Putting her cup of tea to her lips, she used it to hide the grin that lit up her face. Perhaps the next minister would be astute enough to hire her son-in-law when she put forth his name to fill Morton’s post. And if not, well…
DIGITAL WETWORK
now on Black Market Reloaded
Reasonabl cost, bitcoin only
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contact #digital_sealion on IRC: lgttsalmpw3qo4no.onion
HUMPTY DUMPTY: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
The Internet has become what radio was in the 1930s and TV was in the 1950s — a vast uncharted media resource that has yet to reach its full potential. Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, where tech-savvy twentysomethings are being courted — or, more correctly, bombarded—with information concerning elected officials, their policies, and their activities via 24-7 news feeds, blogs, social media, and targeted e-mails. Used correctly, this new medium can ensure a politician’s future. Abused or misused, it can end the career of an elected official faster than a New York minute.
Americans will, no doubt, realize this story is loosely based on the trials and tribulations of former congressman Anthony Weiner, a man who brought his political career to an inglorious end, first by shooting himself in the foot by posting sexually explicit material on the Internet and then all but blowing out his political brains while running for mayor of New York by doing so again. His actions stand as the epitome of a self-inflicted wound.
We deviated from the facts of his story by creating a situation in which a bogus account attributed to a politician, a very British one, was planted for the express purpose of doing damage to that politician’s career. In this case, it was an act of revenge. There is nothing, however, that is stopping a politician, his surrogates, or rabid — if misguided — supporters of his from using the Internet to wreak havoc on his political opponents. As former labor secretary Raymond J. Donovan stated so eloquently in 1987 after being acquitted of criminal charges the media had all but found him guilty of before he went to trial, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” The answer today, in an unfiltered media saturated world, is nowhere. Damage to a public figure’s reputation, deserved or not, is all but impossible to erase.
HAROLD COYLE
HUMPTY DUMPTY: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY
The digital battlefield called the Internet changes fast, as was made abundantly clear when we crafted this story. At the beginning of the week, the criminal marketplace called Silk Road was fully functioning, but by the end, it had been taken down by the FBI and others with its alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht (Dread Pirate Roberts), under arrest. A few days later, a competing site, Black Market Reloaded, was also offline following a leak of source code. This victory proved short lived. At the time of writing, it has been relaunched.
The existence of such commercial sites on the dark Web, hidden deep within the encrypted world of the Tor network, shows just how out of balance the online war between law enforcement and criminal organizations has become. Many of these marketplaces operate with a slick efficiency that high street retailers would envy, offering escrow services, user reviews, and taking payment in virtually untraceable crypto currencies like bitcoin. The range of illegal goods and services offered is equally staggering, so it took no great leap of imagination to come up with the idea of “digital wetwork,” the assassination of an individual’s identity, reputation, or digital life for cash.
Deciding on the sort of individual who could offer such a service was also easy. There have been a vast number of very good books, articles, and research papers recently published about the people behind online crime and hacktivism. Such individuals with the requisite technical skills and lack of morals cannot be neatly pigeonholed. The same hacker may be a criminal freelancer, political hacktivist, and contractor for both organized crime groups and intelligence organizations, all in the same day. As a result, tracking and catching them across a global playing field becomes a gargantuan task. It’s a fascinating area that is only now being given the attention it deserves. For those who wish to know more, I would recommend Misha Glenny’s DarkMarket and Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom as good places to start your own research.
The attacker’s technique to compromise the minister’s home laptop is something we in the security industry see all too frequently. A properly researched piece of bait containing a rather nasty digital hook is something even the most paranoid can fall for, and if one attempt fails, the attackers will keep on casting until they catch their target. This approach is often referred to as an APT, or advanced persistent threat, and whilst it started as a technique primarily used by foreign intelligence services, it has quickly become commonplace among organized criminals and others. Once attackers have a foothold on your machine, it generally doesn’t take long before your computer is completely under their control, or “rooted,” in hacker parlance. When they achieve that, anything you can do, they can do too, (and generally quite a few other things, as well).
It’s not all doom and gloom. Tommy’s advice in the story—“Patch regularly, get a decent antivirus package like Norton, don’t open unexpected docs or click on embedded links, and don’t use the same password for everything”—is pretty much it, although backing up your data to an external drive or a cloud service is also a good idea.
JENNIFER ELLIS
GOODNIGHT GRANNY
1
Richard Graham never looked forward to spending his evenings in a hospital, sitting about in a room that was as inviting as the waiting area of a train station, while trying to make small talk with a woman whose mind was long gone. As he battled his way home through the late-afternoon traffic, he thought about how, had he had any choice in the matter, a real choice, he would have stayed home with the children. Unfortunately, like so much in his life, he didn’t.
As he had for the past two weeks, as soon as they had finished their dinner, Richard Graham had driven his wife to pay a visit to her mother, a woman who had all but made the private Kirkland Hospital her second home. It wasn’t as if Graham was henpecked. Ellen, his wife, wasn’t the nagging sort. Her weapon of choice was silence, which at times could be just as annoying, not to mention unnerving. At least in a stand-up, no-holds-barred argument, Richard had a chance of figuring out what he’d done to piss her off.
Pausing outside the room where Ellen was entertaining her mother by telling her what the children were up to, how she had spent the day, and rendering her version of the latest family gossip that was going around, Graham took a moment to glance at his watch. Although he expected he wouldn’t be missed if he held back going in just a little longer, standing about in the corridor was even less inviting than sitting about listening to a fresh rendition of the same chatter he heard every evening. Besides, the nurse at the desk at the end of the corridor kept looking over at him, sporting what he took to be a questioning stare, one that was starting to make him nervous. Deciding there was no point in putting off making an appearance now that he’d finished checking his e-mails and delaying his return for as long as he dared, Graham drew himself up before manfully pushing open the door and entering his mother-in-law’s private room.
Looking over her shoulder when she heard the door open, Ellen Graham smiled. “Ah, there you are. I was beginning to wonder if I needed to dispatch a search party.”