Misha Glenny - DarkerMarket: The Hunt for Lord Cyric

For the thrilling whole story of international cyber crime,
as well as details on how to protect yourself, don't miss Misha Glenny's
DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You.

In DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You, Misha Glenny plunged into the murky depths of the world's most notorious carder fraud site, DarkMarket. In this exclusive short ebook, he takes you even deeper into that world.

In the realm of the cyberthief, your best friend can be your worst enemy, or worse still, undercover law enforcement. DarkerMarket follows the trail of the most elusive cyberthief of all, Lord Cyric. In doing so, Glenny unveils some of his investigative methods, explores new lines of inquiry and tries to untangle the web at the black heart of the internet. A specially written adjunct to DarkMarket, this ebook delves further into the most compelling crime story of the year.

Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. As the Central Europe Correspondent first for the Guardian and then for the BBC, he chronicled the collapse of communism and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He won the Sony Gold Award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting. The author of four books, including the acclaimed McMafia, he has been regularly consulted by the US and European governments on major policy issues and ran an NGO for three years, assisting with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He now lives in London.

Copyright 2011 Misha Glenny

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This edition published in 2011 by
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eISBN 978-1-77089-186-9

The Hunt for Lord Cyric

Misha Glenny

IT WAS IN the summer of 2009 and, surrounded by the bold primary colours of the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, Cory Louie, head of external security, told me about DarkMarket for the first time. I found it hard to envisage the saturnine website devoted to the dark arts of cyber criminality. DarkMarket, as I soon learned, was the notorious English-speaking cybercrime forum that allowed buyers and sellers of stolen identities and credit card data to meet and conduct business in what some may call an entrepreneurial setting. I knew straight away that I wanted to learn more about DarkMarket to see if it was worthy of investigation.

It most certainly was. As I began to uncover the websites structure, run by a hierarchy at whose peak stood five administrators, and comprising of roughly 2,000 users, I realised that to write anything credible about DarkMarkets history I would have to track down as many members as possible. Then I would have to persuade them to talk. They would need to be representative as well. I needed to find undercover police agents, hackers, members of organised criminal groups, intelligence operatives (if possible) and petty criminals.

Some members were easy to locate they were in prison. But others were still out there. How could I get to them? One of the most effective ways was by using those forums that are not criminal but where hackers and crackers of all shades chew the digital cud about anything and everything. So I put out a few messages some coded, some more obvious.

I waited to see if anyone took the bait. They did, although it took many months before they were prepared to talk and even longer before they agreed to meet face to face. These attempts at making contact had other uses I learned a lot about the language that hackers use, what their interests are and how some have a much greater technical grasp than others.

As I began the process of tracking down the key players in DarkMarket, I became ever more intrigued by one of them: Lord Cyric. There was something more elusive about him than most other posters on the forum.

Some people claimed to know him, others said he had deceived and cheated them; some swore by his rectitude, still more noted that for all his criminal rhetoric, there was no evidence that he had ever committed a crime. A squealer, a hero, a fugitive, a police informant, a hacker. He bullied. He minced. Most of all he got under peoples skin. He certainly got under mine. Halfway through my investigation, I knew I would not rest until I discovered his true identity. My quest remains unfulfilled to this day.

Lord Cyric crops up now and then in my book, DarkMarket. He was a more frequent presence on the forum darkmarket.ws. He is not a central character in the book, although I occasionally allude to his importance. Sometimes I felt I got so close to him that he was almost within reach. At the last moment, however, he seemed to slip from my grasp, an unknowable ethereal being. It is fair to say that Lord Cyric took up large parts of my time and research when I was writing the book.

My fascination for Cyric was prompted by two things. First, there were two key characters in the administration of DarkMarket who the police never bothered to investigate. One was Cyric, the other was the administrator, Shtirlitz, who had spent a long time in the office admittedly, he was not a very active member but he was important nonetheless. I wanted to know who both these characters were.

Second, my interview with one of the most peculiar DarkMember members, the Turk Mert Orta, piqued my interest and triggered what may have been a wild-goose chase, nevertheless it was one of the most absorbing pursuits Ive ever experienced.

The hunt for Lord Cyric developed into a private obsession, one that later on I learned was shared by several other tenacious researchers none of them journalists. He assumed a variety of forms in my mind. As I spent hours, days and even weeks trying to establish this, I realised that I was not alone in the search. Many other DarkMarketeers, carders, criminals and cops were equally fascinated, enamoured or appalled by this avatar.

Max Vision, once better known as the hacker Iceman, quite simply loathed Cyric. Iceman considered him one of the most troublesome denizens of the carder boards, of which DarkMarket and his own forum, CardersMarket, were the most influential of sites between 2006 and 2008. He was like that irritating pet, Salacious Crumb, that belonged to Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars, constantly yapping about something or other just to annoy you with that irritating cackle of a laugh, Iceman recalled.

Then, of course, there was the fictional Lord Cyric created by dozens of imaginations inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. I described this in DarkMarket thus:

The fictional Lord Cyric had become popular among gamers and geeks in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was a self-appointed deity who haunted The Forgotten Realms, a godforsaken fantasy world where warriors roamed to seek out treasure and dark secrets while vanquishing creatures with magical powers and destructive urges. The Realms became a favourite territory for gamers to explore once they had assumed a fantasy role in a team of adventurers playing Dungeons and Dragons. Subsequently, these Badlands of a sub-Tolkienian world appeared in a variety of computer games, including the hugely popular Baldurs Gate.