Cybercrime, credit cards and drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.
THE GREAT CYBERHEIST
by James Verini | New York Times | November 2010
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn’t stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.
Rolling Stone’s more colorful take on the same.
SEX, DRUGS AND THE BIGGEST CYBERCRIME OF ALL TIME
by Sabrina Erdely | Rolling Stone | November 2010
They’d been high all weekend long — on Ecstasy, coke, mushrooms and acid — so there seemed little harm in doing one last bump of Special K while they packed up to leave their $5,000-a-night duplex in South Beach. For the past three days, the three friends had barely bothered leaving their hotel, as a dozen club kids in town for Winter Music Conference, the annual festival that draws DJs and ravers from all over the world, flocked to their luxury suite to partake of the drug smorgasbord laid out on the coffee table. But even stoned on industrial-grade horse tranquilizers, Albert Gonzalez remained focused on business — checking his laptop constantly, keeping tabs on the rogue operators he employed in Turkey and Latvia and China, pushing, haranguing, issuing orders into his cellphone in a steady voice. “Let’s see if this Russian asshole has what I need,” he’d say calmly. Then he would help himself to glass plates of powder, each thoughtfully cut into letters for easy identification: “E” for Ecstasy, “C” for coke.
And one more on stolen credit cards that overlaps with the above two.
ONE HACKER’S AUDACIOUS PLAN TO RULE THE BLACK MARKET IN CREDIT CARDS
by Kevin Poulson | Wired | December 2008
The heat in Max Butler’s safe house was nearly unbearable. It was the equipment’s fault. Butler had crammed several servers and laptops into the studio apartment high above San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, and the mass of processors and displays produced a swelter that pulsed through the room. Butler brought in some fans, but they didn’t provide much relief. The electric bill was so high that the apartment manager suspected Butler of operating a hydroponic dope farm.
…And one more. Kevin Poulson’s book about Max Butler.
KINGPIN: HOW ONE HACKER TOOK OVER THE BILLION-DOLLAR CRIME UNDERGROUND
by Kevin Poulson | February 2011
In a previous life, Poulsen served five years in prison for hacking. So the Wired senior editor and “Threat Level” blogger knows intimately the terrain he explores in this page-turning tale of the criminal exploits of a hacker of breathtaking ambition, Max Butler, who stole access to 1.8 million credit card accounts. Poulsen understands both the hows of hacking, which he explains clearly, as well as the whys, which include, but also can transcend, mere profit. Accordingly, his understanding of the hacking culture, and his extensive interviews with Butler, translates into a fascinating depiction of a cybercriminal underworld frightening in its complexity and its potential for harm, and a society shockingly vulnerable to cybercrime. The personalities, feuds, double dealing, and scams of the hackers are just one half of this lively story. The other half, told with equal verve, is law enforcement’s efforts to find and convict Butler and his accomplices. (Butler is now serving a 13-year sentence and owes .5 million in restitution.) Poulsen renders the hacker world with such virtual reality that readers will have difficulty logging off until the very end.
4/18/11 – Update:
IN SURPRISE APPEAL, TJX HACKER CLAIMS U.S. AUTHORIZED HIS CRIMES
by Kim Zetter | Wired | April 2011
Albert Gonzalez, the hacker who masterminded the largest credit card heists in U.S. history, is asking a federal judge to throw out his earlier guilty pleas and lift his record-breaking 20-year prison sentence, on allegations that the government authorized his years-long crime spree.