Перевод книги «Kingpin». Глава 33. «Стратегия выхода»

Exit Strategy
That’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.
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 email
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 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 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.