Slashdot Mirror
Reporting From the Web's Underbelly
mspohr writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about Brian Krebs (Krebs on Security): 'In the last year, Eastern European cybercriminals have stolen Brian Krebs's identity a half dozen times, brought down his website, included his name and some unpleasant epithets in their malware code, sent fecal matter and heroin to his doorstep, and called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner.' His reporting is definitely on the edge. 'Mr. Krebs, 41, tries to write pieces that cannot be found elsewhere. His widely read cybersecurity blog, Krebs on Security, covers a particularly dark corner of the Internet: profit-seeking cybercriminals, many based in Eastern Europe, who make billions off pharmaceutical sales, malware, spam, frauds and heists like the recent ones that Mr. Krebs was first to uncover at Adobe, Target and Neiman Marcus.' The article concludes with this: 'Mr. Joffe worries Mr. Krebs's enemies could do far worse. "I don't understand why he hasn't moved to a new, undisclosed address," he said. "But Brian needs a bodyguard."' (He does have a shotgun.)"
A thought just came to me: If drugs are sent to his home often enough while he has plausible deniability, if the SWAT turn up often enough without cause... at which point does this man have immunity from law's scrutiny? At some point, the police will begin to just roll their eyes and tell him to just flush the coke down the drain, won't they? It's only human.
At that point... think of all the possibilities.
I agree that any attempt he makes to move to a secret address is pointless.
My guess is that there are a couple of things that really protect him. One is that in addition to being irritating his reporting is also probably useful to the people he reports on. So there is always a calculation that if we do Krebs in we shut him up but we also lose a source of information. Another is that as part of his reporting he deals with a lot of people and touches a lot of data. It is very likely that in his notes and materials are a lot of things that would be incriminating to quite a few people. If something where to happen to him all of that stuff would very likely end up in the hands of law enforcement. Not because he does anything to make that happen but because it would all be evidence in a murder investigation. I suspect the idea of all of that information being seized by law enforcement isn't something that they'd want to see.