the form “Give me all your information. Thanks,
bye.” He met with Mularski and his boss privately and gave
the agents a more thorough rundown on the carder scene.
Mularski returned to Pittsburgh, his head swimming. He’d
thought he’d left behind the world of Russian spies, double
agents, and secret identities. He’d been wrong. And the
safe, satisfying routine of his new job was about to be
shattered.

19

Carders Market
ry as he might, Max couldn’t get situated on any of the
new forums sprouting in Shadowcrew’s ruins. They were all
corrupt, run by dumps vendors hostile to outside
competition. In a way, it was a blessing. He could never
really trust any of the sites; he knew all too well that the
scene was rank with cops and informants.
He finally made up his mind that if he was going to vend,
the only sensible venue would be a site he personally
controlled. Still thinking of himself as Robin Hood, he came
up with the perfect name for his own forum: Sherwood
Forest.
Chris approved of the plan—he liked the idea of vending
his counterfeit credit cards and driver’s licenses in a safe
environment—but hated the name. As an exercise in
branding, “Sherwood Forest” wasn’t going to cut it for a
criminal marketplace. The partners went back to the
drawing board, and in June 2005 Max used a fake name
and bogus address in Anaheim to register
Cardersmarket.com.
It was a critical time for Max: He was near the end of his
federal supervised release, and if he could make it until
midnight, October 10, 2005, he would be a free agent, no
longer obliged to play the role of an underemployed
computer consultant for the benefit of his probation officer.
It should have been easy enough to survive a few more
months. Besides Chris, there were only two people who
knew about Max’s double life, both Chris’s friends: Jeff
Norminton and Werner Janer, the real estate fraudster who
wrote Charity a $5,000 check that helped bootstrap Max’s

hacking operation.
Then, in September 2005, Werner Janer got busted.
Since hooking up with Max, Chris had been dropping
Janer a few cards here and there—maybe eighty over three
years—in exchange for 10 percent of whatever Janer
netted from his in-store purchases. That month Janer asked
for another batch of two dozen cards—a money shortage
had forced him to sell the family home in Los Angeles, and
he’d moved to Westport, Connecticut, to make a new start
of it. Soon after his arrival he was robbed by a criminal
associate of nearly all the proceeds of the house sale, and
he needed an income boost to support himself and his wife
and three children.
When Chris’s FedEx arrived, Janer, an avid watch
collector, headed straight to Richard’s of Greenwich, a
men’s clothing and accessory store that kept an inventory
of high-end timepieces. Janer had quality plastic and a
matching driver’s license in his pocket, all bearing the
name Stephen Leahy. What he didn’t have was a knack for
carding. He selected not one, not two, but four Anonimo
watches, each worth between $1,000 and $3,000, and
asked the store owner to ring each of them up separately
on four different Visa cards, which he conspicuously pulled
from a deck of a dozen. Two of the hefty transactions were
declined, so Janer left with two watches worth a total of
$5,777, charged to two Bank of America cards.
A patrol car pulled over Janer about two miles away.
While the cops looked over Janer’s genuine driver’s
license and asked him if he’d been watch shopping
recently, a second cruiser drove by with the store owner in
the passenger seat. He eyed Janer and confirmed that they
had the right guy.
The cops arrested Janer and searched his car, pulling
out the watches, twenty-eight credit cards, and six
California driver’s licenses, each with a different name.
When detectives served a search warrant on his house they
found more watches and a .22-caliber Walther P22

found more watches and a .22-caliber Walther P22
handgun.
The gun was bad news. Instead of a larceny charge and
a probation violation Janer was now facing a federal beef
for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Janer wasted
no time in offering to lead the feds to the source of the
counterfeit cards. In the standard arrangement for snitches,
the government agreed to let Janer “proffer” his information
under a limited grant of immunity: Nothing he said would be
used directly against him. If they found it useful—if it led to
arrests—they’d consider recommending a reduced
sentence on his gun-possession charge.
In two proffer sessions totaling nearly eight hours, Janer
spilled his guts to a local Secret Service agent and a
federal prosecutor. He told them about Chris Aragon, his
ring of cashers, and “Max the Hacker,” a six-foot-five
computer genius who’d been cracking banks from San
Francisco hotel rooms.
He didn’t know Max’s last name, he said, but he’d once
written a check to the hacker’s girlfriend for $5,000. Her
name was Charity Majors.
The Secret Service wrote up the interviews and entered
the data into the agency’s computer, but the agency never
followed up on the information, and prosecutors declined to
grant Janer any special consideration. He was sentenced
to twenty-seven months in prison.
Max Vision had dodged a bullet. Janer’s statements
sank into a giant government computer—they might as well
have been stashed in the cavernous warehouse in the final
scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As long as nobody had
occasion to dig them up, Max was safe.
Meanwhile, Max began the process of getting Carders
Market up and running. He had plenty of experience setting
up legitimate websites, but starting a crime site would take
special preparations. For one thing, he couldn’t just put the
Carders Market server on the floor of his safe house—that

would make him a sitting duck.
He hacked into a Florida data center run by Affinity
Internet and installed a VMware virtual machine on one of
its servers—secreting an entire simulated computer on one
of its systems. His hidden server grabbed an unused
Internet address from Affinity’s pool of addresses. The site
would be a ghost ship, not officially owned or operated by
anyone.
Max played with different Internet forum software and
finally settled on the flexible package vBulletin. He spent
months customizing the layout and designing his own
templates for the look and feel of the site, styling it in
shades of gray and muted gold. The work felt satisfying.
For the first time in years, he was creating something
instead of stealing. It was just like setting up
Whitehats.com, except in those ways in which it was the
opposite.
Finally, on the one-year anniversary of the Operation
Firewall raids, he conjured a new name in his ever-
changing lineup of noms de guerre: Iceman. He chose the
handle in part for its commonality: There were lots of
Icemen in the underground—there’d even been one on
Shadowcrew. If law enforcement tried to track him down,
they’d find several mirages on their radar.
Max, as Iceman, launched Cardersmarket.com in late
2005 with little fanfare. Chris joined as the first
coadministrator, inventing the handle EasyLivin’ for the site.
From their careful observation of Shadowcrew and the
splinter forums that followed, Max and Chris knew that the
key to gaining acceptance was to appoint big names who
could help run the board and attract still more heavy hitters
from their circle of friends. The partners soon managed to
draw two household names from the Shadowcrew
diaspora.
Bradley Anderson, a forty-one-year-old Cincinnati
bachelor, was their first pick. Anderson was a legend as
“ncXVI,” a fake-ID expert and author of the self-published

book Shedding Skin, the bible of identity reinvention. Their
second recruit was Brett Shannon Johnson, thirty-five, a
Charleston, South Carolina, identity thief famous online as
“Gollumfun,” a founder of both Counterfeit Library and
Shadowcrew who’d retired from the latter site before the
Secret Service swept in.
After vanishing from the scene for over a year, Johnson
was crawling out of retirement—Chris’s sidekick John
Giannone had spotted him online that spring and struck up
a conversation on ICQ, bringing him up to date on the latest
busts and gossip.
Giannone wound up selling Johnson twenty-nine of Max’s
dumps for an easy six hundred bucks, then introduced him
to Max, who sold him another five hundred cards. “I can see
that you and I are going to be doing some good business in
the future,” Johnson had told Max.
Johnson accepted Max’s and Chris’s invitation to
become an admin on Carders Market, lending the site the
experience and contacts of the only Shadowcrew
administrator to survive Operation Firewall.
Giannone joined Carders Market as “Zebra,” and Max
created a second, secret identity for himself, “Digits.” The
alternate handle was a keystone in Max’s new business
strategy. Shadowcrew had fallen because prosecutors
proved that the founders were themselves buying, selling,
and using stolen data—running an informational website
wasn’t, in and of itself, illegal, Max reasoned. So Iceman
would be the public face of Carders Market but would never
buy or sell stolen data. Digits, his alter ego, would handle
that, vending the dumps Max was siphoning from the
Vancouver pizza joint to anyone who could afford them.
To complete his vision for the site, Max needed one
more admin with a particular qualification: a command of
the Russian language. He wanted to repair the rift that
Operation Firewall had torn between Eastern European
carders and their Western counterparts. Two Russian

Shadowcrew members had fallen into Cumbajohnny’s VPN
trap, and the whole affair had left the Russians deeply
suspicious of English-speaking forums.
Max resolved that Carders Market would distinguish itself
by having an Eastern European section moderated by a
native Russian speaker. He just needed to find one.
Chris offered to help out, and Max accepted. If there was
one thing that Chris had proven to his partner, it was that he
knew how to recruit new talent.

20

The Starlight Room
ine chandeliers hung over the lush velvet booths at
Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, the light scattering off a
two-hundred-pound mirror ball suspended over the dance
floor. Heavy crimson drapes parted from the picture
windows like a stage, revealing the glimmering San
Francisco skyline beyond.
Positioned on the twenty-first floor of the Sir Francis
Drake Hotel, the Starlight Room was an opulent fixture in
the city’s teeming nightlife—a flashback to 1930s style,
strewn with deep red and gold damask and hand-rubbed
silk. More garish than hip, the club kept people coming by
hosting regular theme nights. This was Russian
Wednesday, and tuxedoed servers were pouring vodka
shots at the crowded bar while music from the motherland
spilled over the crowd.
In the ladies’ room, Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger was
being kissed. Tipsy from a night out, the young Mongolian
immigrant wasn’t sure how it happened, or why, but a pretty
five-foot-four girl with tumbling brown hair had decided to
kiss her. Then Tsengeltsetseg blinked. There was another,
identical woman beside her.
Michelle and Liz introduced themselves, and a wide,
unaffected pumpkin smile crept onto Tsengeltsetseg’s
face. She told the Esquere twins that they could call her
“Tea.”
Tea was a regular at Russian Night and fluent in both
Russian and English. Born in northern Mongolia at a time
when the country was still under Soviet influence, she’d
learned Russian in school—until the Soviet empire

collapsed and Mongolia’s prime minister declared English
the landlocked nation’s official second language.
Looking for adventure and the proverbial better way of
life, she won a student visa and emigrated to the United
States in 2001. Her first thought upon landing at Los
Angeles International Airport that summer was that
Americans were awfully fat, but when she got out into the
city she was more impressed; she enjoyed beautiful
people, and L.A. was filled with them.
After one semester at a community college in Torrance,
she moved to the Bay Area and got her green card. Now
she was attending classes at Peralta College in Oakland,
paying her rent and tuition by dishing ice cream at Fenton’s
Creamery.
Liz seemed strangely delighted to learn that Tea spoke
Russian. The twins bought her a drink and then suggested
they continue the party with some friends at their hotel four
blocks away. It was after midnight when they got to Chris
Aragon’s suite at the luxe Clift Hotel near Union Square.
Chris was relaxing there; Tea was struck at once by how
handsome he was. He seemed interested in her as well,
particularly after the twins mentioned that Tea knew
Russian. Joined by two of Chris’s female employees, they
opened some booze and hung out until the small hours of
the morning, when the girls all left to go to their own rooms
and Tea crashed in Chris’s for the night.
She was still shaking off sleep the next morning when the
room became a hive of activity. Liz and a handful of other
attractive young women—all alert and cleanly scrubbed
after their night of partying—began popping in and out,
receiving envelopes and cryptic instructions from Chris.*
They came and went all day, picking up more envelopes,
dropping off department store shopping bags, sometimes
lingering for a time before departing again. The party
atmosphere hung in the air, but there was a nervous,
excited edge to it now that made Tea curious—but not so
curious as to pry.

curious as to pry.
When the sun had set and the gang had gathered back
at the suite, Tea said her good-byes; she had to go home
to the East Bay, to be at work at the ice-cream parlor in the
morning.
Chris had a better idea. He was starting a website with a
business partner—“Sam”—and they happened to be in
need of a full-time Russian translator. It would pay better
than spooning out Coffee Cookie Dream to yuppies all day.
“Don’t go,” said Liz. “You’ll make more money with us.”
Tea looked over her pretty new friends. They reminded
her of the New Russians who had emerged following the
collapse of the Soviet regime, flush with suspiciously
acquired wealth, consuming with more hunger than taste.
She liked Chris, though—he seemed different. And an
Internet translating job would grant her the freedom and
flexibility to focus on her college studies. She said yes.
The next day, Chris packed up his team for the next leg in
their travels, a road trip to Vegas. Tea, he said, should
meet them there for more fun. He told her to get a Yahoo! e-
mail account, and he’d send her flight information once
they’d arrived.
Back in her apartment, the whole adventure felt like a
strange dream. But the next day, Tea had a confirmation
number for her prepaid flight to Las Vegas in her Yahoo! in-
box. She packed a bag and headed to the airport.
Chris relocated Tea to his own neighborhood and paid for
her to rent an apartment in her real name in Dana Point, a
coastal town in southern Orange County. At the end of a
quiet, winding cul-de-sac, painted an Umbrian orange with
Spanish tiles combing the roof, the “Tea House,” as he
dubbed it, was a world away from the Mongolian city where
Tea grew up.
They made love on her new bed, and afterward, Chris left
$40 on the nightstand so she could get her nails done.
Tea’s feelings were hurt. She wasn’t a hooker. She was

falling in love.
Chris and his team moved his card-printing gear from
Villa Siena into the Dana Point apartment’s attached
garage—the Tea House would be his new plant and party
house, as well as the base of operations for Tea’s twenty-
four-hour-a-day job on Carders Market. Her task would be
to haunt the Eastern European carder forums, like
Mazafaka and Cardingworld, and summarize what was
happening there for the Russian section of Carders Market.
She’d need a “nick,” Chris explained, a handle or
nickname for her online alter-ego. She decided on
“Alenka,” the name of a Russian candy.
Alenka went to work at once, glued to the monitor at the
Tea House day and night, doing her best to lure the high-
powered Russians onto the site run by Chris and “Sam,”
the Whiz.
* Liz was one of Chris Aragon’s cashers, but there’s no
evidence that her sister Michelle was involved.

21

Master Splyntr
aking up one floor of a lime-green office building on the
bank of the Monongahela River, the National Cyber
Forensics and Training Alliance was far removed from the
cloistered secrecy of Washington’s intelligence community,
where Mularski had cut his teeth. Here, dozens of security
experts from banks and technology companies worked
alongside students from nearby Carnegie Mellon University
in a cluster of neat cubicles, surrounded by a ring of offices
that followed the smoked-glass walls around the building.
With Aeron chairs and dry-erase boards, the office had the
feel of one of the technology companies that provided the
NCFTA with the bulk of its funds. The FBI had made a few
changes before moving in, transforming one office into an
electronic communications room, packed with government-
approved computer and crypto gear to securely
communicate with Washington.
In his office, Mularski looked over a “linkchart” Crabb, the
postal inspector, had e-mailed him—a massive
organization schematic showing the disparate connections
among 125 hard targets in the underground. Mularski
realized he’d been going about it all wrong by waiting for a
crime, then working to track it back to the culprit. The
criminals weren’t hiding at all. They were advertising their
services on the forums. That made them vulnerable, in the
same way the New York and Chicago Mafia’s rituals and
strict hierarchy had given the FBI a roadmap to crack down
on the mob decades before.
All he had to do now was join the carders.
He selected a forum from a list provided by Crabb and

clicked on the account registration link. Under Justice
Department regulations, Mularski could infiltrate the forums
without approval from Washington, provided he observed
strict limits on his activities. To maintain his cover, he could
post messages to the forum bulletin boards, but he couldn’t
engage anyone directly; he would be permitted no more
than three “substantive contacts” with any other forum
member. Participating in crimes, or making controlled buys
from a vendor, was out of the question. It could be an
intelligence-gathering operation only; he would be a
sponge, soaking up information about his adversaries.
As soon as he connected, he was confronted with his
first important strategic decision: What would his hacker
handle be? Mularski went with his gut. Inspired by the
Saturday morning cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
the agent settled on the moniker of the sewer-dwelling
karate champs’ rodent sensei, a biped rat called Master
Splinter. For uniqueness, and a hackerish timbre, he
spelled his surname without major vowels.
So in July 2005, Master Splyntr signed up for his first
crime forum, CarderPortal, laughing to himself over the
poetry in assuming the name of an underground rat.
Mularski was soon playing the carder forums like a
chessboard, drawing on the NCFTA’s stream of scam data
for his opening moves.
The center was plugged directly into the antifraud efforts
at banks and e-commerce sites, so when a new criminal
innovation showed up, Mularski knew about it. He posted
about the schemes on CarderPortal, portraying them as his
own inventions. The experienced crooks marveled at the
newcomer who’d independently reinvented their newest
tricks. And when the scams eventually became public in the
press, the newbies remembered they’d heard it first from
Master Splyntr.
In the meantime, the FBI agent was soaking up the

history of the forums while honing his prose to affect the
cynical, profanity-laced style of the underground.
After a few months, Mularski faced the first challenge to
his intelligence-gathering operation. The initial crop of
forums that grew from the detritus of Shadowcrew had
been wide open to new members—spooked by Operation
Firewall, many scammers had adopted new handles, and
without reputations to trade on there’d been no way for
carders to vet one another. Now that was changing. A new
breed of “vouched” forums was emerging. The only way to
get on them was to win the sponsorship of two existing
members. Constrained by the Justice Department’s
guidelines, Mularski had deliberately avoided forming
direct relationships in the underground. Who would vouch
for him?
Borrowing a page from a Robert Ludlum novel, Mularski
decided Master Splyntr needed a background legend that
could propel him into the new crime boards. His thoughts
turned to a Europe-based antispam organization called
Spamhaus that he’d worked with as part of previous FBI
initiatives.
Founded in 1998 by a former musician, Spamhaus
charts the ever-changing lineup of Internet addresses
spewing garbage into consumers’ in-boxes; its database of
spam sources is used by two-thirds of the world’s ISPs as
a blacklist. Of more interest to Mularski was the
organization’s public most-wanted list of notorious
spammers. Peopled by the likes of Alan “Spam King”
Ralsky and the Russian Leo “BadCow” Kuvayev, the
Registry of Known Spam Operations, or ROKSO, is
second only to a federal grand jury indictment on the list of
places an Internet scammer doesn’t want to see his name.
Mularski phoned up founder Steve Linford in Monaco to
explain his scheme: He wanted to be on ROKSO—or, at
least, he wanted Master Splyntr there. Linford agreed, and
Mularski went to work crafting his background story. The

best lies hew to the truth, so Mularski decided to make
Splyntr a Polish spammer. Mularski was descended on his
father’s side from Polish immigrants—his bureau-issue
button-down concealed a tattoo on his left arm of the Orzel
Bialy, the white eagle with golden beak and talons that
adorns Poland’s coat of arms. Mularski would locate
Master Splyntr in Warsaw; he’d visited Poland’s capital and
could roughly describe its landmarks if pressed.
In August, the ROKSO listing went live, for the first time
stapling a “real” name to Mularski’s cartoon-inspired alter
ego.
Pavel Kaminski aka “Master Splyntr” runs a loosely
organized spam and scam crew from Eastern Europe.
Possibly a BadCow affiliate. He is linked to: proxy
spam; phishing; pump’n’dump; javascript exploits;
carder forums; botnets.
The profile included samples of scammy spam
messages supposedly sent out by “Pavel Kaminski,”
handcrafted by Spamhaus, and an analysis of his hosting
arrangements.
Now the carders who Googled Master Splyntr could see
for themselves that he was the real deal, a bona fide
Eastern European cybercrook with sticky fingers in a lot of
pies. When Mularski logged on to CarderPortal, he found
business proposals waiting in his in-box from crooks
hoping to partner with him. Still not allowed to engage any
suspects, he blew them off sneeringly.
You’re not much of a player, he’d write back. I don’t want
to deal with you because I’m a professional and you’re
obviously a newbie at this. To rebuff upper-echelon
scammers, he challenged their pocketbooks: You don’t
have enough money to invest in what I’m doing.
Like an unattainable girl on prom night, Master Splytnr’s
aloofness only made him more attractive. When a new site
called the International Association for the Advancement of

Criminal Activity launched as a closed forum, he posted a
simple note—Hey, I need a vouch—and two existing
members spoke up for him solely on the strength of his
reputation.
He was vouched on Theft Services next, then
CardersArmy. In November 2005, he was one of the first
members invited to a brand-new forum called
Darkmarket.ws.
A few months later, another, competing site got big
enough to cross his radar, and Master Splyntr joined
Cardersmarket.com.

22

Enemies
onathan Giannone was learning that loss of privacy
was the cost of doing business with Iceman.
He’d been working with the mystery hacker for over a
year—mostly acquiring servers that Iceman used in his
vulnerability scanning—and he was still constantly under
Iceman’s electronic scrutiny. One day, the hacker sent
Giannone a link purporting to be a CNN article about
computer problems at JetBlue, the airline that had rebuffed
Giannone’s long-ago extortion attempt. Giannone clicked
on the link without thinking, and, just like that, Iceman was
on his computer again. Client-side attacks for the win.
Giannone began routinely checking his computer for
malware but couldn’t keep up with Iceman’s intrusions. Max
got ahold of Giannone’s United Airlines Mileage Plus
password and began tracking his movements around the
world—Giannone was a serious air travel aficionado who’d
sometimes fly just to accumulate miles. When he’d land at
San Francisco International, he’d find a text message from
Iceman waiting for him on his cell. “Why are you in San
Francisco?”
It might have been amusing if it weren’t for Iceman’s
frightening mood swings. He could turn on you in a minute
—one day you’d be his best friend, his “number one guy”;
the next he’d be convinced you were a snitch, a ripper, or
worse. He wrote Giannone long, unprompted e-mail
diatribes, laundry lists of grievances against Chris or
various members of the carding community.
It was jealousy, Giannone figured. While he and Chris
were partying in Vegas and the OC, Iceman was locked in

his apartment, working like a dog. Indeed, the hacker’s
outbursts often coincided with one of Giannone’s California
sojourns. In June 2005, Iceman picked a fight as Giannone
boarded an early morning flight to Orange County—Iceman
was taking him to task for some oversight in one of their
joint operations. The first message hit Giannone’s
BlackBerry at six a.m.—three in the morning San Francisco
time—and the texts continued nonstop for 2,500 miles
before Iceman finally fell silent as the plane landed. When
Giannone checked his e-mail later, he found dozens of
apologetic letters from the hacker. “Sorry, I apologize. I was
bugging out.”
On an earlier occasion, in September 2004, Giannone
told Iceman he was about to fly out to visit Chris, and Max
remarked cryptically that he could prevent the trip if he
wanted to. Giannone laughed. But an hour and a half into
his flight, the plane suddenly turned around and headed for
Chicago. As the airliner set down at O’Hare, the captain
explained that the Los Angeles air traffic control center had
gone dark, necessitating the change in itinerary.
It turned out a computer error was responsible. There
was a known bug in the Windows-based radio control
system at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center
in Palmdale, which required technicians to reboot the
machine every 49.7 days. They’d missed a reboot, and a
backup system had failed at the same time. The outage
resulted in hundreds of flights being grounded and five
incidents of airplanes drifting closer to each other than
safety regulations permit. No foul play was discovered, but
years later, when the full range of Max Vision’s powers
became clear, Giannone would find himself wondering if
Iceman hadn’t cracked the FAA’s computers and crippled
Los Angeles, just to stop him from going clubbing with
Chris.
Giannone finally took radical measures to try to keep
Iceman out of his stuff: He bought an Apple. Iceman could
penetrate just about anything. But Giannone was pretty sure

penetrate just about anything. But Giannone was pretty sure
he couldn’t hack Macs.
While Max kept up surveillance of his crime partners,
Carders Market began slowly generating buzz, intensified
by the mysterious swagger of its founders. As Iceman and
Easylivin’, Max and Chris were unknown quantities among
their fellow crooks, but experienced carders could
practically smell the confidence and street smarts in their
posts.
In Seattle, word of the new site reached Dave “El
Mariachi” Thomas, the former FBI asset who, like Max, had
tried to blow the whistle on Operation Firewall. Thomas had
been feeling adrift since the feds pulled the plug on his
intelligence-gathering operation, and he was looking for a
new online home.
Wary at first, Thomas registered under a fake handle. But
when Iceman invited a public discussion of Carders
Market’s philosophy and charter, Thomas dove in, opining
in detail on the course the site should follow to nurture
successful ops while avoiding Shadowcrew’s fate.
At first, Chris and Max thought Thomas might be a
valuable contributor. But they soon detected that he had a
beef with one of their handpicked admins, Brett “Gollumfun”
Johnson.
Rumors had been swirling about Johnson since his return
to the scene—you don’t just disappear for two years and
then come back onto the carder forums as though nothing
has happened. In August, a hacker called “Manus Dei”—
the Hand of God—added fuel to the fire when he cracked
Johnson’s e-mail account and posted a blistering profile of
the carder on a Google Group called FEDwatch. The write-
up gave Johnson’s real name, his current address in Ohio,
and a slew of personal details stolen from his in-box.
Among the revelations: Johnson had been corresponding
with a New York Times reporter about the carding scene
and had registered a mysterious domain name,

Anglerphish.com—perhaps in preparation for starting his
own site.
There was nothing to suggest that Johnson was
snitching, though, and neither Max nor Chris had been
particularly alarmed by the info dump. Thomas, on the other
hand, was now convinced the Shadowcrew founder was an
informant. After all, Johnson had announced his retirement
before Operation Firewall and then reappeared afterward
with no real explanation.
The last thing Chris and Max needed on their emerging
site was a shootout between two old-school carders with a
Shadowcrew-era grudge. Still possessed by an
entrepreneurial pride, Chris wanted the site to be the best
crime forum possible. So he reached out to Thomas by ICQ
to try to head off trouble.
“I’m not going to entertain any drama about Gollumfun, or
others, who is a rat who isn’t a rat,” Chris wrote. “I just want
a clean nice board so we can have a safe place to play.”
Chris promised he’d give Johnson the same message:
Play nice. It was Conflict Resolution 101. He followed the
paternalistic lecture by asking Thomas’s advice on running
a successful forum—showing the elder carder respect for
his years of experience. But to make sure his admonition
was taken seriously, Chris added a warning. “We are not
kids dude,” he wrote. “We are very old school. And we are
very good at what we do.”
Thomas promised to behave, adding that he’d do his
best to help make Carders Market the drama-free forum
everyone wanted. But secretly, a hard pit of suspicion was
forming in his gut. Why would anybody defend Brett
Johnson, who was so obviously a snitch?
He noticed that Easylivin’ was using an old version of
ICQ that leaked an Internet IP address. Thomas tried to
trace the address and wound up in Boston, a known hotbed
of federal informants. Carders Market’s hosting was based
in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, another perfect place to run an
undercover operation. And the phone number on the

domain name listing went to a police department in
California, albeit in a different area code. That was
probably a coincidence, but who knows?
When he was done adding up the evidence, he felt sick
to his stomach. Carders Market was a federal sting. It was
obvious now. He vowed to himself that he’d do everything
he could to destroy the new site and bring down the old-
school assholes Easylivin’ and Iceman.

23

Anglerphish
ax was developing suspicions of his own about Brett
Johnson. He began keeping a close eye on the admin on
Carders Market, checking his access logs and scouring his
private messages. For good measure, he hacked into
Johnson’s account on the International Association for the
Advancement of Criminal Activity, IAACA, and reviewed his
activity there. He found no smoking gun.
Could he really have brought an informant into the inner
circle of his new crime site?
The problem was that there was no reliable test to
determine if Johnson, or anyone else, was working for the
government. Max wanted one badly—a jurisprudence
security hole, like the buffer overflow in BIND, that he could
use over and over again on anyone he suspected. If
(is_snitch(Gollumfun)) ban(Gollumfun);. He confided in David
Thomas, not realizing that Thomas had already put Iceman
on his mile-long enemies list.
At one point in checking him out, he sent us some
PayPal fulls that were valid, which I pegged as illegal. It
made me think, okay, this guy isn’t a fed or fed lackey.
This is very important for me to find out, because it
is how I have been making trust decisions. We have it
in mind to have a lawyer give us the definitive answer,
my partner said he was on that and would find out. I am
skeptical that we’ll ever get a straight answer though,
because lawyers seem to enjoy taking your money and
providing you heuristic guesses rather than concrete
facts. Maybe I’ve just had bad lawyers.

I would really like to know a specific way that I can
find something a cop or CI can’t do. Something that if
they do it, their cases are all thrown out 100%. What a
holy grail. So far I have been living as though “doing a
criminal act” disqualifies them. Like people who
smoke a joint with someone to make sure that person
isn’t a cop. Or a hooker who asks her john, “Are you a
cop? You know you have to tell me if you are.”
Brett Johnson was indeed dirty. But contrary to
suspicions, his return to crime in the post-Firewall era
hadn’t started as a snitching expedition. It had all begun
with a girl.
Johnson’s crime and cocaine habits had driven away his
wife of nine years—she threw out his MSR206 on her way
out the door—and he’d been seeing a psychologist to cope
with the loss. Then he met Elizabeth in a North Carolina
bar. She was a twenty-four-year-old exotic dancer at a local
strip club, and for Johnson it was love at first sight. He
burned through his savings to buy her gifts, a $1,500 purse
here, a $600 pair of shoes there, and she moved in with
him after five months. But when they had sex for the first
time, she wouldn’t let him kiss her.
Johnson’s darkest suspicions were confirmed when he
located Elizabeth on a website on which men post reviews
of strippers and prostitutes. There it was, line after line of
disgusting detail about the services his girlfriend had been
providing in exchange for cocaine and cash. He confronted
her with the evidence, and she tearfully promised to quit the
drugs and the prostitution.
Hoping to wrench her from the patterns of her old life,
Johnson showered Elizabeth with more gifts and expensive
dinners out. It was that, and not any hidden agenda, that
impelled his return from retirement. He needed the money,
plain and simple.
The luck that had seen him through Operation Firewall
failed him on February 8, 2005, when Charleston, North

Carolina, police busted him for using counterfeit Bank of
America cashier’s checks to pay for Krugerrands and
watches he won on eBay and had shipped COD to his
drops. After a week of stewing in the Charleston County
Detention Center, pining for Elizabeth, the Secret Service
paid him a visit. Once he convinced them he was Gollumfun
—the admin who got away when they dropped the hammer
on Shadowcrew—they agreed to help him with his state
case if he’d work for them.
The Secret Service had Johnson’s bail lowered to
$10,000. When he bonded out, the agents moved him from
Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina, where they rented
him a corporate apartment and paid him a $50 per diem.
Now he was a daily visitor to the Columbia field office,
checking in at four p.m. and working until nine, taking the
Secret Service deep into Carders Market and the other
boards. Everything that crossed his computer was
recorded and displayed simultaneously on a forty-two-inch
plasma screen hanging on the wall of the office.
They called it Operation Anglerphish, and Johnson
thought it would make a great book one day. That’s why
he’d registered the domain name Anglerphish.com and
opened up talks with a New York Times reporter. When
Manus Dei cracked his e-mail and revealed those activities
online, Johnson’s Secret Service handlers were irate. They
promptly banned him from using computers away from the
office and told him to cut off contact with the reporter.
Elizabeth left him—her name and occupation had been
exposed in the breach.
Then Iceman stripped Johnson of his privileged position
in Carders Market, and crooks he’d known since the
Counterfeit Library days started refusing to do business
with him. Johnson was running out of credibility, and the
Secret Service was running out of patience.
In late March 2006, the agents decided to act on one of

Anglerphish’s only catches, a California identity thief who’d
stolen at least $200,000 by e-filing bogus tax returns
through H&R Block, then collecting the refunds himself.
Johnson, an expert in that particular scam, had been talking
with the crook online, and the Secret Service had traced
the chats to the C&C Internet Café in Hollywood. A Los
Angeles agent visited the coffee shop and sat two tables
away while the man filed his fake returns.
But when local police and Secret Service agents raided
the target’s Hollywood apartment, they found it had been
cleaned out: no computers and not a shred of documentary
evidence. The suspect had done everything but deep-clean
the carpet and paint the walls.
Johnson’s handlers in Columbia already suspected their
asset of leaking his informant status after the drama on
Carders Market. Now they had reason to believe he’d
tipped off the target of an impending raid. They brought in a
polygraph examiner and strapped Johnson to the box.
The needles were steady as Johnson answered the first
two questions: Did he contact the target? Did he have
anyone else contact the target? No and no. The final
question was broader: Did Johnson have any unauthorized
contact with anyone? “No,” he said again, his galvanic skin
response skittering up the chart.
Despite the agents’ admonishments, Johnson had
secretly continued his talks with the New York Times
reporter, he admitted, and he was very serious about
getting a book deal. The feds interrogated him until two in
the morning, then had him sign a form consenting to a
search of his agency-funded apartment.
Tossing the apartment was like an Easter egg hunt. The
agents found a stored value card in a shoe in the bedroom
closet. A memo book containing account numbers, PINs,
and identity information was in a toiletry kit in the bathroom.
A sock stuffed in a pair of men’s pants in the closet
contained sixty-three ATM cards. A Rubbermaid bowl at

the bottom of the laundry bin was keeping fresh nearly two
thousand dollars in cash. Finally, there were loaded Kinko’s
payment cards; Johnson had been buying computer time at
the local copy shop.
He’d been leading a triple life almost from the start of his
service to the agency, posing as a crook at the Columbia
field office and pulling his own very real capers in his off
hours.
Johnson’s specialty was the same scam the Los
Angeles target had been carrying out. He’d mine victims’
Social Security numbers from online databases, including
California’s Death Index of recently departed Golden State
residents, then file bogus tax returns on their behalf,
directing the refunds into prepaid debit cards that could be
used for ATM withdrawals. He’d pulled in more than
$130,000 in tax refunds under forty-one names, all under
the nose of the Secret Service.
The agents phoned up Johnson’s bail bondsman and
persuaded him to revoke the $10,000 bond that had set the
fraudster free. Then they put Johnson back in the county jail.
After three days, Johnson’s handler showed up with a
senior agent, who was not happy with the informant.
“Before we begin, Brett, I just want to say that you are either
going to tell us everything that you have done the past six
years, or I’m going to make it my mission in life to fuck over
you and your family,” the supervisor growled. “And I’m not
just talking about these current charges. Once you get out, I
will hound you for the rest of your life.”
Johnson refused to cooperate, and the agents stormed
out. The U.S. Attorney’s Office started working on a federal
indictment. But the swindler had one more trick up his
sleeve. Two weeks later he managed to get his bond
reinstated, bailed from the detention center, and promptly
vanished.
Anglerphish was a debacle. After 1,500 hours of work,
the government was left with a fugitive informant and tens of
thousands of dollars in new fraud. There was only one silver

thousands of dollars in new fraud. There was only one silver
lining: that first batch of twenty-nine platinum dumps
Johnson had bought in May for $600.
The Secret Service had tracked some of the cards to a
pizza parlor in Vancouver—a dead end. But the corporate
Bank of America account the seller used to accept his
payment belonged to one John Giannone, a twenty-one-
year-old living in Rockville Centre on Long Island.

24

Exposure
ea, these girls are white trash. Don’t be friends
with them,” said Chris. “Their minds are different.”
They were at Naan and Curry, a twenty-four-hour Indian
and Pakistani restaurant in San Francisco’s theater district.
It had been three months since Tea hooked up with Chris,
and she was with him for one of his monthly trips to the Bay
Area, where’d he’d meet his mysterious hacker friend
“Sam” just before dawn. They were only four blocks from
Max’s safe house now, but Tea wouldn’t be introduced to
the hacker on this trip or any other. Nobody met Sam in
person.
She was fascinated by how it all worked: the cashless
nature of the crime, the way Chris organized his crew. He’d
told her everything, once he thought she was ready, but
never asked her to hit the stores with the others. She was
special. He didn’t even like her hanging out with his cashing
crew, for fear that they’d somehow taint her personality.
Tea was also the only employee not being paid. After
she’d protested the $40 Chris left on the nightstand, Chris
concluded that Tea didn’t want any money from him at all,
despite the long hours she was spending on Carders
Market and the Russian crime boards. Chris was taking
care of the rent on the Tea House, buying her clothes, and
paying for her travel—but she found it a strange existence,
living online, traveling on confirmation numbers instead of
plane tickets. She’d become a ghost, her body in Orange
County, her mind more often projecting into Ukraine and
Russia, befriending organized cybercrime chieftains in her
role as Iceman’s emissary from the carding world of the

West.
Iceman, she’d decided, was pretty cool. He was always
respectful and friendly. When Chris and his partner got into
one of their fights, each man would whine and gossip about
the other to Tea over ICQ, like children. At one point,
Iceman sent her a bunch of dumps and suggested she go
into business for herself, a move that sent Chris into a
petulant rage.
As Chris and Tea chatted over Indian food, a tall man
with a ponytail walked in from the street and headed for the
cash register in back, his eyes flickering over them, just for
a moment, before he picked up a bag of takeout and left.
Chris smiled. “That was Sam.”
Back in Orange County, Chris’s counterfeiting operation
was earning enough for him to send his kids to private
schools, cover Tea’s apartment, and, in July, start
searching for a bigger and better home for himself and his
family. He went house-hunting with Giannone and found a
spacious rental—a two-story house in the coastal town of
Capistrano Beach at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on a bluff
rising above the sandy beach. It was a family-friendly
neighborhood, basketball hoops hanging above garages
and a boat parked in a neighbor’s driveway. His move-in
date was July 15.
Giannone flew back out for the July 4 weekend—Chris’s
last holiday at his old condo—but wound up back at the Tea
House while Chris spent time with his family. It happened all
the time; Giannone would fly into John Wayne Airport,
expecting a weekend of clubbing with Chris, and instead
would end up holed up with one of the crew or be tasked
with babysitting Chris’s boys at his house. Tea was
tolerable, different from the cheap party girls cashing out
Chris’s cards, but time at the Dana Point apartment
dragged.
He phoned Chris and complained that he was bored.

“Come to the house,” Chris said. They were at the pool.
“The wife’s here with the kids.”
Giannone invited Tea, who’d never seen Chris’s condo
complex just four miles away. When they arrived, Chris,
Clara, and the two boys were splashing around in the pool,
enjoying the sun. Giannone and Tea said hello and made
themselves at home on some deck chairs.
Chris looked stunned. “I see you brought your friend,” he
said to Giannone testily.
Clara knew Giannone, the babysitter, but had never met
Tea. She looked at the stranger, then at Giannone, then
back at the Mongolian, awareness and anger creeping
over her face.
Giannone realized he’d made a blunder. The two women
looked uncannily alike. Tea was a younger version of
Chris’s wife, and at a glance, Clara knew her husband was
sleeping with this woman.
Chris pulled himself out of the pool and walked around to
where they were sitting, his face neutral. He squatted down
in front of Giannone, his hair dripping water onto the
concrete. “What are you doing?” he said in a low voice.
“Get out of here.”
They left. And for the first time since she joined up with
Chris Aragon and his gang, Tea felt dirty.
Chris wasn’t angry—he got a guilty, alpha-male pleasure
out of seeing Tea and Clara in the same place. But Tea’s
crush was becoming a problem. He had genuine affection
for her and her quirky ways, but she was becoming an
unwanted complication.
There was an ideal solution at his disposal. He bought
her a plane ticket to visit her home country for an extended
vacation, literally banishing his overardent paramour to
Outer Mongolia.
With Chris distracted by his tangled love life, Carders
Market was consuming more of Max’s time, and he still had

his business as “Digits” to run. He was working in the food
service industry now, and it was paying off big.
It had started in June 2006, when a serious security hole
emerged in the software RealVNC, for “virtual network
console”—a remote-control program used to administer
Windows machines over the Internet.
The bug was in the brief handshake sequence that opens
every new session between a VNC client and the RealVNC
server. A crucial part of the handshake comes when the
server and client negotiate the type of security to apply to
the session. It’s a two-step process: First, the RealVNC
server sends the client a shorthand list of the security
protocols the server is configured to support. The list is just
an array of numbers: [2,5], for example, means the server
supports VNC’s type 2 security, a relatively simple
password authentication scheme, and type 5, a fully
encrypted connection.
In the second step, the client tells the server which of the
offered security protocols it wants to use by sending back
its corresponding number, like ordering Chinese food off a
menu.
The problem was, RealVNC didn’t check the response
from the client to see if it was on the menu in the first place.
The client could send back any security type, even one the
server hadn’t offered, and the server unquestioningly
accepted it. That included type 1, which is almost never
offered, because type 1 is no security at all—it allows you
to log in to RealVNC with no password.
It was a simple matter to modify a VNC client to always
send back type 1, turning it into a skeleton key. An intruder
like Max could point his hacked software at any box running
the buggy RealVNC software and instantly enjoy unfettered
access to the machine.
Max started scanning for vulnerable RealVNC
installations as soon as he learned of this gaping hole. He
watched, stunned, as the results scrolled down his screen,
thousands of them: computers at homes and college

thousands of them: computers at homes and college
dorms; machines in Western Union offices, banks, and
hotel lobbies. He logged in to some at random; in one, he
found himself looking at the feeds from closed-circuit video
surveillance cameras in an office-building lobby. Another
was a computer at a Midwest police department, where he
could listen in on 911 calls. A third put him in a home
owner’s climate control system; he raised the temperature
ten degrees and moved on.
A tiny fraction of the systems were more interesting and
also familiar from his ongoing intrusion into the Pizza
Schmizza: They were restaurant point-of-sale systems.
They were money.
Unlike the simple dumb terminals sitting on the counters
of liquor stores and neighborhood grocers, restaurant
systems had become sophisticated all-in-one solutions that
handled everything from order taking to seating
arrangements, and they were all based on Microsoft
Windows. To support the machines remotely, service
vendors were installing them with commercial back doors,
including VNC. With his VNC skeleton key, Max could open
many of them at will.
So Max, who’d once scanned the entire U.S. military for
vulnerable servers, now had his computers trolling the
Internet day and night, finding and cracking pizza joints,
Italian ristorantes, French bistros, and American-style grills;
he harvested magstripe data everywhere he found it.
Under Visa-issued security standards, that shouldn’t
have been possible. In 2004 the company outlawed the use
of any point-of-sale system that stores magstripe data after
a transaction is complete. In an effort to comply with the
standards, all the major vendors produced patches that
would stop their systems from retaining the swipes. But
restaurants weren’t racing to install the upgrade, which in
some cases was a paid extra.
Max’s scanning machinery had several moving parts.
The first was aimed at finding VNC installations by

performing a high-speed “port sweep”—a standard
reconnaissance technique that relies on the Internet’s
openness and standardization.
From the start, the network’s protocols were designed to
let computers juggle a variety of different types of
connections simultaneously—today that can include e-mail,
Web traffic, file transfers, and hundreds of other more
esoteric services. To keep it all separate, a computer
initiates new connections with two pieces of information:
the IP address of the destination machine, and a virtual
“port” on that machine—a number from 0 to 65,535—that
identifies the type of service the connection is seeking. The
IP address is like a phone number, and a port is akin to a
telephone extension you read off to the switchboard
operator so he can send your call to the right desk.
Port numbers are standardized and published online. E-
mail software knows to connect to port 25 to send a
message; Web browsers connect to port 80 to retrieve a
website. If a connection on the specified port is refused, it’s
like an unanswered extension; the service you’re looking for
isn’t available at that IP address.
Max was interested in port 5900—the standard port for a
VNC server. He set his machines sweeping through broad
swaths of Internet address space, sending to each a single
sixty-four-byte synchronization packet that would test
whether port 5900 was open for service.
The addresses that answered his sweep streamed into a
PERL script Max wrote that connected to each machine
and tried to log in through the RealVNC bug. If the exploit
didn’t work, the script would try some common passwords:
“1234,” “vnc,” or an empty string.
If it got in, the program grabbed some preliminary
information about the computer: the name of the machine
and the resolution and color depth of the monitor. Max
snubbed computers with low-quality displays, on the
assumption that they were home PCs and not businesses.
It was a high-speed operation: Max was running on five or

It was a high-speed operation: Max was running on five or
six servers at once, each capable of zipping through a
Class B network, over sixty-five thousand addresses, in a
couple of seconds. His list of vulnerable VNC installations
grew by about ten thousand every day.
The point-of-sale systems were needles in a massive
haystack. He could spot some just from the name: “Aloha”
meant the machine was likely an Aloha POS made by
Atlanta-based Radiant Systems, his favorite target.
“Maitre’D” was a competing product from Posera Software
in Seattle. The rest of them took some guesswork. Any
machine with a name like “Server,” “Admin,” or “Manager”
needed a second look.
Slipping in over his VNC client, Max could see what was
on the computer’s screen as though standing right in front
of it. Since he worked at night, the display on the dormant
PC was usually dark, so he’d nudge his mouse to clear the
screen saver. If there was anyone in the room, it might have
been a little spooky: Remember that time your computer
monitor flipped on for no reason, and the cursor twitched? It
might have been Max Vision taking a quick look at your
screen.
That manual examination was the slow part. Max
recruited Tea to help out—he gave her a VNC client and
started feeding her lists of vulnerable machines, along with
instructions on what to look for. Soon, Max was wired into
eateries throughout America. A Burger King in Texas. A
sports bar in Montana. A trendy nightclub in Florida. A
California grill. He moved up to Canada and found still
more.
Max had gotten his start vending by stealing the dumps
from a single restaurant. Now he had as many as a hundred
feeding him credit card data in nearly real time. Digits
would be doing a lot more business.
With so much work to be done, Dave “El Mariachi” Thomas
had chosen a bad time to become a real pain in Iceman’s

ass. In June, Thomas did something nearly unheard of in
the insular computer underground: He took their dispute off
the forums and into public, civilian cyberspace, attacking
Carders Market in the comments section of a widely read
computer security blog, where he accused Iceman of being
“LE”—law enforcement.
“Here is a site hosted in Ft Lauderdale Florida,” Thomas
wrote. “Matter of fact, it’s hosted right out of a guy’s house.
Yet, LE refuses to shutter them. Instead, this site promotes
vending of PINs and numbers and PayPals and eBays and
so forth, all the while LE looks on at all the players.
“LE claims they can’t do anything to a site hosted on U.S.
soil. Yet, truth be told, it’s LE running the site just like they
ran Shadowcrew.”
By highlighting Carders Market’s hosting arrangements,
Thomas was targeting Iceman’s Achilles’ heel. The site had
been purring along unmolested because Affinity didn’t
notice the illicit server among its tens of thousands of
legitimate hosted sites. El was working to change that,
lodging complaints with the company over and over again.
The tactic was lacking in logic: If Carders Market really was
under government control, the complaints would fall on deaf
ears; only if it was a real crime site would Affinity kick it off.
If Iceman drowns, then he’s not a witch.
A week after Thomas’s post, Affinity abruptly cut off
Carders Market. The shutdown angered Max; he’d had a
good thing going at ValueWeb. He searched overseas for
new, legitimate hosting that would stand up to El Mariachi,
approaching companies in China, Russia, India, and
Singapore. It always turned out the same way—they’d
demand some upfront money as the price of admission
and then roll a spool of red tape in front of the door, asking
for a passport and a business license or corporate papers.
“Couldn’t be because you have some STUPID FUCKING
NAME called CARDERS this or CARDERS MARKET that,
now could it?” Thomas wrote, taunting Iceman. “Maybe if
you didn’t scream ‘CARDERS WORK HERE,’ you could

you didn’t scream ‘CARDERS WORK HERE,’ you could
get a small site going, and possibly grow to be the beast
you so desperately need to be.”
It was personal now: Thomas hated Iceman, whether he
was a fed or not, and the feeling had become mutual.
Max finally set up at Staminus, a California firm
specializing in high-bandwidth hosting resistant to DDoS
attacks. By then, Thomas was tearing into him in the
comments section of a random blog called “Life on the
Road.” The blogger had quoted Thomas’s comments about
Carders Market in a brief entry about the forums, unwittingly
volunteering his blog as the new battlefield in the El
Mariachi-versus-Iceman war.
Iceman picked up the gauntlet and posted a lengthy
public rebuttal to Thomas’s indictment, accusing his foe of
“hypocrisy and slander.”
CM is NOT a “crime board” or an “empire” or any
of this bullshit accusation. We are simply a forum that
chooses to allow discussion of financial crime. We
also lend authority in judging which members are real
and which are the fakes, but those are just our
opinions, we make no money from this service. We
are just a CARRIER for the information, a FORUM
through which this communication can occur without
oppression. CM is not involved in any crime
whatsoever. It is not illegal to operate a forum and
allow discussion.
Craigslist.com has people posting about
prostitution, drug hookups, and other obvious crime,
yet people don’t call craigslist a “hookers and blow
one stop shop” or a crime empire. It is recognized as a
CARRIER which is not responsible for the content of
posts therein. This is the state of Carders Market.
The spirited defense completely ignored the detailed
crime tutorials and review system on Carders Market, not
to mention the secret impetus for the site: to give Max a

place to sell stolen data.
Knowing his California hosting wouldn’t satisfy the
underground, Max resumed his search for an arrangement
overseas. The next month, he hacked himself a new server,
this time in a country as far from U.S. influence as any on
the Net—a nation unlikely to respond to complaints from
Dave Thomas or even the American government.
“Carders Market is now hosted in IRAN,” he announced
on August 11. “Registration is reopened.”

25

Hostile Takeover
apidity is the essence of war. Take advantage of
the enemy’s unreadiness, make your way by unexpected
routes, and attack unguarded spots.”
Max had been reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, using
the 2,600-year-old tome as his hacking manual. He
sketched out his plans on a pair of whiteboards in his safe
house; after some attrition and new entrants, there were
five English-language carding sites that mattered in the
underground, and that was four too many. He’d spent
weeks infiltrating his competitors: ScandinavianCarding,
the Vouched, TalkCash, and his chief rival, DarkMarket, the
UK-run site that emerged a month before Carders Market
and was building a powerful reputation as a ripper-free
zone.
In a way, Max’s plan to muscle in on the other forums was
coming from the white-hat side of his personality. The
status quo was working fine for Max the criminal—he
wasn’t greedy, and he was doing brisk business on
Carders Market. But the post-Shadowcrew carding scene
was broken, and when Max the white hat saw something
broken, he couldn’t resist fixing it—just as he’d done for the
Pentagon a few years earlier.
Ego played a role too. The whole carding world seemed
to think Iceman was just another forum administrator,
bankrupt of any skill except the ability to set up forum
software. Max saw a golden opportunity to show the
carders how wrong they were.
DarkMarket turned out to be an unguarded spot. A
British carder called JiLsi ran the site, and he’d made the

mistake of choosing the same password—“MSR206”—
everywhere, including Carders Market, where Max knew
everyone’s passwords. Max could just walk in and take
over. The Vouched, on the other hand, was a fortress—you
couldn’t even connect to the website without a privately
issued digital certificate installed in your browser.
Fortunately, JiLsi was also a member of that site, and he
had moderator privileges there. Max found a copy of the
certificate in one of JiLsi’s webmail accounts, protected by
the carder’s usual password. From there, it was just a
matter of logging in as JiLsi and leveraging his access to
get at the database.
On TalkCash and ScandinavianCarding, Max
determined that the forum software’s search function was
vulnerable to an “SQL injection” attack. It wasn’t a
surprising discovery. SQL injection vulnerabilities are the
Web’s most persistent weakness.
SQL injection has to do with the behind-the-scenes
architecture of most sophisticated websites. When you visit
a website with dynamic content—news articles, blog posts,
stock quotes, virtual shopping carts—the site’s software is
pulling the content in raw form from a back-end database,
usually running on a completely different computer than the
host to which you’ve connected. The website is a facade—
the database server is the important part, and it’s locked
down. Ideally, it won’t even be accessible from the Internet.
The website’s software speaks to the database server in
a standard syntax called Structured Query Language, or
SQL (pronounced “sequel”). The SQL command SELECT,
for example, asks the database server for all the
information that fits a specified criteria. INSERT puts new
information in the database. The rarely used DROP
instruction will mass-delete data.
It’s a potentially perilous arrangement, because there are
any number of situations where the software has to send a
visitor’s input as part of an SQL command—in a search
query, for example. If a visitor to a music site enters

query, for example. If a visitor to a music site enters
“Sinatra” in the search box, the website’s software will ask
the database to look for matches.
SELECT titles FROM music_catalog
WHERE artist = ‘Sinatra’;
An SQL injection vulnerability occurs when the software
doesn’t properly sanitize the user’s input before including it
in a database command. Punctuation is the real killer. If a
user in the above scenario searches on “Sinatra’; DROP
music_catalog;” it’s tremendously important that the
apostrophe and semicolons not make it through.
Otherwise, the database server sees this.
SELECT * FROM music_catalog
WHERE artist = ‘Sinatra’; DROP music_catalog;’;
As far as the database is concerned, that’s two
commands in succession, separated by a semicolon. The
first command finds Frank Sinatra albums, the second one
“drops” the music catalog, destroying it.
SQL injection is a standard weapon in every hacker’s
arsenal—the holes, even today, plague websites of all
stripes, including e-commerce and banking sites. And in
2005, the forum software used by TalkCash and
ScandinavianCarding was a soft target.
To exploit the bug on TalkCash, Max registered for a new
account and posted a seemingly innocuous message on
one of the discussion threads. His SQL attack was hidden
in the body of the message, the font color set to match the
background so nobody would see it.
He ran a search query designed to find the post, and the
buggy forum software passed his command to the
database system, which executed it, INSERTing a new
administrator account just for Max. A similar attack worked
at ScandinavianCarding.
On August 14, Max was ready to show the carding world

what he was capable of. He slid into the sites through the
holes he’d secretly blasted in their ramparts, using his illicit
admin access to copy their databases. The plan would
have made Sun Tzu proud: Attacking and absorbing rival
forums was an unexpected route indeed. Most carders
wanted to avoid attention, not thrust themselves into
prominence. A hostile takeover was unprecedented.
When he was done with the English-speaking sites, Max
went to Eastern Europe. He’d strived to unite the Eastern
European carders with the West, but Tea’s efforts had
been largely fruitless—the Russians liked her but didn’t
trust an American board. Diplomacy had failed; it was time
for action. He found Cardingworld.cc and Mazafaka.cc no
more secure than the western boards and was soon
downloading their databases of private messages and
forum posts. Megabytes of Cyrillic flowed onto his
computer, a secret history of scams and hacks against the
West stretching back months, now permanently
warehoused on Max’s hard drive in San Francisco’s
Tenderloin.
When he was done, he executed the DROP command
on all the sites’ databases, wiping them out.
ScandinavianCarding, the Vouched, TalkCash,
DarkMarket, Cardingworld—the bustling, twenty-four-hour-
a-day marketplaces supporting a billion-dollar global
underground economy all winked out of existence. Ten
thousand criminals around the world, men with six-figure
deals in the works; wives, children, and mistresses to
support; cops to buy off; mortgages to pay; debts to satisfy;
and orders to fill, were, in an instant, blind. Adrift. Losing
money.
They would all know the name “Iceman.”
Max then went to work on the stolen membership data,
ignoring, for now, the Eastern European carders. After
culling the duplicates and undesirables from the four
English-language sites, there were 4,500 new members for
Carders Market. He rolled them all into his site’s database,

Carders Market. He rolled them all into his site’s database,
so the carders could use their old nicknames and
passwords to log in to their new home. Carders Market had
six thousand members now. It was larger than Shadowcrew
had ever been.
He announced the forced merger in a mass e-mail to his
new members. As the morning dawned in San Francisco,
he watched them gather, confused and angry, on his
consolidated crime forum. Matrix001, a German
DarkMarket administrator, demanded an explanation for
Iceman’s actions. A previously taciturn spam king named
Master Splyntr spoke up to criticize the organization of the
material Iceman had stolen from the other boards. The
entire contents of the competing sites now lived in a new
section of Carders Market called “Historical posts from
merged forums.” They were unsorted and difficult to
navigate; Max had found the sites’ content worthy of
preserving but not of organizing.
Max watched the grumbling for a while, then stepped in
and let everyone know who was in charge.
@Master Splyntr: unless you have something
constructive or specific to say, your comment is
unwelcome. If you are unhappy with the layout, then go
away and come back later, because it is not yet sorted
out!
@matrix001: The old forums were negligent in their
security, using shared hosting, failing to use encryption
of the data, logging IP addresses, using “1234” as the
administrative passwords (yes really people this is
true!), and general administrative Nazism. Some, such
as TheVouched, were even giving a false sense of
security, which as you know is far worse than none at
all.
You ask, what is the meaning of “all this”? If you
mean, why would we merge five carding forums
together, the short answer is because I didn’t have
time nor interest to merge in the other four for a total of

nine!
Basically, this was overdue. Why have five different
forums each with the same content, splitting users and
vendors, and a mish-mash of poor security and
sometimes poor administration and poor moderation. I
am not saying that is the case in all, but it was for most.
With the right moderation, CM will return to its
previous “tight” reign, with zero tolerance policy
against ripping, and almost anarchist policy of not
locking threads and promoting discussion. In the
meantime, there is extra “fluff” from the previous
forums, but that will be cleaned up.
What is the point? Security. Convenience. Increase
quality and decrease the noise. Bringing order to a
mess …
A Canadian hacker called Silo countered that Iceman
had dissolved the social glue that held the carder
community together. He’d violated their trust.
You breached our community’s security. Stole the
databases of other forums. Couldn’t your merger have
taken place with the admins of all the boards
consenting to it? What’s the difference between me
hacking your e-mails and reading up on your business
and posting your communications on my board?
Either way you look at it, you’ve breached what little
trust exists in the community. My suggestion is that you
delete the databases you have that aren’t yours to
display. The proper thing to do is ASK the admins of
the boards if one true unified board is in the best
interests of our community, and wait and see if they
would be interested in such a board.
That is my two cents.
There are people out here with a lot of skills Iceman.
How they use them is what determines our community.

The Vouched came back online, but not for long—it was
supposed to be a private, secure forum open only to a
select few. When Max had broken its security, he’d
shattered its credibility, and nobody bothered to return.
TalkCash and ScandinavianCarding were doomed—they
had no backups of the databases Max had destroyed.
Their members mostly stayed on at Carders Market.
Aside from the Russian forums, which Max was having
trouble assimilating because of the language barrier, there
was just one black mark on Max’s triumph: DarkMarket. His
chief competitor had backups and managed to crawl back
to life within days. It was a slap in the face to everything
Max was trying to achieve for himself and the community.
The war had begun.
In Orange County, Chris was consolidating his end of the
business too. He decided it would be convenient to have
his full-time workers all living in the same place, and the
Archstone chain of apartment complexes offered an
Internet-based move-in process perfectly suited to his
plans. Prospective tenants could fill out a lease on the
company’s website and pay the easy $99 deposit and the
first month’s rent with a credit card. Chris could handle
everything online, and his people wouldn’t have to put in an
appearance until move-in day, when they’d stop by the
rental office to flash their fake ID and pick up the door key.
He moved two of his cashers, and Marcos, his pot
connection, into the Archstone Mission Viejo, a labyrinth of
McMansion-style apartments painted the colors of a sunset
and clinging to a hill dotted with palm trees and high-
tension lines alongside Interstate 5, ten minutes from his
house. He was also looking to expand his crew. One girl
had dropped out and moved to Toledo after her second in-
store bust, and two others had quit in disgust when Chris
impregnated his teenage girlfriend—he was now paying for
an apartment for the young woman and their son, whose
existence he kept secret even from his mother.

At the NCFTA office in Pittsburgh, Keith Mularski, in his
Master Splyntr guise, got a private message from Iceman
himself two days after the hostile takeover. The hacker
wanted to apologize for some of his hasty words on his
forum.
Anticipating the next stage in the DarkMarket–Carders
Market conflict, Iceman had boasted that he would easily
defuse any DDoS attacks leveled against his site. But
afterward, he Googled Master Splyntr and learned he was
a world-class spammer with a botnet army. Iceman
seemed loath to turn a mere critic into a full-blown enemy.
Don’t take offense to my smartass comments. It is
true that if someone attacks me I will just track the
botnet and try to jack it or shut it down, but it’s not
something I want to taunt people with. No one needs to
waste their time with such activity, really DDoS is no
fun and so don’t get the wrong idea plz. :-)
Mularski was beginning to see an opportunity in the
upheaval gripping the underground. Nobody knew who to
trust anymore; everyone was angry at everyone else. If he
were to play both sides, he might make inroads against the
forum administrators as they grappled for allies in the
brewing battle.
He was allowed three substantive contacts. He decided
to use one of them to respond to Iceman.
No worries brotha, we’re kewl. I’m a smartass
myself. I got no interest in attacking. Shit, my bots
aren’t even configured to attack. Mailing makes me far
more money! I really got no interest in doing anything
that doesn’t make me money, unless I have a vendetta,
which I don’t. And if you do get attacked, I’m also pretty
good in tracking and hijacking, so hit me on ICQ
340572667 if ya need help.… :-) MS

Mularski watched his screen, waiting. A few minutes
later, a response.
Excellent thank you :-) BTW, do you have any
suggestions for running things here, aside from the
obvious organizational mess? Also, I will change it so
you are a vendor and have user selectable title. (Done)
I don’t know if you vend mailing services with your net,
but that is a cool thing to have around and I’m sure
we’re better off having you available for hire. Also, if
you were a vendor before (or other?) then please
accept my apologies for the title loss. I preserved
some of the status like DM vendors, but messed up on
the other forums and those didn’t get preserved. Just
FYI. Thanks bro :-) Also added you to VIP group.
It was a promising response. Mularski talked things over
with his supervisor, then applied to headquarters for Group
II authority, the lesser of two tiers of undercover
engagement available to the FBI but still a step up from his
previous “passive observation only” mandate. The new
latitude wouldn’t let him participate in crimes, but he would
finally be permitted to actively engage with the
underground. He named Carders Market, and everyone
associated with running the site, as the investigation’s
targets.
The approval came quickly. But despite his encouraging
words, Iceman proved a slippery target; he kept Mularski at
arm’s length, not confiding in him and only chatting through
Carders Market’s internal messaging system. The FBI
agent had better luck on the other side of the battlefield.
He’d been an early member of DarkMarket, and now that
he was interactive, the site’s founder, JiLsi, quickly
identified Master Splyntr as management material. In early
September, Splyntr was appointed as a moderator on the
site.

The war was heating up. Despite the lessons of the
August incursion, JiLsi couldn’t manage to completely lock
down DarkMarket. Iceman began sneaking in regularly and
deleting accounts at random, just to mess with JiLsi’s head.
When DarkMarket retaliated with a fierce DDoS attack
against Carders Market’s Iranian host, Iceman fired back
with a DDoS of his own against DarkMarket. Both sites
groaned under the weight of the junk packets. Iceman
quietly set up service at a U.S. hosting company with the
bandwidth to absorb the DDoS packets, cleaning the traffic
before channeling it back to his real server over an
encrypted VPN.
JiLsi was tearing his hair out, voicing his frustrations to
Master Splyntr. Mularski shifted his focus away from
Iceman and toward the British cybercrime boss who was
starting to treat him like a friend. Tentatively, he suggested
that JiLsi consider turning over DarkMarket to someone
seasoned in setting up bulletproof hosting. Someone
accustomed to running sites that everyone hates. A
spammer.
Hey, you know my background, he wrote in a chat. I’m
real good at setting up servers. I secure servers all the time.
I could set this up for you.
Mularski was toying with an extraordinary plan. In the
past, the Secret Service and FBI had both run admins as
informants: Albert Gonzalez on Shadowcrew and Dave
Thomas on the Grifters. But actually running a crime forum
directly would provide access to everything from the
carders’ IP addresses to their private communications,
while giving Master Splyntr, as the site’s runner, more
credibility in the underground than any agent could dream
of.
JiLsi expressed interest in Master Splyntr’s offer, and
Mularski braced himself for another trip to Washington, DC.

26

What’s in Your Wallet?
Selling USA 100% APPROVED DUMPS
*NEW* Discounted Prices for approved dumps:
$11 MasterCard
$8 Visa Classic
$13 Visa Gold/Premium
$19 Visa Platinum
$24 Visa Signature
$24 Visa Business
$19 Visa Corporate
$24 Visa Purchasing
$19 American Express = new price drop (was 24)
$24 Discover = new price drop (was 29)
Minimum order 10 pieces.
Dumps sold by type of card. No bin list.
Max’s hostile takeover was about fixing the community,
not personal profit. But his business in stolen magstripe
data was stronger than ever after the merger—he was
earning a thousand dollars a day now selling dumps to
carders around the world, in addition to the five to ten
thousand a month he was still pulling in through his
partnership with Chris.
Publicly, at FTC meetings and elsewhere, the credit card
industry was doing its best to conceal the impact of the
rampant magstripe theft happening worldwide. Credit
leader Visa held up an industry-funded report by Javelin
Strategy and Research that claimed consumers, not
companies, were the source of the vast majority of identity
theft and credit card fraud cases: Some 63 percent of
cases originated with consumers, primarily victims of lost

or stolen wallets, followed by theft by trusted associates,
stolen mail, and Dumpster diving.
The report was grossly misleading, only tallying cases in
which the victim knew how his information had been stolen.
Visa’s private numbers told the real story. Stolen wallets
hadn’t been the primary source of fraud since mid-2001,
when credit card theft from e-commerce sites sent
fraudulent “card not present” transactions—online and
telephone purchases—rocketing up the chart, while every
other category held steady.
In 2004, when stolen magstripe data became a massive
underground commodity, losses to counterfeit cards
followed the same stratospheric climb. In the first quarter of
2006, Chris Aragon–style counterfeiting edged out card-
not-present fraud for the first time, topping $125 million in
quarterly losses to Visa’s member banks alone.
Nearly all those losses began with a price list like Max’s.
As Digits, Max accumulated page after page of positive
reviews on Carders Market and a reputation for square
dealing. It was a point of pride with Max—and a sign of the
moral compartmentalization he’d practiced since
childhood. Max would happily hack a carder and copy his
entire hard drive, but if a customer paid him for information,
Max wouldn’t even consider shortchanging him.
His generosity, too, was well known. If Max had dumps
that were about to expire, he’d give them away for free
rather than let them go to waste. Together, his exemplary
business practices and the quality of his product made Max
one of the top five dumps vendors in the world, in a market
traditionally dominated by Eastern European sellers.
Max was cautious with his vending. By refusing to sell
dumps by BIN—bank identification number—he made it
tough for the feds to identify his breaches: The government
couldn’t just buy twenty dumps sourced to a single financial
institution and ask that bank to look for a common purchase
point in its transaction records. Instead, a batch of twenty
cards could belong to twenty different banks. They’d all

cards could belong to twenty different banks. They’d all
have to cooperate with one another to nail down the source.
Additionally, only a few trusted associates knew that
Digits and Iceman were one and the same: mostly admins,
like Chris, a Canadian carder named NightFox, and a new
recruit called Th3C0rrupted0ne.
Of everyone he’d met in the scene, it was
Th3C0rrupted0ne with whom Max seemed to share the
most hacking history. As a teenager, C0rrupted had
discovered the warez scene on dial-up bulletin board
systems, then moved into recreational hacking under the
handles Acid Angel, -null-, and others. He defaced
websites for fun and joined a hacking gang called Ethical
Hackers Against Pedophiles—vigilante gray hats working
against Internet child pornography.
Like Max, he’d once thought of himself as one of the
good guys, before he became Th3C0rrupted0ne.
In other ways, they were very different. A product of a
hardscrabble childhood in a big-city housing project,
C0rrupted became a drug dealer at an early age and
picked up his first arrest—a gun charge—in 1996 when he
was eighteen years old. In college he began making fake
IDs for his friends, and his online research took him to
Fakeid.net, a Web bulletin board where experts like ncXVI
got their start. He graduated to small check and credit card
scams around the time Shadowcrew went down and then
found his way to the successor sites.
Diplomatic and even-tempered, C0rrupted was
universally liked in the scene and enjoyed moderator or
admin privileges on most of the forums. Max promoted him
to admin on Carders Market in the summer of 2005 and
made him unofficial site spokesman after the hostile
takeover. Max let C0rrupted in on his double identity about
a week after his power play.
So obviously I am Digits also. Might as well say it
straight since I blew cover in ICQ (talking about “our
forum,” etc.)

It is a pain in the ass trying to keep that separate
from people I know and trust and like such as yourself.
So there you go …
Anyway, reasoning is, Iceman is legal. Digits is
breaking the law. I assumed if I could keep it separate
there would be no legal leg to stand on for coming after
“me” as the forum admin.
Chris remained the greatest threat to Max’s security.
Every time they fought now, Max was reminded of how
vulnerable he was to the only carder privy to his real-life
identity. “I can’t believe how much you know about me,”
he’d spit out, angry at himself.
Meanwhile, Chris had been trying to drive Max into
pulling one big score, something that would catapult them
both out of the crime business for good and maybe fund a
new legitimate start-up for Chris in Orange County. He’d
crafted a flowchart and a step-by-step plan for each of them
to follow; he called it the “Whiz List.”
Max was supposed to infiltrate banking networks and
gain the power to direct millions of dollars to accounts
specified by Chris. He’d delivered on his end—from the
very start of their partnership, back when he was working
from Chris’s garage, he’d been breaching small banks and
savings and loans. He was in hundreds of them now and
could transfer money out of customers’ accounts at will. But
the scheme was hung up on Chris’s end. Chris had to find a
safe harbor for the money Max would steal—an offshore
repository where they could park the cash without it being
recalled by the victim bank. So far, he’d failed.
So when, in September, Max got his hands on a deadly
new Internet Explorer zero day, he shared the news not with
Chris but with a different partner, one who had more
knowledge of international finance, the Carders Market
admin called NightFox.
The security hole was a monster: another buffer overflow,
this time in the Internet Explorer code designed to let

websites draw vector graphics on a visitor’s screen. Sadly
for Max, Eastern European hackers had found the bug first,
and they’d been using it. A computer security company had
already found the Russian exploit code infecting visitors to
an Internet porn site and sent it to Microsoft. The
Department of Homeland Security had issued a blunt
warning to Internet Explorer users: “Do not follow
unsolicited links.”
The word was out, but there was no patch. Every Internet
Explorer user was vulnerable. Max got his copy of the
Russian exploit in the early morning hours of September 26
and informed NightFox enthusiastically.
“Assume we get a free pass today to own whatever
company we want,” Max wrote over Carders Market’s
messaging system. “There you go. No limits. Visa.com.
Mastercard.com. egold.com. Whatever you can get the
employee e-mails for. Google. Microsoft. Doesn’t matter.
It’s all equally ownable right now.”
Microsoft pushed out a patch later that day, but Max
knew that even the most secure company would take days
or weeks to test and install the update. The Russian exploit
was already detected by antivirus software, so he modified
it to change its signature, running it through his antivirus lab
to verify that it was now undetectable.
The only thing left was the social engineering: Max had to
trick his targets into visiting a website loaded with the
exploit code. Max decided on the domain name
Financialedgenews.com, and set up hosting at ValueWeb.
NightFox came back with the target list: CitiMortage,
GMAC, Experian’s Lowermybills.com, Bank of America,
Western Union MoneyGram, Lending Tree, and Capital
One Financial, one of the largest credit card issuers in the
country. NightFox had vast databases of internal corporate
e-mail addresses he’d acquired from a “competitive
intelligence” firm, and he sent Max thousands of them,
spread across all the targets.

On September 29, Max fired up his spamming software
and flung a personalized e-mail at his victims. The
message was from “Gordon Reily,” with the return address
g.reily@lendingnewsgroup.com.
I am a reporter for Lending News doing a follow up
story on the recent leak of customer records from
Capital One. I saw the name Mary Rheingold in the
article from Financial Edge and would like to interview
you for a follow up piece.
http://financialedgenews.com/news/09/29/Disclosure_Capital0ne
If you have time I would greatly appreciate an
opportunity to further discuss the details of the above
article.
Each copy of the message was customized, so every
employee would think he or she was mentioned by name in
the notional Financial Edge article. At Capital One, 500
employees got the message, from executives to PR
spokespeople and IT workers. About 125 of them clicked
on the poisoned link and were sent to a page loaded with
generic finance industry news. While they puzzled over the
page, a hidden payload zipped through the corporate
firewall and onto their machines.
The software opened a back door that would allow Max
to slip in at his leisure and scour the victims’ hard drives for
sensitive data, sniff the banks’ internal networks, steal
passwords. It wasn’t much different from what he’d done to
thousands of Defense Department computers a lifetime
ago. Back when it was all just fun and games.

27

Web War One
eith Mularski stood at the podium, his PowerPoint
presentation filling an LCD big-screen at his back. In front
of him were fifteen senior FBI officials and Justice
Department lawyers, sitting around the conference room
table at Justice headquarters. They were riveted. Mularski
was proposing something that had never been done
before.
Group I “sensitive circumstances” authorizations were a
rare thing in the bureau. Mularski first wrote out a twenty-
page proposal, addressing every aspect of the plan and
gathering legal opinions from FBI lawyers for each. The
FBI’s general counsel was excited about the possibilities; if
it were approved, the operation could set a precedent for
future online undercover work.
The biggest obstacle for the Justice Department’s
Undercover Review Committee was the third-party liability
issue of letting crimes unfold over a website owned and
operated by the U.S. government. How would Mularski
mitigate the damage so innocent people and institutions
wouldn’t suffer? Mularski had an answer at the ready. The
criminal activity on DarkMarket was going to take place
whether the FBI ran the forum or not. But with the bureau
controlling the server, and Master Splyntr leading the site,
the FBI could potentially intercept large amounts of stolen
data that would otherwise flow freely through the black
market. His proposal stipulated that any financial data
would be sent immediately to the affected banks. Stolen
credit cards could be canceled before they were used.
The meeting lasted twenty minutes. When he returned to

Pittsburgh on October 7, Mularski had written approval to
acquire DarkMarket. Iceman was still listed as a subject of
the undercover operation, but now JiLsi and DarkMarket’s
other leaders were the primary targets.
Once his wife went to bed, Mularski settled in front of his
couch, turned on Saturday Night Live, and looked for JiLsi
on ICQ. After some pleasantries, he got down to business.
DarkMarket was under yet another DDoS attack, and
Mularski, as Master Splyntr, was ready to take the site onto
a secure server—JiLsi need only say the word, and his
problems with Iceman would be history.
JiLsi had some reservations. DarkMarket was his baby,
and he didn’t want to be perceived by the community as
ceding control. That wouldn’t be a problem, Mularski
explained. Master Splyntr would be a stealth administrator.
Nobody but he and JiLsi would know he was running the
site. To everyone else, he’d still just be a moderator.
“Bro,” JiLsi typed back. “Get your server ready. We
moving.”
Mularski went to work at once. He rented a server from a
Texas-based hosting company called the Planet and went
to the underground to shore it up, buying $500-a-month
DDoS protection services from a Russian named
Quazatron and paying for it in e-gold. Quazatron configured
the site so its public face was at Staminus, a DDoS-
resistant high-bandwidth hosting company. The company’s
pipes could withstand a deluge, and Quazatron’s software
would channel only the legitimate traffic to DarkMarket’s
real server behind the scenes.
Everything would be done the way an Eastern European
cybercrook would do it. When Mularski wanted to log in to
the site’s back end, he’d go through KIRE, a Virginia
company offering Linux “shell accounts”—a service that lets
IRC users connect to chat rooms without being traced to
their home IP addresses. Nobody would see that the Polish
spam king was logging in from Pittsburgh.

Once the move was complete, Mularski went to court and
won a sealed search warrant against his own server,
allowing him to riffle through DarkMarket’s user database,
access logs, and private messages.
There was one more thing to do. Post-Shadowcrew, it
was de rigueur for carder forums to make users click on a
terms-of-service agreement prohibiting illegal content and
stipulating that the site’s operators weren’t responsible for
anything on the board. Forum runners believed the
legalistic language might shield them from prosecution.
DarkMarket had a particularly long and detailed user
agreement, so nobody noticed when Master Splyntr added
a line.
“By your use of this forum you agree that the
administrators may review any communication sent using
this forum to ensure compliance with this policy,” he wrote,
“or for any other purpose.”
“I think it’s important to note that Iceman is a foolish
wannabe hacker who goes around and hacks sites for fun
and pleasure.”
El Mariachi knew how to push Iceman’s buttons. After the
hostile takeover, Dave Thomas returned to the Life on the
Road blog to browbeat his foe relentlessly, calling him
“Iceboy,” “Officer Ice,” and “a fucking piece of shit on my
shoes.” He challenged Iceman to meet him in person, so
they could resolve their dispute like men. And he implied he
could hire a hit man to track down the carding kingpin and
end his life.
Max responded with growing fury. He hadn’t forgotten the
hassle and expense of finding a new host after Thomas
shut him down in Florida. The aggressiveness he’d kept
buried since Boise boiled from his gut and into his
fingertips. “You small dick limp sack of shit. I could fucking
tear you apart with my bare hands but a COWARD snitch
like yourself would call the cops and scramble for a weapon

at the first sight of me,” he wrote. “You better pray to your
god that I am never outed, because not only will you look
like even more of a jackass than you already do, but then I
will have no inhibition about coming over and wringing your
snitch punk neck.”
When he calmed down, he sent Thomas a private e-mail.
He’d been thinking about taking down Carders Market and
retiring his Iceman identity. It wouldn’t be a surrender;
rather, it was the most serious threat imaginable to
Thomas’s campaign.
You haven’t read the Art of War, have you, cunt?
You know NOTHING about me. I know EVERYTHING
about you.
I kill CM, I kill Iceman, then what do you have you
punk bitch? Shadowboxing?? You are FUCKED. An
enemy who will fuck you over constantly for years, that
you have NO DEFENSE and NO TARGET for
retribution.
I am your worst nightmare you little bitch, and you
and your family will be feeling the effects of the money
you cost me for a long, long time.
Two days later, Max proved he was serious. He hacked
into El Mariachi’s website, the Grifters, which Thomas had
turned into a semi-legitimate security site dedicated to
watching the carding forums. Max wiped the hard drive. The
site never came back.
Iceman announced his triumph in a final public message
to the blog. “I have nothing to prove, and now having beat
down David Renshaw Thomas, federal snitch, I make my
exit,” he wrote. “Unlike you people, I pay attention to my own
business. Learn a lesson. Move on and leave me the fuck
alone.”
But Max wasn’t going to be able to slip back into the
shadows. Two reporters from USA Today had taken notice
of the public carder war and confirmed the details of the

hostile takeover with security firms watching the forums.
The morning after Max declared victory over El Mariachi,
delivery drivers around the country plunked down
Thursday’s edition of the paper on more than two million
doorsteps from coast to coast. There, on the front page of
the business section, was the whole sordid tale of Iceman’s
annexation of the carding sites.
By letting his ego lead him into a public battle with David
Thomas, Max had gotten Iceman into the largest-circulation
daily in America.
“The Secret Service and FBI declined to comment on
Iceman or the takeovers,” the article read. “Even so, the
activities of this mystery figure illustrate the rising threat that
cybercrime’s relentless expansion—enabled in large part
by the existence of forums—poses for us all.”
The story wasn’t a surprise; the reporters had
approached Iceman for comment, and Max had e-mailed a
long one, lobbing his Craigslist defense. His views didn’t
make it into the article, and the story only made Max more
defiant. He added a quote from the piece to the top of the
Carders Market login page: “It’s like he created the Wal-
Mart of the underground.”
Max showed the article to Charity. “I seem to have
created quite a stir.”
Chris was apoplectic when he learned that Max had
corresponded with the journalists. He’d watched as Max
burned hours squabbling with Thomas. Now his partner
was giving press interviews?
“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” he said.
Max was swamped. Vouch requests were pouring into
Carders Market in a torrent. The USA Today article
seemed to bring out every street-level hood hoping to
break into computer fraud. The site picked up over three
hundred new members overnight. Two weeks later, they
were still coming in.

He offloaded as much of the work as he could to his
admins. Max had other things to worry about now. His
spear-phishing attack against the financial institutions had
been wildly successful, but getting past the banks’ firewalls
had turned out to be the easy part. Bank of America and
Capital One, in particular, were huge institutions, and Max
was lost in their vast networks. He could easily spend years
on either one, just looking for the data and the access he
needed to make a big score. Max was having trouble
staying motivated for the mind-numbing follow-through to
his intrusions; cracking the networks had been the fun part,
and now that was over.
Instead, Max put the banks on the back burner to focus
on the carding war. Max’s new hosting provider was getting
complaints about the rampant criminality on Carders
Market. Max saw one of the e-mails, sent from an
anonymous webmail account. On a hunch, Max tried
logging in to the account with JiLsi’s password. It worked.
JiLsi was trying to get him shut down.
Max retaliated by hacking into JiLsi’s account on the
Russian forum Mazafaka and posting an avalanche of
messages reading, simply, “I’m a fed.” Then he went public
with the evidence of JiLsi’s malfeasance; snitching to
Carders Market’s hosting company was a scummy tactic.
DarkMarket just didn’t have the decency to die. Max
could have dropped the database again, but it would do no
good—the site had come back before. His DDoS attacks
had become ineffective, too. Overnight, DarkMarket had
come into expensive high-bandwidth hosting and erected
dedicated e-mail and database servers. It was suddenly a
hard target.
Then Max heard an intriguing rumor about DarkMarket.
The story involved Silo, a Canadian hacker known for an
uncanny ability to juggle dozens of false handles in the
community, effortlessly switching writing styles and
personalities for each one. Silo’s second claim to fame
was his compulsive back-dooring of other carders. He was

was his compulsive back-dooring of other carders. He was
constantly posting software with hidden code that would let
him spy on his peers.
Both traits were at play when Silo registered an account
at DarkMarket under a new handle and submitted a piece
of hacking software for vendor review. True to form, Silo
had secreted a hidden function in the software that would
smuggle a user’s files out to one of Silo’s servers.
When Silo looked at the results, he found a small cache
of blank Microsoft Word templates, including a “malware
report” form. The templates carried the logo for an
organization called the National Cyber Forensics and
Training Alliance in Pittsburgh. Max looked them up; it was
a fed shop. Someone connected with DarkMarket was
working for the government.
Determined to investigate, Max breached DarkMarket
again through his back door. This time, it was a
reconnaissance mission. He dropped into a root shell and
entered a command to bring up the recent login history and
then started down the list in another window, checking the
public registration records for each of the Internet IP
addresses used by the administrators. When he got to
Master Splyntr, he stopped. The supposedly Polish
spammer had connected from an IP address belonging to
a private corporation in the United States called
Pembrooke Associates.
He pulled up the Whois.net registration records for the
company’s website, Pembetal.com. The mailing address
listed was a PO box in Warrendale, Pennsylvania, twenty
miles north of Pittsburgh. There was also a phone number.
Another click of his mouse, another browser window—
the reverse white pages at Anywho.com. He entered the
phone number and this time got a real street address: 2000
Technology Drive, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
It was the address he’d already found for the National
Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance. Master Splyntr was
a fed.

28

Carder Court
eith Mularski was screwed.
He got the word first from an agent at the Secret Service
field office across town. “I think you may be in some
trouble.” One of their myriad informants heard that Iceman
had uncovered incontrovertible proof that Master Splyntr
was either a snitch, a corporate security spy, or a federal
agent. Iceman had forged a temporary alliance with his
sometime enemy Silo and was preparing a comprehensive
presentation for the leadership of Carders Market and
DarkMarket. Iceman and Silo were going to put Master
Splyntr on trial.
It had begun with Silo’s code. Master Splyntr’s reputation
as a spammer and programmer made him DarkMarket’s
go-to guy for malware reviews. It was one of the perks of
his undercover operation: Mularski got the first look at the
underground’s latest attack code and could pass it to
CERT, who would in turn give it to all the antivirus
companies. The malicious code would be detectable even
before it went on the black market.
This time, Mularski had assigned the code as a training
exercise to one of the CMU students interning at NCFTA.
As standard procedure, the student ran the program
isolated in a virtual machine—a kind of software petri dish
that could be scrubbed afterward. But he forgot that he had
a thumb drive in the USB port. The drive was loaded with
blank malware report forms containing the NCFTA logo
and mission statement. Before the intern realized what was
happening, the documents were in Silo’s hands.
Six DarkMarket admins and moderators had gotten a

copy of Silo’s code. Now the Canadian knew that one of
them was a fed.
Silo was a wild card. In real life, he was Lloyd Liske, a
Vancouver auto shop manager and credit card forger
who’d been busted a few months after Operation Firewall.
When he was sentenced to eighteen months of house
arrest, Liske changed his surname from Buckell and his
handle from Canucka, and reemerged in the carding
scene.
Now the Canadian was untouchable. It was widely known
in law enforcement circles that Silo was an informant for the
Vancouver Police Department. That’s why he was always
back-dooring other hackers: The Trojan horse that
infiltrated NCFTA wouldn’t have been intended to expose a
law enforcement operation; it was just Silo trying to gather
intelligence on DarkMarket members for the police.
Silo had no allegiance to the FBI, but he probably
wouldn’t have gone out of his way to expose a bureau
undercover operation. Unfortunately, Iceman had learned
about the discovery and staged his reconnaissance raid on
DarkMarket. That’s where Mularski’s own personal
screwup came into play. He normally logged in to
DarkMarket through his KIRE shell, hiding his location. But
JiLsi was a demanding boss, constantly hitting Master
Splyntr with maintenance tasks—like swapping in a new
banner ad—that simply had to be performed at once.
Sometimes KIRE was down when Mularski got one of
these requests, and he’d take a shortcut and log in directly.
Iceman had caught him.
Even then, he should have been relatively safe. The office
broadband service was set up under the name of a dummy
corporation, with a phone number that rang to an
unanswered VoIP line in the communications room. The
phone line was supposed to be unlisted. Somehow, though,
it wasn’t, and Iceman had gotten the address and
recognized it as the NCFTA’s.
Mularski walked hurriedly to the communications room,

Mularski walked hurriedly to the communications room,
swiped his access card, keyed in the door code, and
locked himself inside. He picked up the secure line to
Washington. The FBI agent didn’t sugarcoat his report to
the brass. After all his work winning undercover authority to
take over DarkMarket, getting a buy-in from senior Justice
Department and bureau officials, Iceman was going to blow
them out of the water just three weeks into the operation.
Max struggled with how to handle the exposé—after his
attacks on DarkMarket, he knew his findings would be
viewed as partisan mudslinging. He considered shuttering
Carders Market before exposing Master Splyntr, to avoid
the perception that the whole thing was just another volley in
the carding wars. Instead, he decided to send his new
lieutenant, Th3C0rrupted0ne, to represent his site.
The trial was held over Silo’s “Carder IM”—a free,
supposedly encrypted instant messaging program the
Canadian hacker offered as an alternative to AIM and ICQ,
supported by display ads for dumps vendors. Matrix001
showed up from the DarkMarket side—JiLsi was busy with
the fallout from Max’s attack on Mazafaka. Silo and two
other Canadian carders were also present. Silo opened the
meeting by handing out a compressed RAR file containing
the evidence gathered by him and Iceman.
When some of the carders opened the file, their antivirus
software went wild. Silo had back-doored the evidence; not
a promising start to a summit meeting.
C0rrupted and Silo walked them through the case: Silo’s
document templates showed that someone at NCFTA held
a privileged position on DarkMarket, and the access logs
Iceman had stolen proved that Master Splyntr was the mole.
“One hundred percent undeniable proof,” wrote
C0rrupted. “We worked hard to try and make peace, and if
we go public LE [law enforcement] is going to come after
us HARD. But if we don’t say anything, we are responsible
for all those who get fucked over.”

“This is for real dude,” said Silo.
Matrix was unconvinced. He ran his own Whois on the
Pembrooke Associates domain name and got back an
anonymous listing through Domains by Proxy: no street
address, no phone number. “Blah,” Matrix typed. “You did
not even verify the whois info and the company, did you?
Who passed you that stuff?”
“That’s not my stuff,” wrote Silo. “That’s Iceman.”
“So you believe every shit which is pasted to you?
Without even verifying it?”
Silo’s evidence was no more convincing to Matrix: The
NCFTA templates contained spelling and formatting errors
—would the FBI, or a nonprofit security group, really do
such shoddy work? Moreover, Iceman’s contempt for
DarkMarket was well-known, and Silo was a constant
annoyance on the board.
The conversation grew heated. C0rrupted dropped out,
and the others fell silent while Silo and Matrix began
exchanging insults. “What in the whole world should make
me trust you?” asked Matrix.
“Don’t,” Silo finally said. “Don’t trust me. Get the fuck off
my IM … Go get busted.”
Mularski was excluded from the meeting, but when it
concluded, Matrix sent Master Spyntr a transcript. The
agent was pleased to see his last-minute cleanup had
worked: As soon as he’d learned about Iceman’s plans to
expose him, he’d contacted the domain registrar and got
the company to scrub the Pembrooke Associates name
and phone number from the records. Then he asked
Anywho to take out its listing for the undercover phone line.
The cover-up was sure to convince Iceman all the more that
Master Splyntr was a fed, but nobody else was able to
independently verify his findings.
Now Mularski went into spin control over ICQ. He told
Matrix and anyone else who’d listen that he was innocent.
He directed the carders’ attention to the logs, highlighting
all the occasions he’d logged in from KIRE’s IP address.

all the occasions he’d logged in from KIRE’s IP address.
Those are my logins, he wrote. I don’t know who those other
logins are.
Then he spun and attacked. The doubt Iceman had sown
about JiLsi worked to his advantage. Things were going
crazy, he wrote. JiLsi had been acting suspiciously. For
one thing, he’d instructed Master Splyntr not to tell anyone
that he was running the server. And while JiLsi cultivated
the impression that DarkMarket was hosted in a country out
of reach of western law enforcement, he was actually
hosting it in Tampa, Florida, where the feds could just waltz
in any time and serve a search warrant. It was odd behavior
indeed.
JiLsi protested his innocence, but it was looking bad for
him. Master Splyntr publicly thanked Iceman for bringing the
matter to his attention and said he’d move DarkMarket out
of the United States at once.
Mularski reached out to law enforcement contacts in
Ukraine, and they helped him quickly get hosting there. In
the blink of an eye, DarkMarket was in Eastern Europe.
Most of the carders had to agree that no fed would move a
sting site to a former Soviet state.
There was no formal verdict, but a consensus formed that
Master Splyntr was innocent. They weren’t too sure about
JiLsi.
When the controversy subsided, Mularski returned to the
routine business of running his undercover operation. He
was at his desk filling out reports a couple of weeks later
when he got a call from another agent.
Special Agent Michael Schuler was a legend among the
bureau’s cybercrime agents. It was he who’d hacked into
the Russians’ computers in the Invita sting. Now stationed
in the Richmond, Virginia, field office, Schuler was calling
about a breach at nearby Capital One. The bank’s security
officials had detected an attack using an Internet Explorer
exploit. They’d sent Schuler a copy of the code, and he

wanted Mularski to get one of the NCFTA’s geeks to take a
look at it.
Mularski listened as Schuler described his investigation
to date. He’d focused on the fake news website,
Financialedgenews.com, used to deliver the malware. The
domain was registered to a false identity in Georgia. But
when the registrar, Go Daddy, checked its records, it found
the same user had once registered another address
through the company.
Cardersmarket.com.
Mularski recognized the significance at once. Iceman
positioned himself as the innocent operator of a website
that happened to discuss illegal activity. Now Schuler had
evidence that he was also a profit-oriented hacker, one
who’d broken into the network of the fifth-largest credit card
issuer in America. “Dude, you got the case!” Mularski
laughed. “You got the case right now on the guy we were
just trying to target on our Group II. We’ve got to work
together on this.”
Across town, Secret Service agents at the Pittsburgh
field office had made a discovery of their own about
Iceman: An informant tipped them off that Carders Market’s
kingpin had a second identity as the dumps vendor Digits.
Four days after the USA Today article, the agents
exploited that knowledge by having a second snitch make a
controlled buy from Digits: twenty-three dumps for $480 in
e-gold.
It was more than they needed for a felony charge.

29

One Plat and Six Classics
eith Mularski hadn’t known what he was in for when he
took over DarkMarket.
His days were crazy now. He’d start at eight in the
morning, logging in to his undercover computer at the office
and checking for overnight ICQ messages—any urgent
business for Master Splyntr. Then he’d hit DarkMarket and
make sure it was up and running. It was always hit-or-miss
with Iceman on the loose.
Next came the drudgery of backing up the SQL
database. Iceman had somehow dropped the tables twice
since his failed attempt to expose Mularski, so now the
backups were a part of Mularski’s morning routine. They
served an investigative function as well: While the database
was being copied, a simple script authored by an NCFTA
coder scanned every line for sixteen-digit numbers
beginning with the numerals 3 through 6. The stolen credit
card numbers would be automatically sorted by BIN and
sent to the proper banks for immediate cancellation.
Next, Mularski had to review all the private messages,
pick out the interesting chats, and check them into the FBI’s
central ELSUR electronic surveillance database. An hour or
two of report writing followed. As Master Splyntr, Mularski
had begun his own modest cash-out operation. Some
banks had agreed to issue him disposable dumps as bait,
with fake names but real lines of credit that the FBI would
cover out of its investigative budget. Mularski handed them
out with PINs to carders around the country, while the
financial institutions reported back daily on where and when
each withdrawal took place. Mularski had to pass the

information to the local agents in whatever city his cashers
were operating from, which meant writing up a detailed
memo each time.
At three, when the carders came online in force,
Mularski’s second life shifted into high gear. Everyone
wanted something from Master Splyntr. There were
disputes to settle, like a dumps vendor complaining that his
ad wasn’t displayed as prominently as a competitor’s, or a
vendor facing accusations of ripping off a customer.
Beggars approached him asking for free dumps or
spamming services.
Mularski went home at the end of the day, only to log on
again. Keeping his credibility as Master Splyntr meant he
had to work the same hours as a real carder, so every night
saw Mularski on the sofa at home, the television turned to
whatever was on, his laptop open and online. He was on
DarkMarket, and AIM, and ICQ, answering questions,
assigning reviewers, approving vendors, and banning
rippers. He stayed online and in character until two in the
morning, nearly every day, dealing with the underground.
To ingratiate himself to his primary targets, he’d give
them gifts or sell them discounted merchandise,
supposedly purchased with stolen credit cards but actually
paid for by the bureau. Cha0, a Turkish crime boss and
DarkMarket admin, coveted an $800 lightweight PC sold in
the States, so Mularski shipped two of them off to Cha0’s
drop address in Turkey. Playing Santa Claus was in his job
description now: He had to appear to be running ops and
making money, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to spam
anyone.
Being a cybercrime boss, he was discovering, was hard
work.
When he traveled or vacationed, he had to let the forum
know in advance—even a brief unexplained absence would
invite suspicion that he’d been busted and turned. In
January 2007, he let the board know that he’d be on a
plane for a while. He didn’t say where or why. He was going

plane for a while. He didn’t say where or why. He was going
to Germany to talk with prosecutors about DarkMarket’s
cofounder Matrix001.
Among other things, Matrix001 was DarkMarket’s
resident artist par excellence. He created and sold
Photoshop templates used by forgers to produce credit
cards or fake ID. He had them all: Visa, MasterCard,
American Express, Discover, the U.S. Social Security card,
notary seals, and driver’s licenses for several states. His
template for an American passport sold for $45. A Bank
One Visa was $125.
Matrix001 and Master Splyntr had grown tight since the
attempted exposé three months earlier: Mularski and the
German both liked video games, and they chatted about
the latest titles well into the night. They talked business, too,
and Matrix001 had confided that he received wire transfers
for some of his sales in the town of Eislingen in southern
Germany. That was the first clue to tracking him down.
From there, it was a matter of following the money. Like
virtually all carders, Matrix preferred to be paid by e-gold,
an electronic payment system created by a former Florida
oncologist named Douglas Jackson in 1996. A competitor
to PayPal, e-gold was the first virtual currency backed by
deposits of actual gold and silver bullion held in bank vaults
in London and Dubai.
It had been Jackson’s dream to forge a true international
monetary system independent of any government.
Criminals loved it. Unlike a real bank, e-gold took no
measures to verify the identity of its users—account holders
included “Mickey Mouse” and “No Name.” To get money in
or out of e-gold, users availed themselves of any of
hundreds of independent e-gold exchangers around the
world, businesses that would accept bank transfers,
anonymous money orders, or even cash in hand and
convert it to e-gold for a cut. Exchangers took another slice
when a user wanted to convert in the other direction,
changing the virtual money into the local currency or

receiving it by Western Union, PayPal, or wire transfer. One
company even offered a preloaded ATM card—the “G-
Card”—that would let account holders withdraw their e-gold
from any cash machine.
By all evidence, criminals were e-gold’s bread and
butter. By December 2005, the company’s internal
investigations had identified more than three thousand
accounts involved in carding, another three thousand used
for buying and selling child porn, and thirteen thousand
accounts linked to various investment scams. They were
easy enough to spot: the “memo” field in child porn
transactions would read, for example, “Lolita”; in Ponzi
schemes, “HYIP,” for “high-yield investment program.”
Carders included shorthand descriptions of what they were
buying: “For 3 IDs”; “for dumps”; “10 classics”; “Fame’s
dumps”; “10 M/C”; “one plat and six classics”; “20
vclassics”; “18 ssns”; “10 AZIDs”; “4 v classics”; “four
cvv2s”; “for 150 classics.”
For a long time, e-gold largely turned a blind eye to the
criminal trade; employees locked down some accounts
used by child porn sellers but didn’t stop them from
transferring out their money. But the company’s attitude
changed dramatically in December 2005, when FBI and
Secret Service agents executed a search warrant at e-
gold’s Melbourne, Florida, offices and accused Jackson of
running an unlicensed money transfer service.
Jackson began voluntarily searching his database for
signs of criminality and sending tips to the only agency that
wasn’t trying to put him in jail, the U.S. Postal Inspection
Service. His newfound commitment to law and order was a
boon to Mularski. Through Greg Crabb and his team at the
post office, Mularski asked Jackson for information about
Matrix001’s e-gold account, which was under the alias
“Ling Ching.” When Jackson looked in his database, he
found that the account had originally been set up under
another name: Markus Kellerer, with a street address in
Eislingen. In November, Mularski sent a formal request for

Eislingen. In November, Mularski sent a formal request for
assistance to the German national police through the U.S.
consulate in Frankfurt. The police confirmed that Kellerer
was a real person and not just another alias, and Mularski
booked his flight to Stuttgart.
Matrix001 would be the first arrest from the DarkMarket
sting. Mularski would have to find someone else to chat
with about video games.
• • •
Once he was back in Pittsburgh, Mularski began working a
new, farfetched theory about Iceman. He’d been running
down every “Iceman” he could find—there’d been an
Iceman on Shadowcrew and others on IRC. They always
turned out to be red herrings. Now Mularski was toying with
the idea that his Iceman didn’t really exist.
It was Iceman’s supposed collaboration with the
Canadian informant Lloyd “Silo” Liske that intrigued him.
Silo had worked with Iceman to try to expose Mularski.
That, in itself, didn’t mean much—informants often call out
suspected cops and snitches to deflect suspicion from
themselves. But Silo had told his handler at the Vancouver
Police Department that he’d hacked Iceman’s computer,
yet when push came to shove, he couldn’t produce
Iceman’s real name or even a good Internet IP address.
And it turned out that Silo had dozens of e-gold accounts—
one of them under the name “Keyser Söze.”
If Liske was a fan of The Usual Suspects, it might occur
to him to create a phantom criminal mastermind and then
feed law enforcement false information about the supposed
kingpin in his role as an informant.
Mularski flew to Washington and presented his theory to
the Secret Service at their headquarters. It was shot down
at once. They were working closely with Silo’s handler at
the Vancouver Police Department, and they knew Silo as
one of the good guys.
The Secret Service had run down some false leads

themselves. In a lab in the Pittsburgh field office, the agents
had a whiteboard scrawled with handles and names
connected by squiggles and lines. Many of the names were
crossed out. It was their ever-changing road map to Iceman
and his world.
Mularski returned to Pittsburgh, and both agencies
resumed their search for the real Keyser Söze of the
cyberworld—the elusive hacking kingpin Iceman.

30

Maksik
ax could see what was coming. With an FBI agent at
the helm, DarkMarket was going to put a lot of carders in
prison. But like Cassandra from Greek mythology, he was
cursed to know the future and have nobody believe him.
Between the USA Today article and his failed attempt to
expose Master Splyntr, Max could feel the heat coming at
him. In November, he declared Iceman’s retirement and
made a show of handing control of the site to
Th3C0rrupted0ne. He secluded himself while things cooled
down and three weeks later took back the board under
another handle. Iceman was dead; long live “Aphex.”
Max was getting tired of the tight quarters at the Post
Street Towers, so Chris brought Nancy, one of his cashers,
up to San Francisco to rent Max a one-bedroom at
Archstone’s towering Fox Plaza corporate apartment
complex in the financial district. She posed as a sales
representative at Capital Solutions, a corporate front
Aragon used to launder some of his income. Tea, back
from her trip to Mongolia, was conscripted to sit in the
apartment and accept delivery of a bed, paid for with her
legitimate American Express card. Chris reimbursed her
afterward.
By January 2007, Max was back in business at his new
safe house, with a stew of Wi-Fi brewing outside. Fox
Plaza was a giant step up in luxury from the Post Street
Towers, but Max could afford it—he could pay a month’s
rent with a couple of good days of dumps vending. As
Digits, Max was now regarded by some carders as the
second-most-successful magstripe vendor in the world.

The number one spot was firmly occupied by a Ukrainian
known as Maksik. Maksik operated outside the carding
forums, running his own Web-based dispensary for his
stolen cards at Maksik.cc. Buyers would begin by sending
Maksik upfront money by e-gold, WebMoney, wire transfer,
or Western Union. That would buy them access to his
website, where they could select the dumps they wanted by
BIN and type of card and place an order. On his end,
Maksik would press a button to approve the transaction,
and the buyer would get an e-mail with the dumps he’d
ordered, straight from Maksik’s massive database of
stolen cards.
Maksik’s wares were phenomenal, with a high success
rate at the register and a mammoth selection of BINs. Like
Max’s, Maksik’s cards came from swipes at point-of-sale
terminals. But instead of targeting scores of small stores
and restaurants, Maksik got his cards from a smaller
number of giant targets: Polo Ralph Lauren in 2004; Office
Max in 2005. In three months, Discount Shoe Warehouse
lost 1.4 million cards taken from 108 stores in 25 states—
straight into Maksik’s database. In July 2005, a record-
breaking 45.6 million dumps were stolen from the TJX-
owned retail chains T. J. Maxx, Marshalls, and
HomeGoods.
There was a time when such breaches might have
remained a secret between the hackers, the companies,
and federal law enforcement—with the victim consumers
kept in the dark. To encourage companies to report
breaches, some FBI agents had an unofficial policy of
keeping company names out of indictments and press
releases, protecting corporations from bad publicity over
their shoddy security. In the 1997 Carlos Salgado Jr. case
—the first large-scale online credit card heist—the
government persuaded the sentencing judge to
permanently seal the court transcripts, for fear the targeted
company would suffer “loss of business due to the
perception by others that computer systems may be

perception by others that computer systems may be
vulnerable.” Consequently, the eighty thousand victims were
never notified that their names, addresses, and credit card
numbers had been offered for sale on IRC.
In 2003, the state of California effectively ended such
cover-ups when the legislature enacted SB1386, the
nation’s first compulsory breach-disclosure law. The law
requires hacked organizations doing business in the
Golden State to promptly warn potential identity theft
victims of a breach. In the years that followed, forty-five
other states passed similar legislation. Now no significant
breach of consumer data remains a secret for long, once
detected by the company and the banks.
The headlines over the giant retail breaches only added
luster to Maksik’s product—he didn’t try to hide the fact that
he was vending the dumps from the retail chains. When the
TJX attack made news in January 2007, the details that
emerged also confirmed what many carders already
suspected: the Ukrainian had a stateside hacker supplying
him with dumps. Maksik was a middleman for a mystery
hacker in the States.
In mid-2006, the hacker was apparently in Miami, where
he parked at two TJX-owned Marshalls outlets and cracked
the stores’ Wi-Fi encryption. From there, he hopped on the
local network and swam upstream to the corporate
headquarters, where he launched a packet sniffer to
capture credit card transactions live from the Marshalls, T.
J. Maxx, and HomeGoods stores around the country. The
sniffer, an investigation would later find, ran undetected for
seven months.
Max had a rival in America, and a damn good one.
Thanks in large part to Maksik’s hacker and Max Vision,
the popular consumer impression that Web transactions
were less secure than real-life purchases was now
completely false. In 2007, the majority of compromised
cards were stolen from brick-and-mortar retailers and
restaurants. The large retail intrusions were compromising

millions of cards at a time, but breaches at smaller
merchants were far more common—Visa’s analysis found
83 percent of credit card breaches were at merchants
processing one million Visa transactions or less annually,
with the majority of thefts taking place at restaurants.
Max tried to keep the sources of his dumps a secret,
falsely claiming in his forum posts that the data came from
credit card processing centers to throw investigators off
track. But Visa knew that restaurant point-of-sale terminals
were being hit hard. In November 2006, the company
issued a bulletin to the food service industry warning about
hack attacks unfolding through VNC and other remote-
access software. Max, though, continued to find a steady
stream of vulnerable eateries.
But for Max, it wasn’t enough. He hadn’t gone into the
data-theft business to be second-best. Maksik was costing
him money. Even Chris was now buying from both Maksik
and Max, going with whichever vendor offered him a good
deal on the best dumps.
At Max’s direction, Tea befriended the Ukrainian over the
course of months and urged him to start vending on
Carders Market. Maksik declined graciously and
suggested she visit him sometime in Ukraine. Rebuffed,
Max took the gloves off and got Tea to send Maksik a
Trojan horse program, hoping to get control of the
Ukranian’s database of dumps. Maksik laughed off the
hacking attempt.
If he’d known, Max might have taken comfort in the fact
that he wasn’t the only one frustrated by Maksik’s tight
security.
Federal law enforcement had been tracking Maksik
since his rise to infamy in the wake of Operation Firewall.
An undercover Secret Service agent had been buying
dumps from him. Postal Inspector Greg Crabb had worked
with law enforcement in Europe to bust carders who’d done
business with Maksik, and he shared the resulting
information with the Ukrainian national police. In early 2006,

information with the Ukrainian national police. In early 2006,
the Ukranians finally identified Maksik as one Maksym
Yastremski, from Kharkov. But they didn’t have enough
evidence to make an arrest.
The United States refocused on identifying Maksik’s
hacking source. E-gold once again provided the entry
point. The Secret Service analyzed Maksik’s accounts in
the e-gold database and found that between February and
May 2006, Maksik had transferred $410,750 out of his
account to “Segvec,” a Mazafaka dumps vendor generally
thought to be in Eastern Europe. An outward transfer
implied Segvec wasn’t one of Maksik’s customers but a
supplier getting his cut.
The feds got a chance at more direct information in June
2006, when Maksik was vacationing in Dubai. Secret
Service agents from San Diego worked with local police to
execute a “sneak-and-peek” in his room, where they
secretly copied his hard drive for analysis. But it was a
dead end. The sensitive material on the drive was all
encrypted with a program called Pretty Good Privacy. It
was good enough to stop the Secret Service in its tracks.
Carders like Maksik and Max were at the fore in embracing
one of the unheralded gifts of the computer revolution:
cryptography software so strong that, in theory, even the
NSA couldn’t crack it.
In the 1990s the Justice Department and Louis Freeh’s
FBI had tried hard to make such encryption illegal in the
United States, fearing that it would be embraced by
organized crime, pedophiles, terrorists, and hackers. It was
a doomed effort. American mathematicians had decades
before developed and published high-security encryption
algorithms that rivaled the government’s own classified
systems; the genie was out of the bottle. In 1991, a U.S.
programmer and activist named Phil Zimmerman had
released the free software Pretty Good Privacy, which was
available on the Web.

But that didn’t stop law enforcement and intelligence
officials from trying. In 1993, the Clinton administration
began producing the so-called Clipper Chip, an NSA-
developed encryption chip intended for use in computers
and telephones and designed with a “key recovery” feature
that would allow the government to crack the crypto on
demand, with the proper legal authority. The chip was a
dismal failure in the marketplace, and the project was dead
by 1996.
Then lawmakers began swinging the opposite direction,
talking about repealing Cold War–era export regulations
that classified strong encryption as a “munition” generally
prohibited from export. The regulations were forcing
technology companies to keep strong crypto out of key
Internet software, weakening online security; meanwhile,
overseas companies weren’t bound by the laws and were
in position to overtake America in the encryption market.
The feds responded with a draconian counterproposal
that would have made it a five-year felony to sell any
encryption software in America that lacked a back door for
law enforcement and government spies. In testimony to a
House subcommittee in 1997, a Justice Department lawyer
warned that hackers would be a prime customer of legal
encryption and used the Carlos Salgado bust to illustrate
his point. Salgado had encrypted the CD-ROM containing
the eighty thousand stolen credit card numbers. The FBI
had only been able to access it because the hacker gave
his supposed buyer the key.
“We were lucky in this case, because Salgado’s
purchaser was cooperating with the FBI,” the official
testified. “But if we had discovered this case another way,
law enforcement could not have penetrated the information
on Salgado’s CD-ROM. Crimes like this one have serious
implications for law enforcement’s ability to protect
commercial data as well as personal privacy.”
But the feds lost the crypto wars, and by 2005
unbreakable crypto was widely available to anyone who

unbreakable crypto was widely available to anyone who
wanted it. The predictions of doom had largely failed to
materialize; most criminals weren’t tech-savvy enough to
adopt encryption.
Max, though, was. If all his tradecraft failed and the feds
crashed through his safe house door, they’d find everything
he accumulated in his crimes, from credit card numbers to
hacking code, scrambled with an Israeli-made encryption
program called DriveCrypt—1,344-bit military-grade crypto
he’d purchased for about $60.
The government would arrest him anyway, he expected,
and demand his passphrase. He would claim to have
forgotten it. A federal judge somewhere would order him to
disclose the secret key, and he’d refuse. He’d be held on
contempt charges for maybe a year and then be released.
Without his files, the government wouldn’t have any
evidence of his real crimes.
Nothing had been left to chance—Max was certain. He
was untouchable.

31

The Trial
onathan Giannone, the Long Island carder Max and
Chris had discovered as a teenager, was keeping a secret
from everyone.
The same day Max had absorbed his competitors,
Secret Service agents had arrested Giannone at his
parents’ house for selling some of Max’s dumps to Brett
Johnson, the Secret Service informant known as Gollumfun.
Giannone was released on bail, but he told nobody about
the bust. To him, it was just a bump in the road—how much
trouble could he really get in for selling twenty-nine dumps?
The impression that he was facing a slap on the wrist
was bolstered when the judge in South Carolina lifted his
travel restrictions a month after his arrest. Giannone
promptly flew into Oakland Airport on a carding run, and
Tea picked him up and showed him around. They drove up
and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and she bought him
a pizza at Fat Slice on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue.
She’d always found Giannone amusing—a boastful, curly-
haired white kid with hip-hop sensibilities who’d once
bragged that he’d beat up a member of the New York Jets
at a local bar. Now, though, they had something in common:
Chris had stopped talking to Giannone around the time of
his arrest, while Tea, for her part, had been ordered to
return to the Bay Area so she couldn’t make any more
trouble with Chris’s relationships. Chris had exiled them
both.
Chris called Tea while they were hanging out and was
surprised to hear that Giannone was in town. He had her
put Giannone on the phone. “So, you take my girls out to

party now?” he demanded, angry that Giannone was
forging a relationship with one of his people—perhaps
courting her for a cashing crew of his own.
“No, I just happen to be here and I looked her up,”
Giannone said a little defensively.
It would be Chris’s and Giannone’s last phone
conversation. Giannone flew home. He kept in touch with
Tea, and a few months later, he warned her that he might
not be a good person to be associating with. He was pretty
sure he’d been followed on his trip to the Bay Area.
“I got some heat on me right now,” Giannone said.
“What kind of heat?” Tea asked. Giannone liked to affect
an air of danger.
“I go to trial next week.”
Federal criminal trials are rare. Faced with the long prison
terms recommended by rigid sentencing guidelines, most
defendants opt to take a plea deal in exchange for a slightly
shortened sentence or limit their exposure by becoming an
informant. Some 87 percent of prosecutions were resolved
in this manner in 2006, the year of Giannone’s trial. In
another 9 percent of the cases, charges were dismissed
before reaching a trial, the government preferring to drop a
marginal case rather than risk a loss. Once a jury is seated,
a defendant’s chances for acquittal are about one in ten.
But Giannone liked his odds. Most cases don’t hinge on
the undercover work performed by an active computer
criminal. Soon after he’d snitched on Giannone, Brett
“Gollumfun” Johnson had gone on a four-month cross-
country crime spree, pulling his IRS scam in Texas,
Arizona, New Mexico, Las Vegas, California, and Florida,
where he was finally nabbed in Orlando with nearly
$200,000 stuffed in backpacks in his bedroom. He wouldn’t
make a very good witness for the prosecution.
The bailiff passed out pads and pencils to the twelve
jurors, and the prosecutor began his opening statement,

adopting a down-home, country tone.
“I love the Internet,” he said. “The Internet is a fascinating
thing. It’s a place where we can entertain ourselves; we can
get information; we can watch videos; we can play games;
we can buy things. eBay is a great place, you can bid on
things. If you can think about it, you can buy it on eBay.
“But, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a side of the Internet
that we don’t like to think about. There’s kind of a dark
underbelly to the Internet, one where not trinkets or bobbles
are bought, sold, and traded. There’s a part of the Internet
where people’s lives are bought, sold, and traded.…
“You are going to see that side of the Internet. And I
suspect that you are never going to look at the Internet
exactly the same way again.”
The trial lasted three days. The prosecutor disposed of
Brett Johnson right out of the gate, acknowledging that
Gollumfun was a liar and a thief who’d betrayed the trust of
his Secret Service handlers. That was why the government
wasn’t calling him to testify. The prosecution’s “star
witness” would be the computer logs of Giannone’s chats
with the informant. The record would speak for itself.
Giannone’s lawyer did his best to attack the logs.
“Machines make mistakes.” He argued that because the
stolen credit cards were never fraudulently used, there were
no victims. He reminded the jurors that nobody died or
suffered physical harm.
After one day of deliberation, the verdict came in: guilty.
The first federal trial of the carding underground was over.
The judge ordered Giannone taken into custody.
A week later, Giannone was summoned from his cell at
the Lexington County Jail. He instantly recognized the
Secret Service agents waiting by the sally port, two steel
doors away from freedom; the two men had been
Johnson’s handlers, and they’d testified at Giannone’s trial.
“We want to know who this guy Iceman is,” one of them

said.
“Who’s Iceman?” Giannone answered innocently.
The situation was serious, the agents said; they’d
learned that Iceman had threatened to kill the president.
Giannone asked for his lawyer, and the agents phoned him
on the spot. The attorney consented to an interview in the
hope of winning leniency for his client at sentencing.
In a series of meetings over the next three weeks, the
agents pulled Giannone out of jail again and again, shuttling
him to the same field office where Gollumfun had
orchestrated his downfall. Unlike most carders, Giannone
had held his mud at his arrest and taken a chance on a trial
instead of cutting a snitch deal. But now he was looking
down the barrel of a five-year sentence. He was only
twenty-one years old.
Giannone told them everything he knew: Iceman lived in
San Francisco, did a brisk business in dumps, sometimes
used the aliases Digits and Generous to sell his goods. He
used hacked Wi-Fi to cover his tracks. A Mongolian
woman called Tea was his Russian translator.
Most crucially, he had a partner named Christopher
Aragon in Orange County, California. You want Iceman?
Get Chris Aragon.
The revelations electrified the agents tracking Iceman.
When Keith Mularski typed Chris Aragon’s name into the
FBI’s case management system, he found Werner Janer’s
2006 proffer sessions, in which he’d named Chris’s dumps
supplier as a tall, ponytailed man he knew as “Max the
Hacker.” It got better. Way back in December 2005, Jeff
Norminton had been arrested for receiving Janer’s wire
transfer on behalf of Aragon. He’d told the FBI about
introducing Aragon to the superhacker Max Butler after his
release from Taft. The interviewing agent was only
interested in real estate fraud and hadn’t pursued the lead.
Now Mularski and his Secret Service counterparts had a

name. Giannone’s statements confirmed it. Iceman had told
Giannone that he was once raided as a suspect in the Half-
Life 2 source-code theft. Mularski ran another search and
saw there were only two U.S. search warrants executed in
that investigation: one against Chris Toshok, and one
against Max Ray Butler.
Iceman’s identity had been hidden in the government’s
computers all along. Giannone had given them the
password to unlock it.
Knowing Iceman’s identity wasn’t the same as proving it,
though. The feds had enough for a search warrant, but they
didn’t have the location of Max’s safe house. Worse,
Giannone had tipped them that Iceman used DriveCrypt.
That meant that even if they tracked down Max’s address,
they couldn’t count on finding evidence on his hard drive.
They could bust down Max’s door, then watch him walk out
of a courtroom twenty-four hours later on bail or a signature
bond. With an international network of fake ID vendors and
identity thieves at his beck and call, Max might vanish,
never to be seen again.
They needed to sew up the case before making a move.
Mularski decided Chris Aragon was the key. Thanks to
Norminton, they knew all about the wire transfer and real
estate fraud scheme he’d profited from almost five years
earlier. If they could nail Aragon for that, they could press
him to cooperate against Max.
Unaware of the net tightening around him, Max continued
his round-the-clock management of Carders Market as
“Aphex.” Not that his new identity was really fooling anyone.
He couldn’t resist carrying Iceman’s campaign against
DarkMarket’s leaders into his new persona, calling them
“idiots and incompetents” and circulating the evidence he’d
gathered against Master Splyntr. He was astonished that
so many people didn’t believe him. “DarkMarket is founded
and run by NCFTA/FBI for Christ sake!”

Th3C0rrupted0ne believed Max and gave up his status
on DarkMarket to work as a full-time admin on Max’s board
—he was devoting fourteen hours a day to the site now. But
Max didn’t trust him either. It was well-known that C0rrupted
lived in Pittsburgh, the home of the NCFTA.
Max had developed a new test function for possible
informants, and in March he’d tried it out on the carder,
announcing out of the blue that he was working with a
terrorist cell “and we should have a shot at killing President
Bush this coming weekend.” If C0rrupted was a fed, he’d
be obliged to discourage the notional assassination plot,
Max figured, or he’d ask for more details.
C0rrupted’s response briefly assuaged Max’s doubts.
“Good luck with the president thing. Make sure you get the
vice president as well. He is no better.”
There was a lot of work to do on the board. Carders
Market was hopping, with over a dozen specialized
vendors: DataCorporation, Bolor, Tsar Boris, Perl, and
RevenantShadow sold credit card numbers with CVV2s,
stolen variously from the United States, UK, and Canada;
Yevin vended California driver’s licenses; Notepad would
check the validity of dumps for a small fee; Snake Solid
moved U.S. and Canadian dumps; Voroshilov offered
identity thieves a service that could obtain a victim’s Social
Security number and date of birth; DelusionNFX vended
hacked online banking logins; Illusionist was Carders
Market’s answer to JiLsi, selling novelty templates and
credit card images; Imagine competed with EasyLivin’ in
the plastics trade.
Max tried to run a tight ship—a “military base,” one
carder critic groused. As in his white-hat days, he prized
intellectual honesty, refusing to grant special favor to even
his closest allies.
In April, C0rrupted prepared a review of Chris’s latest
generation of “novelty” IDs and plastics. He found them
wanting—for one thing, the signature strips were printed
right on the cards; you had to sign them with a felt-tip. He

right on the cards; you had to sign them with a felt-tip. He
thought the products were worth five stars out of ten, but he
asked Max if he should fluff his findings a little. “I know you
and Easylivin’ are close, so I wanted to know if I should post
a true opinion review about these things that I felt, or if I
should not be so harsh?”
“I think definitely post the truth, and if possible back it up
with pics etc.,” Max wrote back. “I am tight with Easylivin’,
but I think the truth is more important. Besides, if he is
covered for, and continues to ship poor quality (damn … it’s
really that bad?) then it will reflect badly on you and Carders
Market.”
A bad review would cost Chris money. But Max didn’t
hesitate when it came to the integrity of his crime site.

32

The Mall
hris pulled his Tahoe into the garage at Fashion Island
Mall in Newport Beach, parked, and got out with his new
partner, twenty-three-year-old Guy Shitrit. They walked
toward the Bloomingdale’s, fake American Express cards
in their wallets.
Originally from Israel, Shitrit was a handsome guitar
player and ladies’ man whom Chris had met on Carders
Market. Shitrit had been running a skimming operation in
Miami, recruiting professional strippers at work and
equipping them with exceedingly small skimming devices
to steal patrons’ magstripe data. When the strip-club
managers found out, Shitrit had to get out of town in a hurry.
He’d landed in Orange County, where Chris hooked him up
with a fake ID, a rental car, and an apartment at the
Archstone. Then they hit the stores.
Chris was close now, so close, to getting out. His wife,
Clara, had brought in $780,000 on eBay in a little over
three years: 2,609 Coach bags, iPods, Michele watches,
and Juicy Couture clothes. She had an employee working
twenty hours a week just shipping the ill-gotten
merchandise. Chris added to the take with his sales of
plastics and novelties on Carders Market, an enterprise
that wasn’t helped by Th3C0rrupted0ne’s nitpicking review.
Max, he felt, was ignoring the Whiz List, their blueprint for
building one big score and getting out. Chris had finally
figured it out: Max didn’t want to quit. He liked hacking; it
was all he wanted to do. So screw him. Chris had his own
exit strategy in place. He’d poured his profits into an
enterprise for Clara, a denim fashion company called

Trendsetter USA that already employed several full-time
workers at a bright, pleasant office in Aliso Viejo.
Eventually, he was certain, it would be profitable. And 100
percent legit.
Until then, he’d be busy.
Shitrit was a clotheshorse, and they’d already
squandered some of their stolen credit on men’s clothing
for him. On this visit, they’d stay focused. They walked into
the air-conditioned coolness of the Bloomingdale’s and
made a beeline for Ladies’ Handbags. The Coach purses
rested on small shelves along one wall, individually spotlit
like museum exhibits. Chris and Guy each picked some out
and went to the register. After some swipes at the point-of-
sale terminal, they were headed for the door with $13,000
worth of Coach in their hands.
Chris was breaking his own rules by going in-store
himself, but his crew was suddenly thinning. Nancy, who’d
helped set up Max’s new safe house, had since moved to
Atlanta and was doing only a little cashing there. Liz was
becoming paranoid—she was constantly accusing Chris of
ripping her off, conveying her displeasure in meticulous,
hand-drawn spreadsheets summing up how much Chris
owed her for each in-store appearance: $1,918 from a trip
to Vegas; $674 for iPods and GPS systems; $525 for four
Coach purses worth $1,750. The “amount paid to me”
column was zeroes all the way down. In the meantime, his
newest recruit, Sarah, was balking at big-ticket items,
though she was still useful for running errands. On
Valentine’s Day she bought Chris’s presents for his wife
and his girlfriend.
With the demands of vending, starting a legitimate
business, and trying to resuscitate his crew, Chris now
found it more efficient to pay someone else to make his
plastic. He’d met Federico Vigo at UBuyWeRush. Vigo
was looking for a way to pay down a $100,000 debt to the
Mexican Mafia, after accepting that amount in front money
to import a pallet of ephedra from China, only to have the

to import a pallet of ephedra from China, only to have the
product intercepted at the border. Chris put him to work.
The counterfeiting gear was moved from the Tea House to
Vigo’s office in Northridge, and one of Chris’s gophers was
running out to the Valley a couple of times a week to collect
the latest batch of credit cards hot off the presses, paying
Vigo $10 for each card.
Chris and Guy left the Bloomingdale’s and kept their
unhurried pace back to the SUV. Chris popped the back
and found a place for the new purchases amid a dozen
plain brown department store bags already jostling for
space, each filled with purses, watches, and a smattering
of men’s clothing. He closed up; they got into the car and
started planning their next stop.
They were still planning when a white police cruiser
zoomed into the garage. It stopped near them and
disgorged two uniformed Newport Beach Police
Department officers.
Chris’s heart sank. Another bust.
The police booked Chris at the Newport Beach Police
Station just down the road from the mall, then searched his
car, turning up seventy credit cards and small amounts of
Ecstasy and Xanax. Once he was fingerprinted, Chris was
ushered into an interrogation room, where Detective Bob
Watts handed him a Miranda waiver.
Chris signed and launched into the same basic story that
had gotten him out of serious trouble in San Francisco a
few years earlier. He promptly admitted his real name and
confessed with evident shame to using counterfeit credit
cards at Bloomingdale’s and elsewhere. It was the
economy, he said. He’d worked in the mortgage industry
and was hit hard when the real estate market collapsed.
That’s when the head of an Orange County carding ring
recruited him to card merchandise for a small percentage
of the profits. He was just a mule.
It was a familiar tale to Watts, who’d busted low-level

cashers before. It even explained Aragon’s amateurish
Bloomingdale’s run—gobbling up thousands of dollars’
worth of Coach bags at once. Bloomingdale’s security
people didn’t like to upset the store’s customers, so when
they had a suspicious one, they normally called Watts or his
partner, who’d arrange for a discreet traffic stop on a
“vehicle code violation” to check out the suspect away from
the store. If the shopper was innocent, they’d never know
that Bloomingdale’s had called the cops on them. Chris’s
and Shitrit’s behavior, though, was so blatant that the store
had no worries that they might be innocent. The security
team called the police dispatch desk directly to make sure
the men didn’t get out of the parking lot.
But Watts wasn’t buying Chris Aragon’s hard-luck story.
He’d been a detective for only eight months but a cop for
seven years; the first thing he’d done when Aragon came in
was run him through NCIC. He’d seen that Chris’s criminal
record stretched back to the seventies, and technically, he
was still on probation from his most recent bust in San
Francisco—for credit card fraud.
He figured he had a ringleader in his holding cell. He got
a search warrant in a hurry and converged with a team of
detectives and uniformed cops at the only address he could
find for Chris: Trendsetter USA. One look at the baffled
faces of the employees as the cops stormed the door told
Watts they were innocent. After some questioning, one of
the workers mentioned that their boss, Clara, ran an eBay
business in the back office.
Watts opened the storage cabinets in back and took
inventory: thirty-one Coach bags, twelve new Canon
PowerShot digital cameras, several TomTom GPS
navigators, Chanel sunglasses, Palm organizers, and
iPods, all new in the box.
Clara walked into the office in the middle of the search
and was promptly arrested. In her purse, Watts found
several utility bills for an address in Capistrano Beach, all in
different names. Clara reluctantly admitted she lived there;

different names. Clara reluctantly admitted she lived there;
her face fell when Watts told her it was his next stop.
With Clara’s house keys and a new search warrant in
hand, the detectives arrived at the Aragon home and began
their search. In Chris’s home office, they found an unlocked
safe in the closet. Inside were two plastic index-card cases
crammed with counterfeit cards. There were more cards in
the bedroom, bundled in rubber bands and stashed in the
night table. An MSR206 rested on a shelf in the family
room, and in the connecting garage, a box of purses sat on
the floor next to the fitness machine.
Aside from the dining room and bathrooms, the only
space in the house clean of evidence was the boys’
comfortable bedroom. Just two twin beds, side by side,
some stuffed animals and toys.
For all his talk about credit card fraud as a victimless
crime, Chris had overlooked the two most vulnerable
victims of his conduct. They were four and seven, and their
dad wasn’t coming home.

33

Exit Strategy
hat’s a fed,” Max said, indicating a sedan passing
them on the street. Charity glanced skeptically at the Ford.
American-made cars were just one of the many things that
alarmed Max these days.
Weeks had passed since Chris’s arrest, and reading the
press coverage from Orange County, Max couldn’t get over
how much evidence the police had found in Aragon’s
home. Using Chris’s payout sheets as a road map, the
cops had rounded up his entire cashing crew; even Marcus,
Chris’s pot grower and errand boy, was busted with a
hydroponic dope farm growing in his Archstone apartment.
After two weeks of hunting, the police converged on Chris’s
credit card factory at Federico Vigo’s office in the Valley,
arrested Vigo, and seized the counterfeiting gear. Chris
was being held on a million dollars’ bail.
The entire operation had been dismantled piece by
piece. They were calling it perhaps the largest identity-theft
ring in Orange County’s history.
“Shit, I wonder what kind of records he kept on all that,”
Max later wrote The3C0rrupted0ne. “I mean, if he was
sloppy enough to have equipment at his house.”
Max had already ditched his prepaid cell phone and
instituted a “security ban” on his former partner’s Carders
Market account. They were routine precautions—he was
largely unconcerned about the bust at first; it was, after all,
just a state case. Chris had been caught red-handed at the
W, too, and that time he walked away with probation.
But as the weeks passed with Chris still in jail, Max
started to worry. He was noticing strange cars parked on

his street—an animal control van aroused his suspicion so
much he got out a flashlight to peer in the windows. Then a
San Francisco FBI agent called him out of the blue to
inquire about Max’s long-dead arachNIDS database. Max
decided to invest in a rope ladder; he kept it by the back
window of the apartment he shared with Charity, in case he
had to get out fast.
He’d pause every now and then to reflect on his freedom
—here he was, enjoying life, hacking, while at that very
moment Chris was in a jail cell in Orange County.
Max picked a random San Francisco criminal defense
attorney from the yellow pages, walked into his office, and
handed over a pile of cash; he wanted the lawyer to travel
to Southern California to check on Chris and see if there
was anything he could do. The attorney said he’d look into
it, but Max never heard back from him.
It was then that Max finally learned about Giannone’s bust
from a news article about Brett Johnson’s life as an
informant. Max had lost track of Giannone, and for all his
hacking, Max had never thought to run the names of his
associates through the public federal court website. The
news that Giannone had lost a criminal trial worried him.
“Of all the rat snitch piece of shit motherfuckers out there,
Giannone is the closest to being able to finger me for the
feds,” he confided in a post to the private administrators’
forum on Carders Market. “The little dipshit might actually
be able to get the feds close to me.”
Max uprooted from Fox Plaza, hiding his equipment at
home until he was set up with a new sanctuary. On June 7,
he picked up the keys at the Oakwood Geary, another
corporate apartment building carved out of gleaming
marble in the Tenderloin. He was “Daniel Chance” now, just
another displaced software drone relocating to the Bay
Area. The real Chance was fifty years old and bearded,
while Max was clean shaven with long hair—but the fake
driver’s license and genuine money order were enough to
get him in.

get him in.
The next evening, Max checked out a red Mustang from
his neighborhood Zipcar and packed it with his computer
gear. For all his paranoia, he didn’t notice the Secret
Service agents tailing him on the drive to the Oakwood and
watching from the street as he moved into his new safe
house.
A month later, Max jolted awake, shot upright in bed, and
blinked into the darkness of the flat. It was just Charity; she
had crawled into bed next to him, trying in vain not to wake
him. He was growing jumpier every day.
“Sweetie, you can’t keep doing this,” Charity murmured.
“You may not realize it, but I realize it. I can see it. You’re
getting too sucked into it mentally. You’re losing focus of
who you are and what you’re doing.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m done.”
A lot of time had passed since his last prison term, he
thought. Maybe he could find honest work again. NightFox
had already offered him a legitimate job in Canada, but
he’d turned it down. He couldn’t bring himself to leave
Charity. He’d been contemplating marriage, playing with
the idea of luring her to Las Vegas on a vacation and
popping the question there. She was fiercely independent,
but she couldn’t argue that he hadn’t given her space.
It was time, he decided, for Max Vision, white hat, to
return. It would be official. He visited the San Francisco
courthouse and filled out the necessary paperwork. On
August 14, a judge approved his legal name change from
Max Butler to Max Ray Vision.
He already had an idea for a new website that could
catapult him back into the white-hat scene: a system for
disclosing and managing zero-day vulnerabilities. He could
seed it with the security holes he was privy to in the
underground, bringing the exploits into the white-hat world
like a defector crossing Checkpoint Charlie with a suitcase
full of state secrets.

But after all his work making Carders Market the top
crime forum in the English-speaking world, he couldn’t
bring himself to just abandon it.
Max returned to his safe house. It was August, and the
heat was back—the temperature topped 90 degrees
outside, and higher in his studio. His CPU was threatening
to burn itself alive. He turned on his fans, sat at his
keyboard, and began the work of phasing out his Digits
and Aphex identities.
He logged on to Carders Market and, as Digits, posted a
note that he was shunting his dumps vending to
Unauthorized, one of his admins. Then, as Aphex, he
announced that he was retiring from carding and was
selling Carders Market. He let the announcement sit for a
few minutes and then took down the site. When he brought
it back up, Achilous, one of his administrators in Canada,
was in charge. Max created a new, generic handle for
himself, “Admin,” to help Carders Market’s new kingpin
during the transition.
He was still working on his exit strategy when an instant
message popped up on his screen. It was from Silo, the
Canadian carder who was always trying, and failing, to
hack him. Max had tracked him down and identified him as
Lloyd Liske in British Columbia. He suspected Liske was
an informant.
The note was odd, a long sentence about newbies
making dumb mistakes. But Silo had hidden a second
message within it by strategically capitalizing nine of the
letters.
They spelled out “MAX VISION.”
A guess, Max thought. Silo couldn’t possibly know
anything.
It was just a guess.
• • •
The day after Max announced his retirement, Secret

Service agent Melissa McKenzie and a federal prosecutor
from Pittsburgh flew to California to tie up some loose
ends.
The investigation was nearly complete. The Secret
Service had gotten ahold of Digits’s e-mail from a contact
at the Vancouver Police Department—Silo’s handler. Max
had been using a Canadian-based webmail provider called
Hushmail that provides high-security encryption, using a
Java applet that decrypts a customer’s messages right on
his own PC instead of the company’s server. In theory, the
arrangement ensures that even Hushmail can’t get at a
customer’s secret key or incoming e-mail messages. The
company openly marketed the service as a way to
circumvent FBI surveillance.
But, like e-gold, Hushmail was another formerly crime-
friendly service now being mined by law enforcement. U.S.
and Canadian agencies had been winning special orders
from the Supreme Court of British Columbia that forced
Hushmail officials to sabotage their own system and
compromise specific surveillance targets’ decryption keys.
Now the feds had Max’s e-mail.
At the same time, the agency had located Tea living in
Berkeley serving a probation sentence—it turned out she’d
been caught using Aragon-produced gift cards at the
Emeryville Apple Store months earlier. It was supposed to
be a training run for one of Chris’s new recruits, but Tea
had never cashed before, and when she impulsively added
a PowerBook to her iPod purchase, she was arrested
along with the trainee. Eager to avoid more trouble, she’d
told the Secret Service everything she knew.
Meanwhile, the Secret Service had begun sporadic
physical surveillance of Max. From Werner Janer’s proffers,
Mularski had learned that Max had a girlfriend named
Charity Majors. Public records provided her address, and a
subpoena of her bank records showed she had a joint
account with Max. The Secret Service staked out the house
and eventually trailed Max to the Oakwood Geary.

Electronic surveillance confirmed that Max was operating
from the Oakwood. The FBI had won a secret court order
letting them electronically monitor the IP addresses
connecting to Carders Market’s false front at a U.S. hosting
company—the modern equivalent of taking down the
license plates outside a mob hangout. Several traced back
to broadband subscribers living within a block of the
corporate apartment complex and running Wi-Fi.
Two weeks earlier, a female Secret Service agent
disguised as a maid had ridden up the elevator with Max
and watched him unlock apartment 409. The apartment
number was the last piece of data they’d needed.
There was just one more stop before they’d move in: the
Orange County Central Men’s Jail, a grim lockup in the flat,
sun-baked center of Santa Ana, California. McKenzie and
federal prosecutor Luke Dembosky were shown to an
interview room to meet Chris Aragon.
Chris was the last holdout in the Orange County crew.
Clara and six members of his crew were headed to plea
deals that would ultimately net them from six months to
seven years in prison. Clara would get two years and eight
months. Chris’s mother was looking after the two boys.
Once the introductions were made, McKenzie and
Dembosky got down to business. They couldn’t do anything
about Chris’s state case, but if he cooperated, he’d have a
nice letter in his file from the U.S. government attesting that
he’d helped in a major federal prosecution. That could sway
the judge at sentencing time. It was all they could do.
McKenzie produced a photo lineup and asked Chris if
anyone looked familiar.
Chris’s situation was grim. With his bank robberies and
drug-smuggling convictions, he was eligible for California’s
tough three-strikes law. That meant a mandatory twenty-
five-to-life.
Chris picked out Max’s mugshot from the photos. And
then he told the feds the story of Max Vision’s drift to the

dark side.
• • •
On Wednesday, September 5, 2007, Max dropped Charity
at the post office on an errand and directed his cab driver
downtown to the CompUSA store on Market Street. He
picked up a new fan for his CPU, walked to his apartment,
stripped down, and crashed out on his bed amid a tangle of
unfolded laundry. He settled into a deep slumber.
Max had stopped hacking, but he was still disentwining
himself from his double life—after five years, he had a lot of
relationships and ventures that he couldn’t just sever
overnight.
He slept right through the knock at his door at about two
p.m. Then the door flew open, and a half-dozen agents
rushed into the room, guns drawn, shouting orders. Max
bolted upright and screamed.
“Put your hands where I can see them!” an agent yelled.
“Lay down!” The agent was positioned between Max and
his computers. Max had often thought that, in a raid, he
might be able to pull the plug on his server, making his
already formidable cyberdefenses completely bulletproof.
Now that it was really happening, he realized that diving for
his machines wasn’t an option, unless he wanted to be
shot.
Max recovered his composure. Unplugged or not, his
machines were locked down, and his encryption was rock
solid. He managed to relax a little as the agents let him get
dressed, then walked him down the hall in handcuffs.
On the way, they passed a three-man team who’d been
waiting for the Secret Service to secure the safe house.
They weren’t feds; they were from Carnegie Mellon
University’s Computer Emergency Response Team, and
they were there to bust Max’s crypto.
It was the first time CERT had been invited to a raid—but
the circumstances were special. Chris Aragon had

employed the same DriveCrypt whole-disk-encryption
software that Max used, and neither the Secret Service nor
CERT had been able to recover anything from the drive.
Full-disk encryption keeps the entire hard drive encrypted
at all times: all the files, the file names, the operating
system, the software, the directory structure—any clue to
what the user has been doing. Without the decryption key,
the disk might as well have been a Frisbee.
The key to cracking a full-disk encryption program is to
get at it while it’s still running on the computer. At that point,
the disk is still fully encrypted, but the decryption key is
stored in RAM, to allow the software to decrypt and encrypt
the data from the hard drive on the fly.
The knock on Max’s door had been intended to draw
Max away from his machines; if he’d shut them down
before the Secret Service got the cuffs on, there wouldn’t
have been much CERT could do—the contents of the RAM
would have evaporated. But Max had been caught napping,
and his servers were still running.
CERT had spent the last two weeks gaming out different
scenarios for what they might encounter in Max’s safe
house. Now the team leader looked over the setup: Max’s
server was wired to half a dozen hard drives. Two had lost
power when an agent tripped over an electrical cable
snaking across the floor, but the server itself was still
running, and that was what mattered.
While Secret Service flashbulbs bounced off the walls of
Max’s cluttered apartment, the forensics experts moved to
the machines and began their work, using memory-
acquisition software they’d brought with them to suck down
the live data from the RAM onto an external storage device.
Down the hall, Max cooled his heels in the feds’
apartment.
Two agents watched over him. Max would be questioned
later—for now, the agents were just babysitting, chatting
with one another. The Secret Service agent was from the
local San Francisco field office; he asked his FBI

local San Francisco field office; he asked his FBI
counterpart where he worked.
“I’m from Pittsburgh,” Keith Mularski answered.
Max’s head snapped to look at Master Splyntr. There
was no doubt who had won the carder war.
The Secret Service agents exulted over the bust. “I’ve
been dreaming about you,” agent Melissa McKenzie said
as she drove Max to the field office. On seeing his raised
eyebrow, she added, “I mean about Iceman. Not you
personally.”
Two of the local agents were dispatched to Charity’s
house. They told her what happened and took her
downtown to say good-bye to Max.
“I’m sorry,” he told her when she walked in. “You were
right.”
Max talked to the agents at the field office for a while,
trying to feel them out for what they knew and gauge how
much trouble he was in. Some of them seemed surprised
at his politeness—his sheer likability. Max wasn’t what they
expected from the cold, calculating kingpin they’d been
tracking for a year.
On the drive to jail, McKenzie finally voiced her
puzzlement. You seem like a nice guy, she said, and that’s
going to help you. “But I have this one question for you.…
“Why do you hate us?”
Max was speechless. He never hated the Secret
Service, or the FBI, or even the informants on Carders
Market. Iceman did. But Iceman was never real; he was a
guise, a personality Max slipped on like a suit when he was
in cyberspace.
Max Vision never hated anyone in his life.
The Hungry Programmers were the first to hear the news
that Max had been arrested again. Tim Spencer offered to
sign for Max’s bail bond. For collateral, he had twenty acres
of land in Idaho that he’d bought as his dream retirement
property. When Tim heard the details of the charges

against his old friend, he hesitated. What if he didn’t really
know Max at all?
The moment of doubt passed, and he signed the form.
Max’s mother offered to post the equity in her house as well
to secure her son’s release. Ultimately, though, it didn’t
matter. When Max came up for arraignment in San Jose, a
federal magistrate ordered the hacker held without bail
pending his transport to Pittsburgh.
The government announced Iceman’s arrest on
September 11, 2007. The news hit Carders Market,
sparking a flurry of activity. Achilous immediately deleted
the entire database of posts and private messages, not
knowing the feds already had it. “I think the SQL database
almost had a heart attack when I did it, but it’s done now. I
think this is what Aphex would have wanted,” he wrote.
“This forum is open for posting, so people can chat and
figure out where to go from here. Just be very careful,
specifically about following links. Try to keep the conspiracy
theories to a minimum everyone, please.
“Good luck, be safe.”
Silo jumped in under an alias to wrongly label his former
rival a snitch, based on news reports that misunderstood
Max’s work for the FBI during his white-hat days. “It’s sad to
see a brilliant guy go,” he wrote. “He brought a lot to this
board and the scene as a vendor and an administrator. A
lot of guys made a lot of money from him.”
But “once a rat always a rat,” he wrote, with no trace of
irony. “This whole board is spawned out of the fact that
years ago the FBI and Aphex had a disagreement on
whom he was snitching out.… Bottom line, he is the biggest
hypocrite to ever grace the scene.”
Back at his desk in Pittsburgh, Mularski put on Master
Splyntr’s black hat to join the postgame analysis. The FBI
agent knew full well that Iceman hadn’t been an informant,
but his alter ego would be expected to seize on the news
that Max had once worked with the feds. “Oh just where do I
even begin?” He gloated on DarkMarket, enjoying the

even begin?” He gloated on DarkMarket, enjoying the
moment. “Let’s see … let’s see … How about with this
headline from SFGate.com? And I quote, ‘Ex-FBI snitch in
S.F. indicted in hacking of financial institutions.’
“Did anyone else notice anything about that headline?
Ahh yeah, FBI Snitch. This is turning out to be just like
Gollumfun and El. No wonder why Iceman always had a
hard-on for them, because he was just like them and was
competing for his handlers’ praises.”
When Max arrived in Pittsburgh, his new public defender
tried again to get him released on bail, but the judge
refused after prosecutors speculated that Max was sitting
on vast stores of hidden cash and could easily use his
contacts to disappear with a new name. To prove that he’d
tried to evade the feds, they played their trump card: private
messages written by Max himself describing his use of
false IDs while traveling and his “evasive move” to his final
safe house. Max had sent the messages to a Pittsburgh
Secret Service informant who’d been an admin on Carders
Market for a full year.
Max wasn’t at all surprised to see that it was
Th3C0rrupted0ne.

34

DarkMarket
he man is sitting rigid on a polished wooden chair and
staring balefully into the camera. Paint peels from a
cracked plaster wall behind him. He’s been stripped down
to his underwear, and he’s holding a handwritten sign over
his exposed paunch. I AM KIER, it reads, in large block
letters. MY REAL NAME IS MERT ORTAC.… I AM RAT. I AM PIG. I AM
FUCKED BY CHA0.
The appearance of the photo on DarkMarket in May
2008 sent Mularski hurrying back into the NCFTA
communications room. Headquarters would want to know
that one of Master Splyntr’s admins had just kidnapped and
tortured an informant.
Cha0 was an engineer in Istanbul who sold high-quality
ATM skimmers and PIN pads to fraudsters around the
world. Covertly affixed to a cash machine, the skimmer
would record the magstripe data on every debit or credit
card fed into the ATM, while the PIN-pad overlay stored the
user’s secret code.
Cha0 cut a jaunty presence in the underground. His
Flash-animated banner ad on DarkMarket was a classic,
opening with a cartoon man wading through a house full of
cash. “Is that you?” the text asks. “Yes. If you bought a
skimmer and PIN pad from Cha0.” A similarly styled video
tutorial for new customers was narrated by a smiling
caricature of Cha0 himself. “Hi, my name is Cha0. I’m a
developer of skimming devices. I work for you twenty-four
hours a day and make the best devices for skimming. You’ll
be able to make money in this business with me and my
group. We make these devices for newbies—it’s that easy

to use!” The animated Cha0 goes on to offer practical
advice: Don’t install your skimmer in the morning, because
passersby are more vigilant at that time. Don’t choose a
location where 250 people or more pass a day. Avoid
cities with a population less than 15,000—residents know
too well what the ATM is supposed to look like and might
notice Cha0’s product.
Notwithstanding his whimsical marketing, Cha0 had
always made it clear to his friend Master Splyntr that he
was a serious criminal, not afraid to get physical to protect
his multimillion-dollar business. Now he’d proven it. Mert
“Kier” Ortac had been part of Cha0’s organization, the
Crime Enforcers, until he went running to a Turkish TV
station to blab about Cha0’s activities. After a couple of
interviews, he vanished. When he resurfaced a short time
later, he told a harrowing story about being abducted and
beaten by Cha0 and his henchmen.
Now Cha0 had confirmed the tale by posting the kidnap
photo to DarkMarket as a warning to others.
The image put proof to the FBI’s long-held suspicions
that the computer underground was getting violent. With
hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into the scene every
year, it had seemed inevitable that the carders would take
on the brutal methods of traditional organized crime to
enlarge or protect their illegal income.
With Max safely locked up in an Ohio detention center,
DarkMarket had been free to grow, and Mularski was
closing in on its heaviest hitters—Cha0 among them. A
Turkish cybercrime detective had spent three months at the
NCFTA on a fellowship and was working with Mularski to
run down the skimmer maker.
Mularski had sent Cha0 two lightweight PCs as a gift the
previous year, opening the first door in the investigation.
Cha0 had directed the shipment to flunkies in his
organization, who were promptly put under surveillance by
the Turkish National Police. That led to Cagatay Evyapan,
an electrical engineer with a prior criminal record—details

an electrical engineer with a prior criminal record—details
that jibed with the biography Cha0 had shared privately with
Mularski.
The police approached several international shipping
companies and briefed them about Cha0’s operations.
One of them identified some of the skimmer shipments
from Istanbul to Europe, fingering a known member of
Cha0’s organization as the shipper.
That gave the police the evidence they needed. On
September 5, five police in bulletproof vests raided Cha0’s
apartment on the outskirts of Istanbul. They rushed into his
house and pushed Cha0 and an associate to the ground at
gunpoint.
Inside his apartment was a complete electrical lab and
assembly line, with components neatly organized in trays
and bins. Nearly a dozen computers were running on the
desks. Cha0 had all the same card-counterfeiting
equipment that had graced Chris Aragon’s factory, as well
as giant cardboard boxes holding some one thousand
skimmers and two thousand PIN pads, all awaiting
international shipment. Cha0’s records showed that four of
them had already gotten into the United States.
The cops brought Evyapan out in handcuffs, a tall, beefy
man with close-cropped hair and a black T-shirt
emblazoned with the Grim Reaper. The face of organized
crime in the Internet age.
Cha0 was the last listed target in Mularski’s undercover
authorization; the other key DarkMarket players had
already been taken down. Markus Kellerer, Matrix001, was
arrested in Germany in May 2007 and spent four months in
a high-security prison. Renukanth “JiLsi” Subramaniam, a
Sri Lankan–born British citizen, was raided in London in
June 2007 after detectives with the Serious Organised
Crime Agency in Britain staked out the Internet café he
used as an office, matching his appearances at the Java
Bean with JiLsi’s posts on DarkMarket and his chats with

Master Splyntr. JiLsi’s associate, sixty-seven-year-old John
“Devilman” McHugh, was picked up at the same time;
police found a credit card counterfeiting factory in the
senior citizen’s home.
In Turkey, six members of Cha0’s organization were
charged along with Cha0. With Mularski’s help, the police
also swooped in on Erkan “Seagate” Findikoglu, a
DarkMarket member who ran a massive King Arthur–style
cash-out operation responsible for at least two million
dollars in thefts from U.S. banks and credit unions—they
recovered one million of it in cash at his arrest. Twenty-
seven members of Seagate’s organization were charged in
Turkey, and the FBI rounded up six of his cashers in the
United States.
With Cha0 and Seagate in jail, Mularski’s work was done
—his two years running DarkMarket had now resulted in
fifty-six arrests in four countries. On Tuesday, September
16, 2008, he drafted a post formally announcing the closure
of the site. As an homage to the carding world’s history and
culture, the FBI agent borrowed from King Arthur’s
legendary message closing Carder Planet years before.
“Good day, respected and dear forum members,” he
began.
It is time to tell you the bad news—the forum should
be closed. Yes, I really mean closed.
Over the last year we have lost a lot of the admins of
the forums: Iceman on Carders Market; JiLsi and
Matrix001 disappeared, and now, Cha0 on DM. It is
apparent that this forum, which has been around
almost three years, is attracting too much attention
from a lot of the world services.…
I myself would rather go out like King Arthur than
Iceman. Whereas Iceman decided that all he would do
was change his nick to Aphex, and continue to run CM,
King Arthur closed CarderPlanet and faded into the
night. History has shown that Iceman made a fatal

mistake. I will not make the same.
Mularski planned to keep his Master Splyntr identity
dormant but alive: He’d have a well-established
underground legend that he could pull from his pocket
whenever he needed it in future investigations. But it was
not to be. About a week after DarkMarket went dark, a
reporter for Südwestrundfunk, Southwest Germany public
radio, got his hands on court documents filed in Matrix’s
case that laid bare Mularski’s double life. The U.S. press
picked up the story. Now 2,500 members of DarkMarket
knew they’d been doing business on a sting site and that
Iceman had been right all along.
Three days after the story broke in the United States,
Mularski found an ICQ message to Master Splyntr waiting
on his computer. It was from TheUnknown, a UK target
who’d gone on the run after he was raided by the British
police. “U fucking piece of shit. Motherfucker. Thought you
can catch me. Hahaha. Fucking newb. U are nowhere near
me.”
“If you want to make arrangements to turn yourself in, let
me know,” Mularski wrote back. “It will be easier than
looking over your shoulder the rest of your life.”
TheUnknown turned himself in a week later.
Mularski was almost relieved to have his secret identity
revealed; for two years, his laptop had been his constant
companion—even on vacation, he’d been online talking to
carders. He’d enjoyed some of it—building online
friendships with some of his targets, teasing and taunting
others. Master Splyntr could say things to criminals that a
respectable FBI agent never could.
Eager as Mularski was to have his life back, it would take
time. Nearly a month after DarkMarket’s closing, he was
still fighting a vague restlessness. Mularski had one more
challenge to master. He’d have to learn how to not be
Master Splyntr.

35

Sentencing
ax towered over the marshals as they brought him
into the Pittsburgh courtroom to face sentencing. He wore
an ill-fitting orange jail uniform, his hair trimmed short and
neat.
His escorts uncuffed his hands, and he took a seat next
to his public defender at the defense table. A half-dozen
reporters talked among themselves on one side of the
gallery, an equal number of feds on the other. Behind them,
the long wooden pews were mostly empty: no friends, no
family, no Charity; she’d already told Max she wasn’t going
to wait for him.
It was February 12, 2010, two and a half years after his
arrest at the safe house. Max had spent the first month
locked up at the Santa Clara county jail, speaking daily with
Charity in long phone calls more intimate than any
conversations they’d had while he was immersed in his
crimes. The marshals finally put him on a plane and
checked him into a detention facility in Ohio, where Max
made peace with his confinement, largely drained now of
the self-righteous anger that carried him through his
previous imprisonments. He made new friends in the joint:
geeks like him. They started a Dungeons and Dragons
campaign.
By year’s end, Max had no more secrets. It had taken the
CERT investigators only two weeks to find the encryption
key in the image of his computer’s RAM. At one of his court
appearances, prosecutor Luke Dembosky handed Max’s
lawyer a slip of paper with his passphrase written on it:
“!!One man can make a difference!”

For years, Max had used his encrypted hard drive as an
extension of his brain, storing everything he found and
everything he did. That the feds had it was disastrous for
his legal future, but more than that, it felt like an intimate
violation. The government was in his head, reading his
mind and memories. When he returned to his cell after the
hearing, he wept into his pillow.
They had everything: five terabytes of hacking tools,
phishing e-mails, dossiers he’d compiled on his online
friends and enemies, notes on his interests and activities,
and l.8 million credit cards accounts from over a thousand
banks. The government broke it down: Max had stolen 1.1
million of the cards from point-of-sale systems. The
remainder mostly came from the carders Max had hacked.
It was eight miles of magstripe data, and the feds were
prepared to charge him for every inch. The government had
secretly flown Chris to Pittsburgh for weeks of debriefing
while the credit card companies tallied the fraudulent
charges on Max’s cards, arriving at a staggering $86.4
million in losses.
Max’s profits were far less: Max told the government he
earned under $l million from his capers and had pissed
most of it away on rent, meals, cab fare, and gadgets. The
government found about $80,000 in Max’s WebMoney
account. But federal sentencing guidelines in theft cases
are based on victim harm, not the offender’s profits, so Max
could be held responsible for the charges rung up by Chris,
the carders who bought dumps from Digits and Generous,
and potentially the fraud performed by the carders Max
hacked. Rolled up with Max’s rap sheet, the $86 million
translated to a sentence of thirty years to life, with no
parole.
Faced with decades in prison, Max began cooperating
with the investigation. Mularski took him out for long
debriefing sessions about the hacker’s crimes. At one of
them, after the DarkMarket sting broke in the press, Max
apologized to Mularski for his attempts to expose Master

apologized to Mularski for his attempts to expose Master
Splyntr. Mularski heard sincerity in his old foe’s voice and
accepted his apology.
After a year of negotiation, Max’s lawyer and the
government settled on their number—a joint
recommendation to the judge of thirteen years. In July 2009,
Max had pleaded guilty.
The deal wasn’t binding on the court; in theory, Max could
be released on the spot, sentenced to life, or anything in
between. The day before the sentencing, Max typed out a
four-page letter to his judge, Maurice Cohill Jr., a seventy-
year-old Ford appointee who’d been a jurist since before
Max was born.
“I don’t believe further prison time in my case will help
anyone,” Max wrote. “I don’t think it is necessary because
all I want to do is help. I disagree with the blanket
assessment of the sentencing guidelines. Unfortunately, I
am facing such a horrible sentence that even 13 years
seems ‘good’ in comparison. But I assure you it is overkill
as I am the proverbial dead horse. That said, I plan to make
the most of the time I have left on this earth be it in prison or
otherwise.”
He continued. “I have a lot of regrets, but I think my
essential failing was that I lost touch with the accountability
and responsibility that comes with being a member of
society. A friend of mine once told me to behave as though
everyone could see what I was doing all the time. A sure
way to avoid engaging in illegal conduct, but I guess I
wasn’t a believer because when I was invisible, I forgot all
about this advice. I know now that we can’t be invisible, and
that it’s dangerous thinking.”
Max watched with studied calmness as his lawyer stood
to confer with the prosecution over last-minute details and
the courthouse staff went through their prehearing checklist,
testing the microphones and shuffling papers. At ten thirty
a.m. the door to chambers opened. “All rise!”
Judge Cohill took the bench. A wizened man with a

close-cropped snow-white beard, he peered at the
courtroom through round glasses and announced the
sentencing of Max Butler, the name under which Max had
been charged. He read Max’s sentencing guidelines for the
record, thirty years to life, then listened as prosecutor
Dembosky laid out his case for leniency. Max had provided
significant help to the government, he said, and was
deserving of a sentence below the guidelines.
What followed could have been an awards presentation
instead of a sentencing hearing, with Max’s lawyer,
prosecutor, and judge taking turns praising Max’s computer
skills and apparent remorse. “He’s an extremely bright, self-
taught computer expert,” said federal public defender
Michael Novara, albeit one who orchestrated “computer
security breaches on a grand scale.”
Dembosky, a computer-crime specialist and seven-year
veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, called Max “extremely
bright and articulate and talented.” He’d been at some of
Max’s debriefings, and like virtually everyone who knew
Max in real life, he’d grown to like the hacker. “He’s almost
wide-eyed and optimistic in his view of the world,” he said.
Max’s cooperation, he added, was why they were asking
for only thirteen years instead of an “astronomical”
sentence. “I believe that he is very sorry.”
Max had little to add. “I’ve changed,” he said. Hacking no
longer held any appeal for him. He invited Judge Cohill to
ask him any questions. Cohill didn’t need to. The judge said
he was impressed by Max’s letter and by letters written by
Charity, Tim Spencer, and Max’s mother, father, and sister.
He was satisfied that Max was remorseful. “I don’t think I
have to give you a lecture on the problems you’ve caused
for your victims.”
Cohill had already written the sentencing order. He read
from it aloud. Thirteen years in prison. Max would also be
responsible for $27.5 million in restitution, based on the
cost to the banks of reissuing the 1.1 million cards Max
stole from point-of-sale systems. Upon his release, he’d

stole from point-of-sale systems. Upon his release, he’d
serve five years of court supervision, during which he’d be
allowed to use the Internet only for employment or
education.
“Good luck,” he said to Max.
Max stood up—his face neutral—and let a marshal
handcuff him behind his back, then lead him through the
door in the back of the courtroom connecting to the holding
cells. With credit for time served and good behavior, he’d
be out just before Christmas 2018.
Almost nine years in prison were still ahead of him. At the
time it was the longest U.S. sentence ever handed out to a
hacker.

36

Aftermath
y the time Max was sentenced, the Secret Service had
identified the mystery American hacker who’d made
Maksik into the world’s top carder, and he was poised to
get a sentence that would make Max’s look like a traffic
fine.
The big break in the case came from Turkey. In July
2007, the Turkish National Police learned from the Secret
Service that Maksik, twenty-five-year-old Maksym
Yastremski, was vacationing in their country. An undercover
Secret Service operative lured him to a nightclub in Kemer,
where police arrested Yastremski and seized his laptop.
The police found the laptop hard drive impenetrably
encrypted, just as when the Secret Service performed its
sneak-and-peek in Dubai a year earlier. But after a few
days in a Turkish jail, Maksik coughed up the seventeen-
character passphrase. The police gave the passphrase
and a copy of the disk to the Secret Service, which began
poring over its contents, taking particular interest in the logs
Maksik kept of his ICQ chats.
One chat partner stood out: ICQ user 201679996 could
be seen helping the Ukrainian with a hack attack against
the restaurant chain Dave & Buster’s and discussing some
of the earlier high-profile intrusions that had put Maksik on
the map. The agents checked out the ICQ number and
obtained the e-mail address used to first register the
account: soupnazi@efnet.ru.
SoupNazi was a name the agency had heard before—in
2003, when they arrested Albert Gonzalez.
Gonzalez was the informant who’d lured Shadowcrew

carders into a wiretapped VPN, leading to the twenty-one
arrests in Operation Firewall—the Secret Service’s
legendary crackdown on the carding scene. But years
before he was known as Cumbajohnny on Shadowcrew,
Gonzalez had used the Seinfeld-inspired handle SoupNazi
in IRC.
The carder turncoat who’d made Operation Firewall
possible had gone on to stage the largest identity thefts in
U.S. history.
One month after Firewall, Gonzalez had gotten
permission to move from New Jersey back to his home,
Miami, where he’d launched the second act of his hacking
career. He took on the name Segvec and passed himself
off as a Ukrainian, hanging his hat on the Eastern
European forum Mazafaka. Under the rubric Operation Get
Rich or Die Tryin’—the title of a 50 Cent album and
Maksik’s Shadowcrew motto—he went on to create a
multimillion-dollar cybertheft ring that touched tens of
millions of Americans.
On May 8, 2008, the feds swooped in on Gonzalez and
his U.S. associates. Hoping for leniency at sentencing,
Gonzalez cooperated again, providing agents with the
encryption key for his hard drive and giving them
information on his entire gang. He admitted to the breaches
at TJX, OfficeMax, DSW, Forever 21, and Dave & Buster’s,
and to helping Eastern European hackers penetrate the
grocery chain Hannaford Bros., 7-Eleven’s ATM network,
Boston Market, and the credit card processing company
Heartland Payment Systems, which alone leaked nearly
130 million cards. It was a lucrative business for the hacker.
Gonzalez drew the Secret Service a map to over $1 million
in cash he’d buried in his parents’ backyard; the
government sought forfeiture of the money, his 2006 BMW,
and a Glock 27 firearm with ammunition.
Gonzalez had built his crew from an untapped reservoir
of hacker talent—onetime bedroom hackers who had

trouble finding a place in the white-hat world. Among them
was Jonathan “C0mrade” James, who’d hacked NASA as
a teenager and received a landmark six-month juvenile
sentence the same week Max Vision pleaded guilty to his
Pentagon hacks in 2000. After a brief flurry of fame—
including an interview on PBS’s Frontline—James slipped
into obscurity, living quietly in a house he inherited from his
mother in Miami.
Then in 2004 he allegedly began working with Gonzalez
and an associate named Christopher Scott. The
government believes James and Scott were responsible
for one of the earliest magstripe hauls to make their way
into Maksik’s vaults, cracking OfficeMax’s Wi-Fi from a
store parking lot in Miami and stealing thousands of swipes
and encrypted PINs. The two allegedly provided the data to
Gonzalez, who arranged with another hacker to decrypt the
PIN codes. Credit card companies later reissued some two
hundred thousand cards in response to the attack.
Of all the hackers, it was Jonathan James who would pay
the highest price in the post-Shadowcrew carder
crackdown. In the days after his May 2008 raid, James
became convinced the Secret Service would try to pin all of
Gonzalez’s breaches on him to wring public relations juice
out of his notorious past and protect their informant,
Gonzalez. On May 18, the twenty-four-year-old stepped into
the shower with a handgun and shot himself dead.
“I have no faith in the ‘justice’ system,” read his five-page
suicide note. “Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will
send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have
lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to
regain control.”
In March 2010, Gonzalez was sentenced to twenty years
in prison. His U.S. coconspirators drew sentences ranging
from two to seven years. In Turkey, Maksik was convicted
of hacking Turkish banks and sentenced to thirty years.

Since Max’s arrest, new scams have emerged in the
underground, the worst of them involving specialized Trojan
horse software designed to steal a target’s online banking
passwords and initiate money transfers from the victim’s
account right through his own computer. The thieves have
devised an ingenious solution to the problem that had
bedeviled Chris Aragon: how to get at the money. They
recruit ordinary consumers as unwitting money launderers,
dangling bogus work-at-home opportunities, in which the
“work” consists of accepting money transfers and payroll
deposits, then sending the bulk of the cash to Eastern
Europe by Western Union. In 2009, the scheme’s first year
of widespread operation, banks and their customers lost an
estimated $120 million to the attack, with small businesses
the most common target.
Meanwhile, the sale of dumps continues, dominated now
by a new crop of vendors, same as the old crop—Mr. BIN;
Prada; Vitrium; The Thief.
Law enforcement, though, has claimed some lasting
victories. So far, no prominent English-speaking board has
risen to replace Carders Market and DarkMarket, and the
Eastern Europeans have become more cloistered and
protective. The big players have retreated to invitation-only
encrypted chat servers. The marketplace exists, but the
carders’ sense of invulnerability is shattered, and their
commerce is tariffed by paranoia and mistrust, thanks
primarily to the FBI, the Secret Service, their international
partners, and the unheralded work of the post office.
The veil of secrecy that once protected hackers and
corporations alike has mostly evaporated, with law
enforcement no longer going out of its way to shield
companies from responsibility for their poor security. More
than one of Gonzalez’s hacking targets were made public
for the first time in his federal indictment.
Finally, Mularski’s DarkMarket sting proved the feds
don’t have to get in bed with the bad guys to make busts.
All the lowest moments in the war on the computer

All the lowest moments in the war on the computer
underground came about through the antics of informants.
Brett “Gollumfun” Johnson, the snitch who briefly worked as
a Carders Market administrator, turned the Secret
Service’s Operation Anglerphish into a circus by staging a
tax refund scam on the side. Albert Gonzalez provided the
clearest example. After Operation Firewall, the Secret
Service had been paying Gonzalez an annual salary of
$75,000 a year, even as he staged some of the largest
credit card hacks in history.
The post-Shadowcrew magstripe breaches led to a
reckoning in the civil courts. TJX paid $10 million to settle a
lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of 41 states and
another $40 million to Visa-issuing banks whose cards
were compromised. Banks and credit unions filed lawsuits
against Heartland Payment Systems for the massive
breach at the transaction-processing firm. Gonzalez’s
attacks also tore a hole in the credit card industry’s primary
bulwark against breaches: the so-called Payment Card
Industry—or PCI—Data Security Standard, which dictates
the steps merchants and processors must take to protect
systems handling credit card data. Heartland had been
certified PCI compliant before it was breached, and
Hannaford Brothers won the security certification even as
hackers were in its systems, stealing credit card swipes.
When the dust began to settle from Gonzalez’s large-
scale hacks, the smaller but far more numerous attacks
against restaurant point-of-sale systems began to come
out. Seven restaurants in Mississippi and Louisiana who’d
suffered intrusions figured out they were all using the same
point-of-sale system, the Aloha POS that was once Max’s
favorite target. The restaurants filed a class-action lawsuit
against the manufacturer and the company that sold them
the terminals, Louisiana-based Computer World, which
allegedly installed the remote-access software pcAnywhere
on all the machines and set the passwords on all of them to

“computer.”
Underlying all these breaches is a single systemic
security flaw, exactly 3.375 inches long. Credit card
magstripes are a technological anachronism, a throwback
to the age of the eight-track tape, and today the United
States is virtually alone in nurturing this security hole. More
than a hundred other countries around the globe, in Europe,
Asia, and even Canada and Mexico, have implemented or
begun phasing in a far more secure system called EMV or
“chip-and-PIN.”
Instead of relying on a magstripe’s passive storage,
chip-and-PIN cards have a microchip embedded in the
plastic that uses a cryptographic handshake to authenticate
itself to the point-of-sale terminal and then to the
transaction-processing server. The system leaves nothing
for a hacker to steal—an intruder sitting on the wire could
eavesdrop on the entire transaction and still be unable to
clone a card, because the handshake sequence changes
every time.
White hats have devised attacks against chip-and-PIN,
but nothing that would lend itself to the mass market in
dumps that still exists today. So far, the biggest flaw in the
system is that it supports magstripe transactions as a
fallback for Americans traveling abroad or tourists visiting
the United States.
American banks and credit card companies have
rejected chip-and-PIN because of the enormous cost of
replacing hundreds of thousands of point-of-sale terminals
with new gear. In the end, the financial institutions have
decided their fraud losses are acceptable, even with the
likes of Iceman prowling their networks.

EPILOGUE
n the Orange County men’s jail, Chris Aragon is lonely,
feeling abandoned by his friends and torn with grief that his
children are growing up without him. In October 2009, Clara
filed for divorce, seeking custody of their two children. His
girlfriend filed for child support.
Chris is studying the Bhagavad Gita and has a full-time
job as an inmate representative, helping several hundred
prisoners with legal matters, medical complaints, and
issues with the jail staff. His lawyer is playing a waiting
game, winning endless continuances for the criminal trial
that, if he loses, still carries a twenty-five-to-life term. After
Chris’s story was featured in a Wired magazine article on
Max, Chris was contacted by a Hollywood screenwriter and
a producer, but he didn’t respond. His mother suggested
he get an agent.
Max was assigned to FCI Lompoc, a low-security prison
an hour north of Santa Barbara, California. He hopes to use
his time to get a degree in physics or math—finally
completing the college education that was interrupted a
decade earlier in Boise.
He’s taken a mental inventory and is dismayed to find
that, despite everything, he still has the same impulses that
guided him into a life of hacking. “I’m not sure how to really
mitigate that, except ignore it,” he said in an interview from
jail. “I really believe that I’m reformed. But I don’t know
what’s going to happen later.”
It might seem a curious confession—admitting that the
elements of his personality that landed him in prison still
remain buried deep inside. But Max’s new self-awareness

shows hope for real change. If one is born a hacker, no
amount of prison can drive it out. No therapy, or court
supervision, or prison workshop can offer reform. Max has
to reform himself—learn to own his actions and channel the
useful parts of his nature into something productive.
To that end, Max has volunteered to help the government
during his confinement, defending U.S. networks or
perhaps counterattacking foreign adversaries online. He
wrote out a menu of the services he could offer in a memo
headed “Why the USA Needs Max.” “I could penetrate
China’s military networks and military contractors,” he
suggested. “I can hack al Qaida.” He’s hopeful he might do
enough for the government that he could apply for a
lowered sentence from his judge.
It’s a long shot, and so far, the feds haven’t taken him up
on his offer. But a month after his sentencing, Max took a
baby step in that direction. Keith Mularski arranged for Max
to speak at the NCFTA for an eager audience of law
enforcement officials, students, financial and corporate
security experts, and academics from Carnegie Mellon.
Mularski checked him out of jail for the appearance. And
for an hour or two, Max Vision was a white hat again.

NOTES

Prologue
1 The taxi idled: Interviews with Max Vision.

Chapter 1: The Key
1 As soon as the pickup truck rolled up to the curb:
Interviews with Max’s friend Tim Spencer. The
confrontation was also described in less detail by
Kimi Mack, Max’s ex-wife. Though Max could
intimidate bullies, he was never forced into a
physical confrontation with them.
2 Max’s parents had married young: State of Idaho
v. Max Butler, 1991. District Court of the Fourth
Judicial District, Ada County, Case No. 17519.
3 Robert Butler was a Vietnam veteran: State of
Idaho v. Max Butler and interviews with Max.
4 Weather Channel and nature documentaries:
Interviews with Kimi Winters and Max, respectively.
Max’s parents declined to be interviewed.
5 relaxed, and full-bore insane: Interviews with Tim
Spencer and with “Amy,” Max’s ex-girlfriend. Max’s
emotional problems at this time are also reflected in
court records in State of Idaho v. Max Butler. Max
acknowledges that his parents’ divorce had a deep
effect on him.
6 One day he emerged from his home: Interview with
Tim Spencer. Max confirms the incident but says he
lit the fire in a field adjacent to Spencer’s house.
7 The Meridian geeks had found the key ring: The
account of the master-key incident comes from
interviews with Tim Spencer. Court records confirm
Max’s juvenile conviction. Max admits the trespass
and chemical theft but declined to detail what

occurred inside the school. John, his uncharged
accomplice in the burglary, declined comment.
8 Max became “Lord Max”: Max described his run-in
with the Secret Service in an interview. Also
referenced in a letter Max wrote that was filed in
State of Idaho v. Max Butler.

Chapter 2: Deadly Weapons
1 THIS is the Rec Room!!!!: From MUDs to Virtual
Worlds, Don Mitchell, Microsoft social computing
group (March 23, 1995).
2 three hundred thousand host computers:
Numerous sources, including “Illuminating the net’s
Dark Ages,” Colin Barras, BBC News, August 23,
2007.
3 At Max’s urging: The events surrounding Max’s
assault conviction are based on transcripts and
other documents in State of Idaho v. Max Butler, as
well as interviews with Max and “Amy.” Where there
are significant factual disputes, they are noted
herein.
4 Then the dark truth: “The Dreaming City,” Michael
Moorcock, Science Fantasy 47 (June 1961).
5 Like a few of them, he started hacking the
computer right away: The hacking at BSU was
described by Max and David in interviews. David
described Max’s speed and impatience. BSU
professor Alexander Feldman discussed Max’s
computer ban in an interview and said Max had
probed other computers.
6 The sheriff called BSU’s network administrator at
two in the morning: Interview with Greg Jahn, a
former BSU system administrator responsible for
locking down Max’s account and preserving his files.

Chapter 3: The Hungry Programmers
1 Idaho’s Supreme Court ruled: State v. Townsend,
124 Idaho 881, 865 P.2d 972 (1993).
2 Max found an unprotected FTP file server: Cinco
Network, Inc. v. Max Butler, 2:96-cv-1146, U.S.
District Court, Western District of Washington. Max
confirms this account but says he was primarily
interested in distributing music files, not pirated
software.
3 Chris Beeson, a young agent: The details of Max’s
assistance to the FBI come from court filings by the
defense attorney in his subsequent criminal case,
USA v. Max Ray Butler, 5:00-cr-20096, U.S.
District Court, Northern District of California. Details
of his recruitment and his relationship with the
agents come from interviews with Max and Max’s
Internet writings immediately following his guilty plea.
See
http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/203/5729/threaded
(May 24, 2001). Max says he did not consider
himself an informant and only provided technical
information.

Chapter 4: The White Hat
1 The first people to identify themselves as hackers:
The seminal work on the early hackers is Steven
Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
(New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). Also
see Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, iWoz: From
Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the
Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had
Fun Doing It (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 2006).
2 Tim was at work one day: This anecdote was
recalled by Tim Spencer. Max later recalled
Spencer’s advice in a letter to his sentencing judge
in Pittsburgh.
3 If there was one thing Max: Details of Max’s
relationship with Kimi come primarily from
interviews with Kimi.
4 Max went up to the city to visit Matt Harrigan:
Harrigan’s business and his work with Max were
described primarily by Harrigan, with some details
confirmed by Max.

Chapter 5: Cyberwar!
1 In 1998, security experts discovered the latest flaw
in the code: This account of Max’s BIND attack
draws primarily from court records, including Max’s
written confession, interviews with Kimi, and
interviews with former air force investigator Eric
Smith. E-mail snippets between Max and the FBI
are from court records. Technical details come
primarily from a contemporaneous analysis of Max’s
code that can be found at http://www.mail-
archive.com/redhat-
list@redhat.com/msg01857.html.
2 issued an alert: “Inverse Query Buffer Overrun in
BIND 4.9 and BIND 8 Releases,” CERT Advisory
CA-98.05.
3 He sent Paxson an anonymous note: The note
was provided to the author by Vern Paxson. Max
confirmed that he sent it.

Chapter 6: I Miss Crime
1 Kimi came home from school: Kimi described this
portion of the FBI search and its aftermath.
2 The FBI agents saw an opportunity in Max’s crime:
The details come from court filings by the defense
attorney in USA v. Max Ray Butler, 5:00-cr-20096,
U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.
3 Max was in heaven: Interviews with Max and Kimi.
4 Carlos Salgado Jr., a thirty-six-year-old computer
repairman: Details of the Salgado caper come from
interviews with Salgado, Salgado’s intended buyer,
the former system administrator of the ISP he
hacked, and court records in USA v. Carlos Felipe
Salgado, Jr., 3:97-cr-00197, U.S. District Court,
Northern District of California. The FBI declined to
comment on the case or to identify the victim of the
credit card breach.
5 The next day, Max met Harrigan at a Denny’s:
Interviews with Matt Harrigan and Max.

Chapter 7: Max Vision
1 In late 1998, a former NSA cybersecurity: Interview
with Marty Roesch.
2 The reason I signed the confession: Interviews with
Kimi. In interviews with the author, Max expressed
the sentiment that his attachment to Kimi worsened
his legal situation.
3 “It’s his stuff”: Snort IDS mailing list, April 3, 2000.
(http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/snort/2000-
04/0021.html).
4 Patrick “MostHateD” Gregory: “Computer Hacker
Sentenced,” U.S. Department of Justice press
release, September 6, 2000
(http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/gregorysen.htm).
5 Jason “Shadow Knight” Diekman: “Orange County
Man in Federal Custody for Hacking into
Government Computers,” U.S. Department of
Justice press release, September 21, 2000
(http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/diekman.htm).
6 Sixteen-year-old Jonathan James: “Juvenile
Computer Hacker Sentenced to Six Months in
Detention Facility,” U.S. Department of Justice
press release, September 21, 2000
(http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/comrade.htm).

Chapter 8: Welcome to America
1 The two Russians: The details of the Invita sting
and the background of the Russian defendants
come primarily from court records, particularly USA
v. Vassily Gorshkov, 2:00:mj:00561, U.S. District
Court, Western District of Washington, as well as an
interview with a former FBI agent who worked on the
operation. The description of the Russians’ attire
and the reference to “the Expert Group” comes from
the excellent Washington Post story “A Tempting
Offer for Russian Pair” by Ariana Eunjung Cha, May
19, 2003. Quotes from within the Invita office come
from a transcript of the surveillance tape, with minor
grammatical changes for readability.

Chapter 9: Opportunities
1 Max wore a blazer and rumpled cargo pants: The
author was present at Max’s sentencing hearing:
see “As the Worm Turns,” SecurityFocus,
Businessweek online, May 21, 2001
(http://www.businessweek.com/technology/
content/jul2001/tc20010726_443.htm). The letters
written on Max’s behalf are filed in USA v. Max Ray
Butler, 5:00-cr-20096, U.S. District Court, Northern
District of California.
2 Kimi was talking to him on the phone: Interview
with Kimi.
3 Max took the news with eerie calm: Interview with
Max.
4 “I’ve been talking to some people”: Interview with
Kimi.
5 Jeffrey James Norminton: Three of Norminton’s
close associates, Chris Aragon, Werner Janer, and
an anonymous source, described Norminton’s
alcoholism, and Aragon discussed its effect on
Norminton’s criminal productivity. Federal court
records show Norminton’s assignment to a drug and
alcohol rehabilitation center, and local court records
reflect two DUI arrests in 1990 (Orange County
Superior Court cases SM90577 and SM99355).
6 Norminton’s latest caper: USA v. Jeffrey James
Norminton, 2:98-cr-01260, U.S. District Court,
Central District of California.
7 Norminton made it clear that he saw real potential

in Max: Interviews with Max, Chris Aragon, Werner
Janer, and another source familiar with Max’s and
Norminton’s jailhouse planning.
8 Max refused to sign: Kimi and Max agree on this.
Max says he refused to sign because Kimi
appeared to be wavering in her commitment to
divorce him.
9 I have been showing up at places: Max’s plea to
the security community is archived at
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2002/Aug/257.
10 Even the Honeynet Project: Max says the project
shunned him. Founder Lance Spitzner did not
answer an inquiry from the author.
11 A global survey: Conducted by the Belgian
computer security company Scanit by way of a free
online vulnerability assessment tool, July 9, 2003.

Chapter 10: Chris Aragon
1 Max met his future friend and criminal partner
Chris Aragon: Chris Aragon provided this account
of his first meeting with Max. Max doesn’t remember
where they first met.
2 The first robbery: The first attempted bank robbery
and the final successful one are described in court
records for USA v. Christopher John Aragon and
Albert Dwayne See, 81-cr-133, U.S District Court
for the District of Colorado. Additional details,
including the Dumpster incident and Aragon’s
lifestyle at the time, come from the author’s
interviews with Albert See, Aragon’s former crime
partner. In interviews, Aragon generally
acknowledged his bank robbery conviction and his
use of cocaine in this period.
3 he delved into credit card fraud: Per Aragon, and
confirmed by his former associate Werner Janer
and Max.
4 busted in a nationwide DEA undercover operation:
Kathryn Sosbe, “13 arrested in marijuana
bust/Colombian cartel used Springs as distribution
point,” Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph,
September 13, 1991. The Federal Bureau of
Prisons confirmed Aragon’s conviction and
sentencing on a charge of travel in interstate
commerce in aid of a business enterprise involving
the distribution of marijuana.
5 They wound up at the twenty-seven-story Holiday
Inn: The descriptions of Max and Aragon’s work
together here and throughout this book come

primarily from interviews with Max and Aragon, as
well as their associates Werner Janer, Jonathan
Giannone, Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger, and
another source involved in their crimes. Statements
provided by Jeffrey Norminton to the FBI,
summarized in court documents, also confirm many
of the details.
6 a white-hat hacker had invented a sport called “war
driving”: “Evil” Pete Shipley. See the author’s “War
Driving by the Bay,” Securityfocus.com, April 12,
2001 (http://www.securityfocus.com/news/192).
7 Janer offered to pay Max $5,000 to penetrate the
computer of a personal enemy: According to
Aragon, Max, and other sources. Janer says the
money was a loan. Charity confirms she received
the check on Max’s behalf.
8 Charity had only the broadest notion of what Max
was up to: Interviews with Charity Majors.
9 On a whim, he cracked Kimi’s computer: Interview
with Max.

Chapter 11: Script’s Twenty-Dollar
Dumps
1 In the spring of 2001, some 150 Russian-
speaking computer criminals: Greg Crabb, U.S.
Postal Inspection Service. Roman Vega, currently in
U.S. custody, declined comment, as did the
Ukrainian widely suspected to be Script.
2 The discussion was sparked by: This history of the
carding forums comes from interviews with several
veteran carders, court records, interviews with law
enforcement officials, and a detailed examination of
the archives of Counterfeit Library, CarderPlanet,
and Shadowcrew.
3 the CVV began driving down fraud costs
immediately: Fraud figures come from a
presentation by Steven Johnson, director, Visa USA
Public Sector Sales, at the ninth annual GSA
SmartPay Conference in Philadelphia, August 23,
2007.
4 Chris decided to try some carding himself: Aragon
described his dealings with Script and his first
fraudulent purchases.

Chapter 12: Free Amex!
1 Max broached his plan obliquely with Charity:
Interview with Charity Majors.
2 Internet Explorer can process more than just Web
pages: Drew Copley and eEye Digital Security,
“Internet Explorer Object Data Remote Execution
Vulnerability,” August 20, 2003. See CERT
Vulnerability Note VU#865940. The author located
Max’s attack code in a 2003 post to a hacker Web
forum, and computer security researcher Marc
Maiffret, an executive at eEye, confirmed that it
exploited this bug. Max remembers having the
vulnerability before it was public but isn’t sure how
he obtained it. He says eEye and its researchers
never leaked bugs in advance.
3 The disk was packed with FBI reports: Aragon,
Max, and Werner Janer all related the story of Max’s
intrusion into the FBI agent’s computer. Max, Janer,
and another source confirmed the agent’s name.
The agent, E. J. Hilbert, insists he was never hacked
and that Max likely penetrated an FBI honeypot filled
with fake information.

Chapter 13: Villa Siena
1 Chris loaded blank PVC cards: Aragon admits his
credit card counterfeiting operation and provided
some details in interviews. The author examined
Aragon’s counterfeiting gear, and dozens of his
finished cards, at the Newport Beach Police
Department. The blow-by-blow on how the
equipment operates comes from interviews with
another experienced card counterfeiter who used
the same gear.
2 summoned his girls: Nancy Diaz Silva and
Elizabeth Ann Esquere have pleaded guilty for their
roles in Aragon’s operation. The other cashers were
described variously by Aragon’s former associates
Werner Janer, Jonathan Giannone, and
Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger.
3 They’d be “sticking it to the man”: The Newport
Beach Police Department interviewed one of
Aragon’s later cashers, Sarah Jean Gunderson, in
2007. According to the police report: “Aragon stated
that it was ‘The man that we are sticking it to.’
Gunderson said she knew it was wrong, however all
of her bills were getting paid.” Gunderson has
pleaded guilty.

Chapter 14: The Raid
1 Chris Toshok awoke to the sound of his doorbell
buzzing: The details of the raid come primarily from
Toshok’s blog post “The whole surreal story,” I am
Pleased Precariously on January 15, 2004.
2 The FBI tried to lure Gembe to America: Cassell
Bryan-Low, “Hacker Hitmen,” Wall Street Journal,
October 6, 2003. Also see the author’s “Valve Tried
to Trick Half-Life 2 Hacker into Fake Job Interview,”
Wired.com, November 12, 2008.
(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/11/valve-
tricked-h/).
3 “Call me back when you’re not stoned”: Aragon
and Max both agree they fought over money. This
quote was recalled by Aragon.
4 sending them to Mexico to be fitted with clean
VINs: Interviews with Werner Janer and Jonathan
Giannone. Court records from Aragon’s San
Francisco arrest show his car was found to have
fake VIN tags, and as part of the case settlement
Aragon agreed to forfeit the vehicle. Aragon
declined to elaborate on that aspect of his activities
in interviews.

Chapter 15: UBuyWeRush
1 Cesar had come to the underground by a
circuitous course: Interview with Carranza.
2 Selling equipment wasn’t in and of itself illegal:
Carranza pleaded guilty to money laundering in
December 2009 for running an e-gold exchange
service for carders under the UBuyWeRush brand.
U.S. v. Cesar Carranza, 1:08-cr-0026 U.S. District
Court for the Eastern District of New York. On
September 16, 2010, he was sentenced to six years
in prison.
3 The midsized Commerce Bank in Kansas City,
Missouri, may have been the first: Interview with
Mark J. Tomasic, former vice president of bank card
security with Commerce Bank. Also see “Hey,
banks, earn your stripes and fight ATM fraud
scams,” Kansas City Star, June 1, 2008.
4 Citibank, the nation’s largest consumer bank by
holdings, was the most high-profile victim: The
CVV attacks were widely known as the “Citibank
cash-outs” in carding circles. One of King Arthur’s
cashers, Kenneth Flury, was prosecuted in the
United States after admitting to stealing $384,000 in
Citibank ATM withdrawals in ten days in the spring
of 2004: U.S. v. Kenneth J. Flury, 1:05-cr-00515,
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.
Citibank declined comment. To discourage
competitors, masterminds of the cash-outs often
claimed to have secret algorithms at their disposal
to generate workable magstripes. Max and other
carders confirmed this was a myth, as did FBI agent
J. Keith Mularski. Any data would work.

5 once let it slip to a colleague that King was making
$1 million a week: Joseph Menn, “Fatal System
Error,” Public Affairs, January 2010.
6 Max had passed them all to Chris, who tore into
them with a vengeance: Interview with Max. Werner
Janer confirmed that Chris worked on the Citibank
cash-outs with Max, but Janer did not know the
details. Aragon declined to comment on the cash-
outs.
7 In just one year: Avitan Litan, “Criminals Exploit
Consumer Bank Account and ATM System
Weaknesses,” Gartner report G00129989, July 28,
2005. The loss estimate includes two types of
magstripe “discretionary” data that was not being
properly verified: the CVV and an optional PIN offset
used by some banks.

Chapter 16: Operation Firewall
1 Banner ads appeared at the top of the site: This
and other reporting on Shadowcrew’s contents
comes from a mirror of the public portion of the site
captured in October 2004, immediately before it
was shuttered.
2 The posts disappeared at once: Interviews with
Max. Aragon independently stated that he and Max
tried to warn Shadowcrew members in advance of
the Operation Firewall raids.
3 The transactions ranged from the petty to the
gargantuan: Transaction details come from the
Operation Firewall indictment, U.S. v. Mantovani et
al., 2:04-cr-00786, U.S. District Court for the District
of New Jersey.
4 the Secret Service had noticed Ethics was selling:
Ethics’s hacking of the Secret Service agent was
first reported by the author: “Hacker penetrates T-
Mobile systems,” Securityfocus.com, January 11,
2005. His use of the BEA Systems exploit came
from sources close to the case and was first
reported by the author: “Known Hole Aided T-Mobile
Breach,” Wired.com, February 28, 2005
(http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/02/66735).
Also see U.S. v. Nicolas Lee Jacobsen, 2:04-mj-
02550, U.S. District Court for the Central District of
California.
5 David Thomas was a lifelong scammer who’d
discovered the crime forums: For Thomas’s history
with the forums and the details of his work for the
FBI, see Kim Zetter, “I Was a Cybercrook for the

FBI,” Wired.com, January 20, 2007. A U.S.
government source confirmed to the author that
Thomas had worked for the bureau while running his
forum, the Grifters.
6 “You don’t know who you have here”: From the
police report of Thomas’s arrest. “The problem with
the Bureau and the Secret Service is they look at the
largest biggest deals they can get in on,” Thomas
said in a 2005 interview with the author. “They want
the big enchilada.”
7 Their targets were marked on a map of the United
States: Brian Grow, “Hacker Hunters,”
Businessweek, May 30, 2005
(http://www.businessweek.com/magazine
/content/05_22/b3935001_mz001.htm). The
identification of the Secret Service agents’ guns
also comes from this story.
8 Attorney General John Ashcroft boasted in a press
release: “Nineteen Individuals Indicted in Internet
‘Carding’ Conspiracy,” October 28, 2004
(http://www.justice.gov/usao/nj/press/files/pdffiles/fire1028rel.pdf).

Chapter 17: Pizza and Plastic
1 His scanning put him inside a Windows machine:
Max, Jonathan Giannone, and Brett Johnson each
independently identified the Pizza Schmizza in
Vancouver, Washington, as the source of Max’s
dumps in this period. The store manager said the
restaurant has since changed ownership, and she
had no knowledge of a breach.
2 Max couldn’t help feeling cheated yet again:
Interviews with Max.
3 Giannone was a smart middle-class kid with a
coke habit: Giannone confirmed the cocaine use
and all the details of his relationship with Max and
Aragon. He discussed the elevator button pressing
and the “bank robbery” prank in a chat with another
carder, a log of which was provided to the author.
Giannone confirmed in an interview that he
discussed the bank robbery hoax but said it was an
idle boast, and he didn’t actually pull it off. He said
he did not recall the elevator matter.
4 Giannone joined Shadowcrew and CarderPlanet
under the handle MarkRich: Giannone’s transition
through various handles was confirmed by Giannone
in an interview. Posts on the forums reviewed by the
author confirm he gave up his original handle after
being suspected of informing on an associate while
a juvenile.
5 launched a DDoS attack against JetBlue:
Giannone also discussed this attack in the
abovementioned chat logs. He confirmed it in
interviews with the author.

6 the teen was running his operations from the
computer in his mother’s bedroom: Interviews with
Max.

Chapter 18: The Briefing
1 Mularski had wanted to be an FBI agent since his
freshman year: Mularski’s biographical details and
his early work at NCFTA come from interviews with
Mularski.
2 The briefing for about half a dozen FBI agents:
Interviews with J. Keith Mularski and Postal
Inspector Greg Crabb.

Chapter 19: Carders Market
1 “Sherwood Forest” wasn’t going to cut it for a
criminal marketplace: Aragon’s rejection of the
name comes from interviews with Max and a letter
Max later wrote his sentencing judge.
2 Janer, an avid watch collector, headed straight to
Richard’s: Janer explained his motives in the failed
watch caper in interviews, and Aragon confirmed he
provided Janer with cards as a favor. The criminal
case file describes how he was busted and his
subsequent cooperation, which Janer confirmed.
U.S. v. Werner William Janer, 3:06-cr-00003, U.S.
District Court for the District of Connecticut.
3 He hacked into a Florida data center run by
Affinity Internet: Court records confirm Carders
Market was hosted at Affinity at this time and that
Affinity later provided the FBI with a copy of the file
system. Max detailed the hack in interviews and in
contemporaneous postings to an Internet message
board as “Iceman.”
4 “I’m looking to make a good pile of money”: Chat
logs admitted as evidence in U.S. v. Jonathan
Giannone, 3:06-cr-01011, U.S. District Court for the
District of South Carolina. Online chats and
message board posts in this book are verbatim
when they appear within quotes, except for some
minor changes of grammar, punctuation, or spelling
for readability.

Chapter 20: The Starlight Room
1 Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger was being kissed:
Aragon, Max, and other sources confirm that
Tsetsendelger was recruited at the Starlight Room
and brought back to Aragon’s hotel. The details
come from interviews with Tsetsendelger. Liz and
Michelle Esquere declined comment.

Chapter 22: Enemies
1 required technicians to reboot the machine every
49.7 days: Sources include Linda Geppert, “Lost
Radio Contact Leaves Pilots on Their Own,” IEEE
Spectrum, November 2004
(http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/lost-
radio-contact-leaves-pilots-on-their-own).
2 Giannone was pretty sure he couldn’t hack Macs:
Interview with Giannone. Max acknowledges that he
hacked Giannone frequently and tracked his
movements, and was also prone to sending long
messages to Giannone, and others, reflecting his
thoughts. He also clarified that he had no problem
hacking Macs.
3 So he reached out to Thomas by ICQ to try to
head off trouble: Max and Aragon discussed their
ongoing conflict with Thomas, who also detailed his
suspicions about Carders Market and Johnson on
his own website, the Grifters. Additionally, the author
obtained a log of the chat between Aragon and
Thomas quoted herein.

Chapter 23: Anglerphish
1 He needed the money, plain and simple:
Johnson’s personal story comes from a sworn
affidavit he filed in his criminal case on April 13,
2007, and a letter he wrote his sentencing judge on
March 1, 2007. See U.S. v. Brett Shannon
Johnson, 3:06-cr-01129, U.S. District Court for the
District of South Carolina.
2 displayed simultaneously on a forty-two-inch
plasma screen hanging on the wall of the office:
Trial transcript in U.S. v. Jonathan Giannone, 3:06-
cr-01011, U.S. District Court for the District of South
Carolina.
3 The suspect had done everything but deep-clean
the carpet and paint the walls: Interview with Justin
Feffer, senior investigator, High Technology Crime
Division, Los Angeles County District Attorney’s
Office. Also see The People of the State of
California v. Shawn Mimbs, BA300469, Superior
Court of California, County of Los Angeles. Mimbs
declined comment.
4 The needles were steady as Johnson answered
the first two questions: According to Johnson. The
Secret Service declined to discuss Operation
Anglerphish.
5 “I will hound you for the rest of your life”: From
Johnson’s letter to his sentencing judge.

Chapter 24: Exposure
1 “Tea, these girls are white trash”: Interview with
Tsengeltsetseg Tsetsendelger. Aragon mentioned
his fondness for Tsetsendelger in interviews and a
letter to the author.
2 Iceman, she’d decided, was pretty cool: Interview
with Tsetsendelger. Max says he was respectful in
chats with her but privately disliked her.
3 “Get out of here”: The incident at the pool comes
from interviews with Tsetsendelger and Giannone.
4 The bug was in the brief handshake sequence:
See CERT Vulnerability Note VU#117929. The bug
was discovered accidentally by Steve Wiseman of
Intelliadmin.com while he was writing and testing a
VNC client. Technical details come from an analysis
by James Evans; see http://marc.info/?
l=bugtraq&m=114771408013890&w=2.
5 a widely read computer security blog: “Schneier on
Security” by Bruce Schneier.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/interview_with_1.html.
6 a random blog called “Life on the Road”: See
http://afterlife.wordpress.com/2006/06/19/cardersmarket-
shadowcrew-and-credit-card-theft/ and
http://afterlife.wordpress.com/2006/07/12/carding-
web-sites/.

Chapter 25: Hostile Takeover
1 Carders Market had six thousand members now:
Max, his former administrator Th3C0rrupted0ne,
and other carders say the site had in excess of six
thousand users after the hostile takeover. The
Justice Department, though, has put the number at
forty-five hundred.
2 secret even from his mother: According to his
mother, Marlene Aragon.

Chapter 26: What’s in Your Wallet?
1 industry-funded report by Javelin Research:
Javelin Strategy and Research, “2007 Identity Fraud
Survey Report,” February 2007. The report was
sponsored by Visa USA, Wells Fargo, and
CheckFree, and then prominently cited by Visa USA
in a PowerPoint presentation at a Federal Trade
Commission workshop: “50% of known thieves
—were known by the victim!” (emphasis original).
Also see the author’s “Stolen Wallets, Not Hacks,
Cause the Most ID Theft? Debunked,” Wired.com,
February 12, 2009
(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/02/stolen-
wallets/).
2 Visa’s private numbers told the real story:
Presentation by Steven Johnson, director, Visa
U.S.A. Public Sector Sales, at the ninth annual GSA
SmartPay Conference in Philadelphia, August 23,
2007. The presentation slides are marked “Visa
Confidential.”
3 C0rrupted had discovered the warez scene on
dial-up bulletin board systems: Biographical
information comes from telephone and online
interviews with Th3C0rrupted0ne, who spoke on
condition that his real name not be reported.
4 “I can’t believe how much you know about me”:
Interview with Aragon.
5 “Do not follow unsolicited links”: US-CERT
Technical Cyber Security Alert TA06-262A
(http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/416092).

6 Each copy of the message was customized: The
text of the spear phishing e-mail comes from an FBI
affidavit filed in U.S. v. Max Ray Butler, 3:07-mj-
00438, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Virginia. “Mary Rheingold” is not a real name and
was added by the author in place of “[First Name
and Last Name of Recipient]” in the original court
document.

Chapter 27: Web War One
1 “The Secret Service and FBI declined to comment
on Iceman or the takeovers”: Byron Acohido and
Jon Swartz, “Cybercrime flourishes in online hacker
forums,” USA Today, October 11, 2006.
2 “You’ve lost your fucking mind”: Interview with
Chris Aragon.
3 Bank of America and Capital One, in particular,
were huge institutions: Of his spear-phishing
attacks, Max was charged only with the Capital One
intrusion. The other victims were identified by Max.

Chapter 28: Carder Court
1 it was just Silo trying to gather intelligence on
DarkMarket members for the police: Max, Mularski,
and Th3C0rrupted0ne identified Liske as Silo. In
extensive interviews, Liske was evasive about his
activities on the forums but spoke obliquely of his
work as an informant and his relationship with Max.
“Max was a good case. You know, he was a
challenge.” On the NCFTA Trojan, he said: “Isn’t it
reasonable to assume that whoever was dishing out
Trojans was actually dishing out Trojans to everyone
in the scene?” Later, “If it were malicious I could
have—someone could have caused real damage.”
Detective Mark Fenton of the Vancouver Police
Department said Canadian law prohibits him from
identifying or confirming an informant’s identity. On
the subject of whether he received hacked evidence
from informants, he said: “I know down in the States,
if an individual received any information that is
suspect, it’s not admissible. Up here, if someone
tells me something, I say, ‘Where did you hear that
from?’ He says, ‘I heard it from some guy.’ ” He
likened the arrangement to the Crime Stoppers tip
program. “Should Crime Stoppers be scrapped
because we have criminals phoning in tips about
other criminals?” One unanswered question is to
what degree, if any, the Secret Service leaned on
hacked information provided by the VPD to build
cases in the United States. The Secret Service
declined to make agents available to the author:
“Although we have chosen not [to] participate with
this particular project, feel free to approach us with
other ideas in the future.”
2 the same user had once registered another

address through the company: Max says Night Fox
was responsible for registering the Financial Edge
News website and made this blunder.

Chapter 29: One Plat and Six Classics
1 “for 150 classics”: Affidavit of Secret Service
Special Agent Roy Dotson, July 24, 2007, filed in
USA v. E-Gold, LTD, 1:07-cr-0019, U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia. For the complete
history of e-gold, see Kim Zetter, “Bullion and
Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold,”
Wired.com, June 9, 2007.
2 They were working closely with Silo’s handler at
the Vancouver Police Department: Word of the
meeting got back to Liske. “There was an
accusation that I was Iceman,” he said in an
interview. “And there was a big presentation made
that this guy was Iceman. And the people this was
presented to knew full well that I wasn’t.”

Chapter 30: Maksik
1 straight from Maksik’s massive database of stolen
cards: U.S. v. Maksym Yastremski, 3:06-cr-01989,
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of
California.
2 In early 2006, the Ukranians finally identified
Maksik as one Maksym Yastremski: Interview with
Greg Crabb.
3 they secretly copied his hard drive for analysis:
Government filing dated July 24, 2009, in U.S. v.
Albert Gonzalez, 2:08-cr-00160, U.S. District Court
for the Eastern District of New York.
4 “We were lucky in this case, because Salgado’s
purchaser was cooperating with the FBI”: Written
testimony of Robert S. Litt, deputy attorney general,
before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications,
Trade and Consumer Protection, House Commerce
Committee, September 4, 1997
(http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/daag9_97.htm).
5 But the feds lost the crypto wars: For a detailed
history, see Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code
Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in
the Digital Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2002).

Chapter 31: The Trial
1 “So, you take my girls out to party now?”: Interview
with Giannone.
2 Once a jury is seated, a defendant’s chances for
acquittal are about one in ten: Fiscal year 2006.
Calculated from “Federal Justice Statistics, 2006—
Statistical Tables,” U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 1, 2009
(http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?
ty=pbdetail&iid=980).
3 “I suspect that you are never going to look at the
Internet exactly the same way again”: Trial
transcript in U.S. v. Jonathan Giannone, 3:06-cr-
01011, U.S. District Court for the District of South
Carolina. Some grammatical changes were made
for readability.
4 “Who’s Iceman?”: Interview with Giannone.

Chapter 32: The Mall
1 his new partner, twenty-three-year-old Guy Shitrit:
Information about Shitrit’s trouble in Miami comes
from Aragon. Detective Robert Watts of the Newport
Beach Police Department confirmed he’d heard the
same account. Shitrit, now in custody, did not
respond to a letter from the author.
2 His wife, Clara, had brought in $780,000 on eBay
in a little over three years: Based on sales figures
from Clara Aragon’s eBay account obtained by the
Newport Beach Police Department. Aragon
declined to discuss his profits.
3 Max, he felt, was ignoring the Whiz List, their
blueprint for building one big score and getting out:
Interview with Aragon. When police searched
Aragon’s cell phone, they found this entry on his
electronic to-do list: “tackle whiz list.”
4 in meticulous, hand-drawn spreadsheets
summing up how much Chris owed her for each in-
store appearance: One such spreadsheet was
seized by the Newport Beach Police Department
and seen by the author.
5 Vigo was looking for a way to pay down a $100,000
debt to the Mexican Mafia: This according to Vigo’s
statements to the police following his arrest. The
Newport Beach Police Department found a copy of
the shipping manifest in Vigo’s office.
6 Bloomingdale’s security people didn’t like to upset
the store’s customers: Interview with Detective
Robert Watts.

7 thirty-one Coach bags, twelve new Canon
PowerShot digital cameras: Per the search warrant
seizure records.

Chapter 33: Exit Strategy
1 Max decided to invest in a rope ladder: Interview
with Max.
2 Max finally learned about Giannone’s bust from a
news article: Kim Zetter, “Secret Service Operative
Moonlights as Identity Thief,” Wired.com. June 6,
2007
(http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/06/secret_service).
3 He was growing jumpier every day: Based on an
interview with Charity Majors. Max says he was alert
but not jumpy.
4 a judge approved his legal name change from
Max Butler to Max Ray Vision: In Re: Max Ray
Butler, CNC-07-543988, County of San Francisco,
Superior Court of California.
5 Silo had hidden a second message: Interview with
Max. Lloyd Liske would neither confirm nor deny this
account.
6 The company openly marketed the service as a
way to circumvent FBI surveillance: “In some
countries, government sponsored projects have
been set up to collect massive amounts of data from
the Internet, including emails, and store them away
for future analysis. […] One example of such a
program was the FBI’s Carnivore project. By using
Hushmail, you can be assured that your data will be
protected from that kind of broad government
surveillance.”
http://www.hushmail.com/about/technology/security/.

7 forced Hushmail officials to sabotage their own
system and compromise specific surveillance
targets’ decryption keys: Ryan Singel, “Encrypted E-
Mail Company Hushmail Spills to Feds,” Wired.com.
November 7, 2007. Detective Mark Fenton of the
Vancouver Police Department said he provided
Max’s Hushmail e-mail to the Secret Service.
8 It was supposed to be a training run for one of
Chris’s new recruits: Interviews with Tsengeltsetseg
Tsetsendelger and Chris Aragon.
9 a female Secret Service agent disguised as a
maid: The Secret Service’s surveillance, including
the ride up the elevator with Max, was described in
an affidavit in U. S. v. Max Ray Butler, 2:07-cr-
00332, U.S. District Court for the Western District of
Pennsylvania. Max said in an interview that the
agent was dressed as a maid. FBI agent Mularski
says the surveillance was on and off for months.
10 Chris picked out Max’s mugshot from the photos:
U.S. v. Max Ray Butler, 2:07-cr-00332, U.S. District
Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Aragon says the government tricked him by telling
him Max had already been arrested, but he also
gave them information on Max’s security measures,
which undermines that claim. Court records for
Aragon’s criminal case in Orange County indicate a
sealed letter from Dembosky is on file. The People
of the State of California vs. Christopher John
Aragon, et al., 07HF0992, Superior Court of
California, County of Orange.
11 Two had lost power when an agent tripped over an
electrical cable: According to Max.

12 Max’s head snapped to look at Master Splyntr:
Interview with Mularski.
13 “You were right”: Interview with Charity Majors.
14 “Why do you hate us?”: Interview with Max.

Chapter 34: DarkMarket
1 he told a harrowing story: “Son bilgiyi verecekken
yok oldu!” Haber 71, August 12, 2008
(http://www.haber7.com/haber/20080812/Son-
bilgiyi-verecekken-yok-oldu.php).
2 fingering a known member of Cha0’s organization
as the shipper: Mularski described the genesis of
the investigation. The role played by the shipping
companies was detailed by Uri Rivner of RSA in a
blog post (http://www.rsa.com/blog/blog_entry.aspx?
id=1451). The Turkish National Police referred
inquiries to their embassy in Washington, DC, which
declined to make detectives available for interviews.
3 a tall, beefy man with close-cropped hair and a
black T-shirt emblazoned with the Grim Reaper:
Per police video of the arrest and search. Also see
“Enselenen Chao sanal semayi anlatti,” Haber 7,
September 12, 2008
(http://www.haber7.com/haber/20080912/Enselenen-
Chao-sanal-semayi-anlatti.php).
4 matching his appearances at the Java Bean with
JiLsi’s posts: Interview with Mularski. Also see
Caroline Davies, “Welcome to DarkMarket—global
one-stop shop for cybercrime and banking fraud,”
Guardian, January 4, 2010
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/14/darkmarket-
online-fraud-trial-wembley).
5 JiLsi’s associate, sixty-seven-year-old John
“Devilman” McHugh, Ibid.
6 Erkan “Seagate” Findikoglu: Interview with

Mularski. Also see Fusun S. Nebil, “FBI Siber
Suçlarla, ABD Içinde ve Disinda Isbirlikleri ile
Mücadele,” Turk.internet.com, June 15, 2010
(http://www.turk.internet.com/portal/yazigoster.php?
yaziid=28171).
7 Twenty-seven members of Seagate’s organization
were charged in Turkey: Interview with Mularski.
8 a reporter for Südwestrundfunk, Southwest
Germany public radio: The reporter was Kai
Laufen. See
http://www.swr.de/swr2/programm/sendungen
/wissen/-
/id=660374/nid=660374/did=3904422/p6601i/index.html.
9 The U.S. press picked up the story: The author
was the first to identify J. Keith Mularski by name as
the FBI agent posing as Master Splyntr, in
“Cybercrime Supersite ‘DarkMarket’ Was FBI Sting,
Documents Confirm,” Wired.com, October 13, 2008
(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/darkmarket-
post/).

Chapter 35: Sentencing
1 It had taken the CERT investigators only two
weeks to find the encryption key: Max well knew that
the key was vulnerable while in RAM, but he
believed the software security on his server would
prevent anyone from gaining access to its memory.
CERT’s Matt Geiger, who led the forensics team,
declined to comment on how he bypassed that
security but he said he was able to run memory-
acquisition software on Max’s computer.
2 Max had stolen 1.1 million of the cards from point-
of-sale systems: Max didn’t challenge this amount
for sentencing, but in interviews he expressed
disbelief that the number could be that high.

Chapter 36: Aftermath
1 An undercover Secret Service operative lured him
to a nightclub: “2010 Data Breach Investigations
Report,” Verizon RISK Team in cooperation with the
United States Secret Service, July 28, 2010.
2 ICQ user 201679996: Affidavit In Support of Arrest
Warrant, May 8, 2007, U.S. v. Albert Gonzalez,
2:08-mj-00444, U.S. District Court for the Eastern
District of New York.
3 it was Jonathan James who would pay the highest
price: See the author’s “Former Teen Hacker’s
Suicide Linked to TJX Probe,” Wired.com, July 9,
2009
(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/hacker/).
4 They recruit ordinary consumers as unwitting
money launderers: For more detail on these so-
called “money mule” scams, see the blog of former
Washingtonpost.com reporter Brian Krebs, who has
covered the crime extensively:
http://krebsonsecurity.com/.
5 the Secret Service had been paying Gonzalez an
annual salary of $75,000 a year: First reported in
Kim Zetter, “Secret Service Paid TJX Hacker
$75,000 a Year,” Wired.com, March 22, 2010.
6 filed by the attorneys general of 41 states: Sources
include Dan Kaplan, “TJX settles over breach with
41 states for $9.75 million,” SC Magazine, June 23,
2009 (http://www.scmagazineus.com/tjx-settles-
over-breach-with-41-states-for-975-
million/article/138930/).

7 another $40 million to Visa-issuing banks: Mark
Jewell, “TJX to pay up to $40.9 million in settlement
with Visa over data breach,” Associated Press,
November 30, 2007.
8 Heartland had been certified PCI compliant:
Sources include Ellen Messmer, “Heartland breach
raises questions about PCI standard’s
effectiveness,” Network World, January 22, 2009
(http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012209-
heartland-breach.html).
9 Hannaford Brothers won the security certification
even as hackers were in its systems: Sources
include Andrew Conry-Murray, “Supermarket Breach
Calls PCI Compliance into Question,”
InformationWeek, March 22, 2008.
10 The restaurants filed a class-action lawsuit:
http://www.prlog.org/10425165-secret-service-
investigation-lawsuit-cast-shadow-over-radiant-
systems-and-distributo.html. Also, “Radiant Systems
and Computer World responsible for breach
affecting restaurants—lawsuit,” Databreaches.net,
November 24, 2010 (http://www.databreaches.net/?
p=8408) and Kim Zetter, “Restaurants Sue Vendor
for Unsecured Card Processor,” Wired.com,
November 30, 2009
(http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/pos).
11 White hats have devised attacks against chip-
and-PIN: See Steven J. Murdoch, Saar Drimer,
Ross Anderson, and Mike Bond, “Chip and PIN Is
Broken,” University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory, Cambridge, UK. Presented at the 2010
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May

2010
(http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/).
The response by the UK Card Association is at
http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/
view_point_and_publications/what_we_think/-
/page/906/.
12 hundreds of thousands of point-of-sale terminals
with new gear: The cards themselves are more
expensive as well. For a more thorough discussion
of the issues holding back chip-and-PIN’s adoption
in the United States, see Clases Bell, “Are chip and
PIN credit cards coming?” Bankrate.com, February
18, 2010
(http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/personal-
finance/financial-planning/chip-pin-creditcards-
coming/). See also Allie Johnson, “U.S. credit cards
becoming outdated, less usable abroad,”
Creditcards.com (http://www.creditcards.com/credit-
card-news/outdated-smart-card-chip-pin-1273.php).

Epilogue
1 His mother suggested he get an agent: A letter to
the author from Aragon.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first encountered Max Vision some ten years ago, when I
was a newbie reporter for the computer security site
SecurityFocus.com. Max was then facing charges over his
scripted attack on thousands of Pentagon systems, and I
was fascinated by the story playing out in the Silicon Valley
courtroom, where the federal justice system was bearing
down on a once-respected computer security expert who’d
upended his life with a single, quixotic hack.
Years later, after I’d reported on hundreds of computer
crimes, vulnerabilities, and software glitches, Max was
arrested again, and a new federal indictment exposed the
secret life he’d led after his fall from grace. As I
investigated, I grew certain that Max, more than anyone
else, embodied the sea change I’d witnessed in the world
of hacking, and would be the perfect lens through which to
explore the modern computer underground.
Fortunately, others agreed. I owe a debt of thanks to my
agent, David Fugate, who guided me through the process
of developing my idea into a book proposal, and my editor
at Crown, Julian Pavia, who worked tirelessly to keep me
on course and only slightly behind schedule throughout a
year of reporting, writing, and rewriting.
Also crucial was the enormous support from my boss,
Evan Hansen, editor in chief at Wired.com. And I’m grateful
to my colleagues at Wired.com’s Threat Level blog, Kim
Zetter, Ryan Singel, and David Kravets, who collectively
shouldered the burden of my absence for two months while
I finished the book and then braved the burden of my
irritable, bleary-eyed return afterward.
My thanks also to Joel Deane and Todd Lapin, who
showed me the ropes when I became a journalist in 1998,
and Al Huger and Dean Turner of SecurityFocus.com.

and Al Huger and Dean Turner of SecurityFocus.com.
Jason Tanz at Wired magazine did an amazing job with my
feature article on Max, “Catch Me If You Can,” in the
January 2009 issue.
Among my guides in this book were the cops, feds,
hackers, and carders who spoke with me at length, with no
benefit to themselves. FBI Supervisory Special Agent J.
Keith Mularski was particularly generous with his time, and
Max Vision spent many hours on the prison phone and
writing long e-mails and letters to share his story with me.
My thanks to U.S. Postal Inspector Greg Crabb,
Detective Bob Watts of the Newport Beach Police
Department, former FBI agent E. J. Hilbert, and Assistant
U.S. Attorney Luke Dembosky, the latter of whom wouldn’t
tell me much, but was always nice about it. And I’m grateful
to Lord Cyric, Lloyd Liske, Th3C0rrupted0ne, Chris
Aragon, Jonathan Giannone, Tsengeltsetseg
Tsetsendelger, Werner Janer, Cesar Carranza, and other
veterans of the carder scene who asked to remain
unnamed.
The story of Max Vision would have listed heavily to his
criminal side were it not for Tim Spencer and Marty
Roesch, who shared their experience of Max as white-hat
hacker, and Kimi Mack, who spoke candidly about her
marriage to Max. My thanks also to security wunderkind
Marc Maiffret, who helped isolate some of Max’s exploits.
The underworld that Kingpin delves into has been
illuminated by a number of first-rate journalists, including
Bob Sullivan, Brian Krebs, Joseph Menn, Byron Acohido,
Jon Swartz, and my Wired colleague Kim Zetter.
Finally, my thanks to my wife, Lauren Gelman, without
whose loving support and sacrifice this book would not
have been possible, and to Sadelle and Asher, who will find
their computer use closely supervised until they’re eighteen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KEVIN POULSEN is a senior editor at Wired.com and a
contributor to Wired magazine. He oversees cybercrime,
privacy, and political coverage for Wired.com and edits the
award-winning Threat Level blog (wired.com/threatlevel),
which he founded in 2005. He’s broken numerous national
stories, including the FBI’s use of spyware in criminal and
national security investigations; a hacker’s penetration of a
Secret Service agent’s confidential files; and the secret
arrest of an Army intelligence officer accused of leaking
documents to whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. In 2009
he was inducted into MIN’s Digital Hall of Fame for online
journalism and in 2010 was voted one of the “Top Cyber
Security Journalists” by his peers.
