New breed of Cyber-fighter
p2pnet.net News:- “In an unmarked building in downtown Washington, Brian K. Nagel and 15 other Secret Service agents manned a high-tech command center, poised for the largest-ever roundup of a cybercrime gang,” says a Business Week feature, going on:
“A huge map of the U.S., spread across 12 digital screens, gave them a view of their prey, from Arizona to New Jersey. It was Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004, and Operation Firewall was about to be unleashed. The target: the ShadowCrew, a gang whose members were schooled in identity theft, bank account pillage, and the fencing of ill-gotten wares on the Web, police say. For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com. To ensure the suspects were at home, a gang member-turned-informant had pressed his pals to go online for a group meeting.
“At 9 p.m., Nagel, the Secret Service’s assistant director for investigations, issued the “go” order. Agents armed with Sig-Sauer 229 pistols and MP5 semi-automatic machine guns swooped in, aided by local cops and international police. The adrenaline was pumping, in part, because several ShadowCrew members were known to own weapons. Twenty-eight members were arrested, most still at their computers. The alleged ringleaders went quietly, but one suspect jumped out a second-story window. Agents nabbed him on the ground. Later, they found a loaded assault rifle in his apartment. The operation was swift and bloodless. ‘[Cybergangs] always thought they operated with anonymity,’ says Nagel, a tall, chiseled G-man. ‘We rattled them.’
“There’s a new breed of crime-fighter prowling cyberspace: the hacker hunters. Spurred by big profits, professional cyber-criminals have replaced amateur thrill-seeking hackers as the biggest threat on the Web. Software defenses are improving rapidly, but law enforcement and security companies understand they can no longer rely on technology alone to deal with the plague of virus attacks, computer break-ins, and online scams. Instead, they’re marshaling their forces and using gumshoe tactics to fight back — infiltrating hacker groups, monitoring their chatter on underground networks, and when they can, busting the baddies before they do any more damage. ‘The wave of the future is getting inside these groups, developing intelligence, and taking them down,’ says Christopher M.E. Painter, deputy chief of the Computer Crime section of the Justice Dept., who will help prosecute ShadowCrew members at a trial scheduled for October.
“Step by step, the cops are figuring out how to play the cybercrime game. They’re employing some of the same tactics used to crush organized crime in the 1980s — informants and the cyberworld equivalent of wiretaps. They’re also busy coming up with brand new moves. FBI agent Daniel J. Larkin, a 20-year vet who heads up the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, taps online service providers to help pierce the Web’s veil of anonymity and track down criminal hackers. In late April, leads supplied by the FBI and eBay Inc. (EBAY ) helped Romanian police round up 11 members of a gang that set up fake eBay accounts and auctioned off cell phones, laptops, and cameras they never intended to deliver. “We’re getting smarter every day,” says Larkin …”
… and there’s plenty more on the Business Week site
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See:-
Business Week - Hacker Hunters, May 30, 2005
May 21st, 2005 at 3:42 pm
And they were all home!?!? Well, if they were that stupid, I guess they should have been arrested.
How about war-driving over to the vicinity of a large up-scale condo building where one is bound to find at least one (if not 50) totally open 802.11 networks to connect to, or just go downtown and jack into the muni-WiFi or ‘community’ WiFi networks that are likely available. Connect via https to an off-shore proxy, (optionally connect back to a proxy in the US if you wish to instigate a wild goose chase of armed Government functionaries laying seige to the facility hosting said proxy) and jack into the chat.
The Government is always going to be at least one step behind the truly clever and creative at the forefront of cybersleaze. Furthermore, Government Service is unlikely to appeal to those who have the skills, mind-set, and personality that would be most well-suited to this type of law enforcement because of titanic clash of values that would inevitably occur.
It’s no wonder that the FBI wants a backdoor into your web-enabled kitchen appliances via CALEA.
May 22nd, 2005 at 11:52 am
“Step by step, the cops are figuring out how to play the cybercrime game.”
and the hackers are already 3 steps ahead, playing a whole new “cybercrime game”, laughing uncontrollably at their feeble efforts.
“They’re employing some of the same tactics used to crush organized crime in the 1980s — informants and the cyberworld equivalent of wiretaps. ”
unfortunately unlike the MAFIA, the bonds between hackers are based truly upon loyalty, not fear and/or money. This means the FBI cannot simply “flip someone” because they can’t offer them anything lucrative.
This is just another propaganda fluff piece which says “your government is looking out for you.. we are making progress.. really.. come on.. believe us already… ok don’t believe us.. we don’t care”.
Kinda reminds me of the “war on drugs”. Sorry.. everyone with a brain knows it didnt work, it’s still not working, it will never work, people will still get their drugs after we’re all long dead.
May 22nd, 2005 at 4:11 pm
Yes, and it’s a feature in Business Week, which I guess is meant to assuage the Corporate Types anxieties over hackers breaking into their systems and doing horrible, terrible things. Of course the Corporate Types are doing fabulous well all on their own doing horrible, terrible things: ChoicePoint, Reed-Elsiver(Lexis-Nexis), Bank of America, etc…
None of these were high-tech, hacker jobs. Just good old-fashioned pen and ink fraud.
Oh, and lest we forget, the “War on Drugs” also includes disinformation campaigns about the substances in question that range from spin, all the way to the outright lies based on completely fradulent research done at Johns Hopkins on MDMA that was utterly disproven by European Researchers. The latter was the subject of a piece on ABC News’ 20/20 sometime last year.
The War on Drugs is nothing more that additional Corporate Welfare for the so-called ‘Defense Industry’ so they can put that money somewhere other than the DoD budget, so it doesn’t look like it’s ballooning out of control. There’s now several entrenched bureaucracies and industrial sectors that are beholden to feeding at this money trough and it’s going to be hard for anyone to put a stop to this nonsense.
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing that’s been done thus far is the “Ishtook Amendment” that forebade public transit systems from accepting any advertizing that advocated even the examination of the current drug laws and policies, let alone advocated changing them. It was SO blantantly unconstitutional that Bush’s Solicitor General actually declined to defend it before the Supreme Court stating that there was no reasonable arguement that could be made that it was not an unconstitutional abridgement of the right of free speech and the right to petition the Government.
May 22nd, 2005 at 4:46 pm
speaking of that.. there was this great documentary on this history channel regarding illegal drugs, their evolution, how they became illegal.
It was on in the very early morning of course because there was no way to avoid putting into sharp relief the corruption and constitutional breaches of which the government was guilty in the passage of the nixon era drug control acts.
Those acts basically give the FDA legilsative power to make it an imprisonable offense to carry any drug they feel like banning. No congressional debate, no bills, no new laws.. just despotic decree by the FDA.
May 23rd, 2005 at 3:56 pm
I wish I knew your ip address, or better yet your real streat address. If I did, and it was close enogh, I’d pay you a visit to teach you a lesson about spamming on our message board!
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:18 pm
The criminals won again!!! I’m talking about the criminals that busted their fellow criminals. The S.S. loves to brag. I just wonder why they keep speading propaganda that these criminals are “hackers.” I believe that the government-corporates want the real hackers – the ones that use their knowlege to figure out how things work and expand their capabilities – to be ostricized and scorned. They cannot stand the fact that someone who did not go to a cartel-sanctioned “school” can be smarter than they are.
They do not like the fact that there are those who give away their knowlege for the benefit of the world. The cartels feel that because someone freely shares his or her knowlege that the value of the knowlege controlled by the cartels is diminished. The day will come when the cartels and governments will control the flow of information over the Internet. It is beginning to happen this very day. The government and cartels can do this because they control the cables, satelites and other such infrastructure.
However, there is no need to worry. The hackers will come up with an alternative. That is what real hackers do. They take technology already created and invent new uses and capabilities for it. Private (home) networks and cells is how non-sanctioned information will be passed in the future. P2P is here to stay. The only way the cartels and governments can do away with p2p is if they remove or destroy all electronic technology from the homes and business.
It is the real hackers that the S.S. and other government-cartel goons are afraid of. It is the the real hackers that are going to bypass the controls these thugs want to put us under. So the next time the term “hacker” is used by the press, think about the real purpose of the article.