Cloned Boy
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This is a true story about how two FBI agents fooled two legendary Russian carders. Alexey Ivanov (Subbsta) and Vasily Gorshkov (Kvakin) - Legends of Russian carding.
Chelyabinsk, the birthplace of Russian carding. Chelyabinsk carders are so tough that when applying for a job at an IT company, they put their resumes right on the employer's desktop. Chelyabinsk hackers look like they can hack not only your system, but also your ass. Look at this couple of guys. The one on the left is Alexey Ivanov, and the one on the right is Vasily Gorshkov.
The story of these guys is amazing. It found its place in Steve Schroedder's book "Bait". The true story of how the Justice Department detained two of the most dangerous cybercriminals in the world. And naturally, Kevin Paulson mentioned it in his book about "The First Hacker After God". On July 15, 2000, a strange letter arrived in the mail of E-money president John Morgenstern.
"Your security has been breached, we want to help you," the letter said. John did not attach much importance to it and did not answer, but the very next day a phone call rang at his home. The young man who called introduced himself as Alex, said that he was from Russia and was a member of an organization of experts in protection against carders and hackers.
Naturally, no organization for protection against carders existed at all, and the voice on the line belonged to Alexey Ivanov, a brilliant Russian hacker. Lyokha said that he had access to the Imani customer database, including credit card information, and would be happy to help Morgenstern secure his system from further intrusions, if, of course, Imani paid him 500 thousand dollars.
As proof of the truth of his words, he advised Morgenstern to go to the system file on one of the servers where John found digital graffiti, Alix was there. John was afraid that if people found out about the hack and mania, he would lose clients, but despite all the threats, he stood his ground and refused to pay. Later, Vasily Gorshkov joined the conversation, he introduced himself as Victor.
Vasya was dropping the price in the hope of getting at least something, so 500 thousand turned into 250, then 150 and finally 75 thousand dollars. But John continued to stand his ground, he invited a security guard from Silicon Valley, who patched up all the holes, but Lyokha and Vasya found new ones and screwed John again. It reminded me of those movies from the 90s, when criminals demand ransom from the victim, making brutal dialogues on the phone.
Today, the rules of the game have changed, and Russian carders do not waste time on conversations, they encrypt the entire system and leave silently. And only the ransom note to get the decryption key reminds of their presence. But then everything was different. Lyokha, aka Sabsta, had just graduated from school and was constantly looking for work.
His friend, Vasya Eikey i Kwaken, was older, married and had a child. The guys didn't have enough money, and they decided to put together a hack group, calling it Protection Against Hackers. Imani was not the only victim of the criminal group, and its scheme was perfected to perfection. Lyokha and Vasya stole credit card numbers or any other data and sent a corresponding letter to an email or fax.
You have been hacked. If you want nothing to happen to your data, All information about your security holes is not publicly available, you must pay such and such an amount. But just like John Morgenstern, not everyone paid, so in 1999, friends bent Paypal and got hold of an impressive number of credit cards. Then these cards were used by bots to buy goods at eBay auctions.
Lyokha developed an effective method for cashing out the cash from the credit cards he stole. A specially written software automatically opened PayPal and eBay accounts, bought all sorts of goods with one of half a million stolen cards. The purchased items were sent to Eastern Europe for further resale. After which the program repeated all the actions in a circle over and over again. PayPal checked the list of credit cards he had stolen in its internal database and found that he had spent a crazy, especially at that time, 800 thousand dollars.
And this is only PayPal. The gang stole tens of thousands of credit card numbers from the online information bureau, the Financial Operations Center in Vernon, Connecticut. Seattle Internet provider Speakeasy was attacked, as well as Sterling Microsystems in Anaheim, California. The provider Cincinnati, the Korean bank of Los Angeles and even the well-known Western Union, they were all hacked.
The latter lost about sixteen thousand credit card numbers, for which the extortionists asked for fifty thousand dollars. And when the CD Universe music store refused to pay a ransom of one hundred thousand dollars, thousands of its customers' credit cards appeared on a well-known forum in the public domain. The funniest thing is that Alexey Ivanov, who was far from poor, continued to look for work in the decaying West.
He sent his resume with each new hack. So, when hacking the Speakeasy Internet provider, Lyokha managed to send his portfolio with a personal photo of himself. Meanwhile, John Morgenstern, realizing that he could not cope with the Russians alone, turned to the FBI for help. The feds wiretapped all of John's calls, at that time they were already well aware of all the exploits of the Russian guys.
And the FBI branch "US National Infrastructure Defense Center" was pretty fucking tired of notifying about new holes in the banking and financial systems. The feds gave John an order, he had to drag the carders into the USA by all unthinkable means. When Lyokha called with a new ransom offer, John told him that his hacking skills were amazing.
It is specialists like you that we need in the USA. Gradually, a semblance of friendly relations even developed between Morgenstern and the Russian carders. Sometimes Lyokha would call him at home, and his son would pick up the phone and shout, "Dad, Alex is asking for you again." Morgenstern would tell him about life in the USA, and he would tell him about life in Russia.
One fine day, the tone of their conversations changed completely. Lyokha told Morgenstern to forget about money. He asked for help in obtaining a visa and finding a job in the USA. "John, I will fix your system, and no one will attack you again in your life. Please help me find a job in America," Alexey said. A few days later, he wrote a letter. "I have decided to come and see you in the USA.
Whatever happens to me, I will take the risk, I trust you. I want to find a job and forget about my criminal past. I can come next week. Morgenstern could not help but sympathize with the boys' situation. He offered to be their go-between in finding a job and tried to get the FBI to promise not to touch Russian carders if they found honest work upon arrival in the US. He connected them with an agent who promised to consider such an opportunity, but the federal moles, naturally, were bluffing, they were preparing a cunning operation called a "flyhook".
The hacker attacks stopped, and Morgenstern stopped receiving calls from Alex and Victor. In the meantime, the feds sent a letter to Alexey's email, which said that the company Invita Technologies was inviting him to work in the field of computer security consulting.
The letter was written on behalf of the company's director, a certain Mr. Patterson. Patterson said that Invita was a young company, but already had its own clients thanks to contacts that Patterson had dealt with in the past, working for SAN and Microsoft. Alexey Ivanov was delighted then, finally someone recognized his talent and was ready to invite him to America. He asked if he could bring a business partner with him.
Having received the go-ahead, for the sake of credibility, only Ivanov would be paid for the flight. His friend Vasily Gorshkov would fly at his own expense. In November 2000, the friends flew to America. At the Seattle airport, they were met by company representatives and taken to the office. Office workers crowded around them, local pop music was loudly blaring from the speakers in the room. Having closed all the windows on his computer, Gorshkov entered the conference room, and Michael Patterson, the CEO of Invit, started the conversation.
Patterson began asking Gorshkov about the recent hacks of American companies. “Well, this is so that I know that you are as good as I think you are,” Patterson said. “Maybe it was one of you?” Gorshkov was silent for a minute, then answered. “Well, a few months ago we tried to do something similar, but we found it unprofitable.”
Meanwhile, while Vasily Gorshkov was in the conference room with Patterson, Alexey Ivanov was undergoing some kind of testing on the office computer. To solve some problems, he needed a certain software, which was located on their server in Chelyabinsk. Lyokha, without a second thought, connected to the Chelyabinsk computer, downloaded the necessary software and solved the problem set by the feds. Without suspecting anything, Lyokha and Vasya found themselves in a trap that was about to slam shut.
They were surrounded by feds playing the role of company employees. Among them was a white hat hacker who played an IT specialist named Ray. Hidden microphones and surveillance cameras were installed throughout the office, recording every rustle and movement, and key loggers installed by the FBI on each computer recorded keyboard presses. Outside in the parking lot, about 20 more agents were standing and waiting for signals, who could burst in at any moment and help with the arrest.
Of course, before the arrest, Agent Patterson tried to get as much information out of Gorshkov as possible, since after the arrest he might not say a word, so there was no point in wasting the moment. "How about dumps or something like that?" "I don't understand what you're talking about," Gorshkov replied, smiling. Gorshkov's agents laughed. "I understand you, I understand, guys."
As soon as their nice two-hour meeting was over, the CEO led the guys to the car, supposedly to take them to temporary housing specially prepared for their arrival. But before they had driven even half a kilometer, the car suddenly stopped. The fighters driving behind them opened the car doors, pulled out the Russians and twisted their arms. It all took less than a minute. That's all Ivanov managed to write in his native Russian.
Upon arriving back at the office, one of the agents realized that the Keylogger installed on all the cars in the Invita bureau would give him a rare opportunity right now. What he did next would make him the first FBI agent to be charged with a computer crime by Russian police. He opened the Keylogger log and found the password Ivanov had used to access their home computers in Chelyabinsk.
Then, after consulting with his boss and the prosecutor, he logged into the carders' Russian server and began examining the directory names for files belonging to Ivanov and Gorshkov. The files were found and successfully downloaded as 2.3 gigabytes of compressed data, then burned to CDs. It was only some time later that the agent received written permission from a federal judge to do all the things he had already done.
It was the first international seizure of evidence using the carding method. After their capture, the carders began to cooperate with the investigation, and companies they had previously attacked, such as Good News Internet Services and VPN Internet Services, Online Information Bureau, and Financial Services Incorporated, came to light.
Soon, two residents of Chelyabinsk were charged with multiple charges of hacking computer systems, fraud using computers and data networks, credit card fraud and extortion. Then Vasily Gorshkov received 3 years in an American prison and had to pay 700 thousand dollars in compensation for the damage caused to him. Alexey Ivanov received 4 years.
FBI agents Marty Prevatt and Michael Shuler were nominated for an award. The second of them, by the way, played the role of the CEO of Invit, Mr. Patterson. Thus, Michael Shuler justified his name 100%, thereby staking out a place in federal paradise. The white hacker who played an IT specialist named Ray turned out to be Raymond Pompon, the author of the book "IT Security Risk Management" and the current director of F5 Labs.
Assistant U.S. Attorney for Ivanov and Gorshkov, Stephen Schroeder, was so moved by the hackers' story that he wrote that very book. John Morgenstern, who became the link in catching the Russian carders, did not know about Vasya and Lyokha's arrest until late 2001. By that time, he had already managed to sell his business profitably, but still served as the company's CEO.
He had mixed feelings about everything that was happening, on the one hand, he was angry at the Russian carders for sucking his blood, and on the other, he believed that they had almost no choice. And as a legendary bookseller, I tend to think the same way. Believe me, if you have even the slightest chance to get out of the shit, you will definitely use it.
That's why I never take it upon myself to judge cybercriminals; despite all their exploits, Lyokha and Vasya pursued only one goal - to get a legal job where their skills would be appreciated. They took a risk, they were unlucky, unlucky, that's how it happens in life. Perhaps this flight was naive, stupid, but the history of hacking will not build itself. It needs victims, Vasya and Lyokha became bricks in the foundation of that very history.
Ivanov and Gorshkov were Columbus and Magellan in the field of cybercrime. Their arrival in the USA instantly changed the global map of online fraud for the FBI, placing its center in Eastern Europe. Well, I continue to follow Kingpin, remember I said that it would be a long but exciting journey. And today, looking at the first part about the first hacker after God, a smile appears on my face.
Thank God that Pavlovich then understood the joke and did not send his thugs to me. And there are dangerous guys there, it is clear that years of training were not in vain. The healthiest of them is called Gleb, Gleb is so cool that he can drop in on his godfather right during filming just to say hello. As it turns out, Gleb has his own YouTube channel where he exposes businessmen.
See you soon, hugs!
Chelyabinsk, the birthplace of Russian carding. Chelyabinsk carders are so tough that when applying for a job at an IT company, they put their resumes right on the employer's desktop. Chelyabinsk hackers look like they can hack not only your system, but also your ass. Look at this couple of guys. The one on the left is Alexey Ivanov, and the one on the right is Vasily Gorshkov.
The story of these guys is amazing. It found its place in Steve Schroedder's book "Bait". The true story of how the Justice Department detained two of the most dangerous cybercriminals in the world. And naturally, Kevin Paulson mentioned it in his book about "The First Hacker After God". On July 15, 2000, a strange letter arrived in the mail of E-money president John Morgenstern.
"Your security has been breached, we want to help you," the letter said. John did not attach much importance to it and did not answer, but the very next day a phone call rang at his home. The young man who called introduced himself as Alex, said that he was from Russia and was a member of an organization of experts in protection against carders and hackers.
Naturally, no organization for protection against carders existed at all, and the voice on the line belonged to Alexey Ivanov, a brilliant Russian hacker. Lyokha said that he had access to the Imani customer database, including credit card information, and would be happy to help Morgenstern secure his system from further intrusions, if, of course, Imani paid him 500 thousand dollars.
As proof of the truth of his words, he advised Morgenstern to go to the system file on one of the servers where John found digital graffiti, Alix was there. John was afraid that if people found out about the hack and mania, he would lose clients, but despite all the threats, he stood his ground and refused to pay. Later, Vasily Gorshkov joined the conversation, he introduced himself as Victor.
Vasya was dropping the price in the hope of getting at least something, so 500 thousand turned into 250, then 150 and finally 75 thousand dollars. But John continued to stand his ground, he invited a security guard from Silicon Valley, who patched up all the holes, but Lyokha and Vasya found new ones and screwed John again. It reminded me of those movies from the 90s, when criminals demand ransom from the victim, making brutal dialogues on the phone.
Today, the rules of the game have changed, and Russian carders do not waste time on conversations, they encrypt the entire system and leave silently. And only the ransom note to get the decryption key reminds of their presence. But then everything was different. Lyokha, aka Sabsta, had just graduated from school and was constantly looking for work.
His friend, Vasya Eikey i Kwaken, was older, married and had a child. The guys didn't have enough money, and they decided to put together a hack group, calling it Protection Against Hackers. Imani was not the only victim of the criminal group, and its scheme was perfected to perfection. Lyokha and Vasya stole credit card numbers or any other data and sent a corresponding letter to an email or fax.
You have been hacked. If you want nothing to happen to your data, All information about your security holes is not publicly available, you must pay such and such an amount. But just like John Morgenstern, not everyone paid, so in 1999, friends bent Paypal and got hold of an impressive number of credit cards. Then these cards were used by bots to buy goods at eBay auctions.
Lyokha developed an effective method for cashing out the cash from the credit cards he stole. A specially written software automatically opened PayPal and eBay accounts, bought all sorts of goods with one of half a million stolen cards. The purchased items were sent to Eastern Europe for further resale. After which the program repeated all the actions in a circle over and over again. PayPal checked the list of credit cards he had stolen in its internal database and found that he had spent a crazy, especially at that time, 800 thousand dollars.
And this is only PayPal. The gang stole tens of thousands of credit card numbers from the online information bureau, the Financial Operations Center in Vernon, Connecticut. Seattle Internet provider Speakeasy was attacked, as well as Sterling Microsystems in Anaheim, California. The provider Cincinnati, the Korean bank of Los Angeles and even the well-known Western Union, they were all hacked.
The latter lost about sixteen thousand credit card numbers, for which the extortionists asked for fifty thousand dollars. And when the CD Universe music store refused to pay a ransom of one hundred thousand dollars, thousands of its customers' credit cards appeared on a well-known forum in the public domain. The funniest thing is that Alexey Ivanov, who was far from poor, continued to look for work in the decaying West.
He sent his resume with each new hack. So, when hacking the Speakeasy Internet provider, Lyokha managed to send his portfolio with a personal photo of himself. Meanwhile, John Morgenstern, realizing that he could not cope with the Russians alone, turned to the FBI for help. The feds wiretapped all of John's calls, at that time they were already well aware of all the exploits of the Russian guys.
And the FBI branch "US National Infrastructure Defense Center" was pretty fucking tired of notifying about new holes in the banking and financial systems. The feds gave John an order, he had to drag the carders into the USA by all unthinkable means. When Lyokha called with a new ransom offer, John told him that his hacking skills were amazing.
It is specialists like you that we need in the USA. Gradually, a semblance of friendly relations even developed between Morgenstern and the Russian carders. Sometimes Lyokha would call him at home, and his son would pick up the phone and shout, "Dad, Alex is asking for you again." Morgenstern would tell him about life in the USA, and he would tell him about life in Russia.
One fine day, the tone of their conversations changed completely. Lyokha told Morgenstern to forget about money. He asked for help in obtaining a visa and finding a job in the USA. "John, I will fix your system, and no one will attack you again in your life. Please help me find a job in America," Alexey said. A few days later, he wrote a letter. "I have decided to come and see you in the USA.
Whatever happens to me, I will take the risk, I trust you. I want to find a job and forget about my criminal past. I can come next week. Morgenstern could not help but sympathize with the boys' situation. He offered to be their go-between in finding a job and tried to get the FBI to promise not to touch Russian carders if they found honest work upon arrival in the US. He connected them with an agent who promised to consider such an opportunity, but the federal moles, naturally, were bluffing, they were preparing a cunning operation called a "flyhook".
The hacker attacks stopped, and Morgenstern stopped receiving calls from Alex and Victor. In the meantime, the feds sent a letter to Alexey's email, which said that the company Invita Technologies was inviting him to work in the field of computer security consulting.
The letter was written on behalf of the company's director, a certain Mr. Patterson. Patterson said that Invita was a young company, but already had its own clients thanks to contacts that Patterson had dealt with in the past, working for SAN and Microsoft. Alexey Ivanov was delighted then, finally someone recognized his talent and was ready to invite him to America. He asked if he could bring a business partner with him.
Having received the go-ahead, for the sake of credibility, only Ivanov would be paid for the flight. His friend Vasily Gorshkov would fly at his own expense. In November 2000, the friends flew to America. At the Seattle airport, they were met by company representatives and taken to the office. Office workers crowded around them, local pop music was loudly blaring from the speakers in the room. Having closed all the windows on his computer, Gorshkov entered the conference room, and Michael Patterson, the CEO of Invit, started the conversation.
Patterson began asking Gorshkov about the recent hacks of American companies. “Well, this is so that I know that you are as good as I think you are,” Patterson said. “Maybe it was one of you?” Gorshkov was silent for a minute, then answered. “Well, a few months ago we tried to do something similar, but we found it unprofitable.”
Meanwhile, while Vasily Gorshkov was in the conference room with Patterson, Alexey Ivanov was undergoing some kind of testing on the office computer. To solve some problems, he needed a certain software, which was located on their server in Chelyabinsk. Lyokha, without a second thought, connected to the Chelyabinsk computer, downloaded the necessary software and solved the problem set by the feds. Without suspecting anything, Lyokha and Vasya found themselves in a trap that was about to slam shut.
They were surrounded by feds playing the role of company employees. Among them was a white hat hacker who played an IT specialist named Ray. Hidden microphones and surveillance cameras were installed throughout the office, recording every rustle and movement, and key loggers installed by the FBI on each computer recorded keyboard presses. Outside in the parking lot, about 20 more agents were standing and waiting for signals, who could burst in at any moment and help with the arrest.
Of course, before the arrest, Agent Patterson tried to get as much information out of Gorshkov as possible, since after the arrest he might not say a word, so there was no point in wasting the moment. "How about dumps or something like that?" "I don't understand what you're talking about," Gorshkov replied, smiling. Gorshkov's agents laughed. "I understand you, I understand, guys."
As soon as their nice two-hour meeting was over, the CEO led the guys to the car, supposedly to take them to temporary housing specially prepared for their arrival. But before they had driven even half a kilometer, the car suddenly stopped. The fighters driving behind them opened the car doors, pulled out the Russians and twisted their arms. It all took less than a minute. That's all Ivanov managed to write in his native Russian.
Upon arriving back at the office, one of the agents realized that the Keylogger installed on all the cars in the Invita bureau would give him a rare opportunity right now. What he did next would make him the first FBI agent to be charged with a computer crime by Russian police. He opened the Keylogger log and found the password Ivanov had used to access their home computers in Chelyabinsk.
Then, after consulting with his boss and the prosecutor, he logged into the carders' Russian server and began examining the directory names for files belonging to Ivanov and Gorshkov. The files were found and successfully downloaded as 2.3 gigabytes of compressed data, then burned to CDs. It was only some time later that the agent received written permission from a federal judge to do all the things he had already done.
It was the first international seizure of evidence using the carding method. After their capture, the carders began to cooperate with the investigation, and companies they had previously attacked, such as Good News Internet Services and VPN Internet Services, Online Information Bureau, and Financial Services Incorporated, came to light.
Soon, two residents of Chelyabinsk were charged with multiple charges of hacking computer systems, fraud using computers and data networks, credit card fraud and extortion. Then Vasily Gorshkov received 3 years in an American prison and had to pay 700 thousand dollars in compensation for the damage caused to him. Alexey Ivanov received 4 years.
FBI agents Marty Prevatt and Michael Shuler were nominated for an award. The second of them, by the way, played the role of the CEO of Invit, Mr. Patterson. Thus, Michael Shuler justified his name 100%, thereby staking out a place in federal paradise. The white hacker who played an IT specialist named Ray turned out to be Raymond Pompon, the author of the book "IT Security Risk Management" and the current director of F5 Labs.
Assistant U.S. Attorney for Ivanov and Gorshkov, Stephen Schroeder, was so moved by the hackers' story that he wrote that very book. John Morgenstern, who became the link in catching the Russian carders, did not know about Vasya and Lyokha's arrest until late 2001. By that time, he had already managed to sell his business profitably, but still served as the company's CEO.
He had mixed feelings about everything that was happening, on the one hand, he was angry at the Russian carders for sucking his blood, and on the other, he believed that they had almost no choice. And as a legendary bookseller, I tend to think the same way. Believe me, if you have even the slightest chance to get out of the shit, you will definitely use it.
That's why I never take it upon myself to judge cybercriminals; despite all their exploits, Lyokha and Vasya pursued only one goal - to get a legal job where their skills would be appreciated. They took a risk, they were unlucky, unlucky, that's how it happens in life. Perhaps this flight was naive, stupid, but the history of hacking will not build itself. It needs victims, Vasya and Lyokha became bricks in the foundation of that very history.
Ivanov and Gorshkov were Columbus and Magellan in the field of cybercrime. Their arrival in the USA instantly changed the global map of online fraud for the FBI, placing its center in Eastern Europe. Well, I continue to follow Kingpin, remember I said that it would be a long but exciting journey. And today, looking at the first part about the first hacker after God, a smile appears on my face.
Thank God that Pavlovich then understood the joke and did not send his thugs to me. And there are dangerous guys there, it is clear that years of training were not in vain. The healthiest of them is called Gleb, Gleb is so cool that he can drop in on his godfather right during filming just to say hello. As it turns out, Gleb has his own YouTube channel where he exposes businessmen.
See you soon, hugs!
