How the Secret Service Busted ShadowCrew

plover writes "In the story Hacker Hunters, BusinessWeek Online documents how the Secret Service turned a member of the ShadowCrew and was able to arrest dozens of the members of the phishing ring. From the article: 'Law enforcement officials are often loath to reveal details of their operations, but the Secret Service and Justice Dept. wanted to publicize a still-rare victory. So they agreed to reveal the inner dynamics of their cat-and-mouse chase to BusinessWeek. The case provides a window into the arcane culture of cybercriminals and the methods of their pursuers. ' "

Comments

Re:Wasn't that here before?

[DustyShadow]

yes it was: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/22/172 2243&from=rss

Re:Why doesn't this make sense?

[Cruciform]

If you're a tough guy, silence is street cred.

If you're a computer criminal, silence is 2 extra years in the slammer with your new boyfriend if you're convicted.

No wonder they spill the beans.

Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll

[3770]

There is a really good book by a guy called Cliff Stoll called Cuckoo's egg about how he chased down a hacker in the early days of the Internet.

It wasn't even really the Internet as we know it today.

It will be nostalgia for old timers and a history lesson for the "noobs" around here.

Anyway, it is very interesting. I recommend it highly.

This isn't a very good version of the story

[illumin8]

From TFA: For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com.

I read a much more interesting version of this story somewhere else. I can't find the link right now, but it explained more fully how they really caught them. This sentence above just glosses over it.

Apparently, they did this:

They got to one of the members of shadowcrew and convinced them to work with them. This guy then proceeded to go onto the shadowcrew IRC channel and told everyone that he had setup a new encrypted gateway VPN type channel that would allow them to connect to the shadowcrew servers in a "more secure" fashion. He convinced everyone to go through this proxy. Little did they know, the proxy was actually an FBI server that was monitoring and recording all traffic that passed through it.

This just goes to show, no matter how smart you are, the best hacks are social engineering hacks, not technical.

They should have been smart and used Tor instead, then they probably wouldn't have been caught.

I'm glad they got caught though. These guys were losers of the worst kind.

Re:Money

[plover]

The Harley-Davidson police bikes in our city were leased to us for $1.00/year (each bike) by Harley-Davidson. This is what they do for corporate giving. I'd be hard-pressed to say those two dollars were "spent on useless things."

The other thing to remember is that they're going to spend money to enforce laws that are the most visible to the most people. "Identity Theft" is a very popular headline these days. Most people have inboxes full of spam. By equating these annoyances with "identity thieves," spending money on fighting them becomes a politically smart manouever. And because we are collectively so stupid that we believe everything the news tells us, it doesn't even matter whether or not it has any effect on our inboxes! As long as a politician can use it to say "I'm doing something!" the money to fight it will be there.