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The Mob's IT Department
An anonymous reader writes: An article at Bloomberg relates the story of two IT professionals who reluctantly teamed up with an organized criminal network in building a sophisticated drug smuggling operation. "[The criminals were] clever, recruiting Van De Moere and Maertens the way a spymaster develops a double agent. By the time they understood what they were involved in, they were already implicated." The pair were threatened, and afraid to go to the police. They were asked to help with deploying malware and building "pwnies" — small computers capable of intercepting network traffic that could be disguised as power strips and routers. In 2012, authorities lucked into some evidence that led them to investigate the operation. "Technicians found a bunch of surveillance devices on [the network of large shipping company MSC]. There were two pwnies and a number of Wi-Fi keyloggers—small devices installed in USB ports of computers to record keystrokes—that the hackers were using as backups to the pwnies. MSC hired a private investigator, who called PricewaterhouseCoopers' digital forensics team, which learned that computer hackers were intercepting network traffic to steal PIN codes and hijack MSC's containers."
"hackers were intercepting network traffic to steal PIN codes and hijack MSC's containers"
So this was a MITM capture, or the PIN data was flying through unencrypted.
Life is not for the lazy.
"Pwnies" are probably PWN Plugs from Pwnie Express. The original models were basically Sheeva Plugs, a raspberry-pi esque computer inside a wall wart form factor.
It would be interesting to see if these guys received products or training from Pwnie Express, a well known infosec vendor.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
It should have been: "OMG!!!! pwnies!!!"
The mob will wind up outsourcing the IT jobs to India......
How much does the mob pay an IT worker? It might be better than legit companies.
I know quite a few people that would LOVE to find out their boss is the Mob. They would squeal like pigs to the FBI in a minute - all for just the glory of going into witness protection and leaving their crap lives behind.
Granted, most of them are single and don't have to worry about kids/spouses.
Once you realize what you are doing and for who you are doing it, you contact the authorities. These guys continued to cooperate, continued to engage and despite their attempts to soften their story, are responsible for their actions. Intimidation is not an excuse, it's perhaps a reason, but it doesn't absolve you of the moral and ethical obligation to turn yourself in.
My guess is that they are trying to get some sympathy by cooking up this "We tried to resist, without getting killed" defense. At the very least, you use all that IT knowledge and start reaching out to authorities. Heck, walk into a police station and turn your self in, offer to be an informant, explain to them what's going on and tell them you need help getting out. I'm sure any number of customs officials would have jumped at the chance to help them out for the information they obviously had. I'm also sure that any prosecutor would have loved to let them plea bargain (or just plain offered immunity) as well.
No, despite the intimidation they claim, I'm not inclined to believe they where powerless to help themselves, nor am I inclined to think they should be given lighter sentences for what they participated in. The jails are full of people who claim they where wrongly incarcerated. Some claim to be innocent, some claim the sentence was wrong, some claim they couldn't help it, but nearly all of them are just lying. These guys are in the same boat.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
oh wait, it r de odder wai 'round.
You are now aware that the Big Four accounting firms responsible for the vast majority of fraud in the modern financial system have teams of IT pros with expertises in digital fraud and sophisticated computer crime.
This starts at childhood in the football programs of the world, here give a crap about some random ass person you never met and why he lost x number of dollars on play y over a bet you cared nothing about.
Perhaps we should pierce through this story, and focus on a more important question.
If all these guys did was provide a couple of sabotaged pwnies, what criminal charges will they be brought under? And more relevant, if I roll my own pwnies and sell them on the interwebs to somebody that proceeds to hack the world with them, am I an accomplice? Following the logic of the police, it seems they should start bringing down pwnie express too, and thousands of hacking tools... Again, under the assumption they were no deeper involved.
Where do hacking tools stop and cyberweapons start?
You've never imagined having a gun to your kids' head, have you?
No... But this is NOT the movies or TV. Nobody was being held captive, they had their personal cell phones, cars, homes and where freely walking around. Nobody had a gun to their head 24/7...
Surely there was a time and opportunity to make a move to reach out to authorities, make a phone call, send an E-mail or two, or get somebody in your family to help you. This went on for MONTHS.... Surely there was a number of possible exit ramps one could have taken. Heck, they claim to have had enough time to discuss and implement ways to disrupt what was going on. They had time and opportunity to get out if they wanted too.
This is not how most captivity works. People are held captive by fear and intimidation relatively easily, we just don't expect or and rarely understand it if it's not a part of *our* lives. Domestic Violence is probably the most common example--someone acts as a thug and beats up a person who is physically less powerful or fearful and emotionally unwilling to fight back. The spouse could usually call for help a hundred times a day but just doesn't. She's afraid, for herself or her kids. Human trafficking works the same way--you manipulate someone, show a willingness to show extreme violence, then throw them out on a corner and tell them they better get you some money.
Captivity is not usually about bars, it's about psychological power structures that most humans are susceptible to.
Go to the feds, preferably anonymously (although it's hard to do that reliably without lawbreaking). But I would always do that *after* I made sure my family was safe, or for family members who refused to be safe at least had a lot of guns. You never know when the feds have a leak, or where they're going to share information with a local police force that has a leak, for example. They're not particularly bright about how they go after organized crime and public corruption (or else they'd be asking for tips and for anonymous information a *lot* more than they do). Hell, they could post a slashdot story under the radar and ask people how to deal with a corrupt building inspector and might get lots of stories.
Does GP really think organized crime in Russia doesn't get a phone call from the cops if there's a problem?
thinking the mob is more about threats than action. Is it really worth the risk to bring murder to the table? They don't want the heat. I bet the guys would have been fine if they jumped ship and kept their mouths closed. It's not like they were really "running the it department", more like got involved in one IT gig.