Misha Glenny

Cyber criminals have come a long way from their early days as maverick “lone wolves”. Now they are part of vast and complex organised crime rings.

This is according to investigative journalist and author Misha Glenny, a specialist in cybercrime and global cybercrime networks. Glenny, author of McMafia and DarkMarket, has spent decades tracking and investigating the rise of cybercrime.

It’s a “fascinating” world, he says. The dark underground of the Internet, inaccessible and unknown to most, is populated by organised vast crossborder syndicates with structures, areas of expertise and common goals. Some are “hacktivists” – driven by righting perceived socio-economic wrongs. Some are intent on pure crime. And some even work in collaboration with state bodies.

Glenny says in his early investigations in the mid-2000s, he met and interviewed a number of hackers in Russia and Brazil. Through a white hat hacker in Brazil, Glenny met his first cyber criminals – a group of teenagers. “It was a world few people knew about. I spent a lot of time engaging with people before I interviewed them, and I had to find correct interlocutor to introduce me to them.”

Once he had access to the cyber criminals through a trusted connection, he says: “The characters I go to know were fascinating – a different type of criminal. On the whole, they were very bright. Those I met in Brazil were generally lower-middle class, aspiring, hardworking and fanatical about computers. I also met a group of pre-Anonymous hackivists – they were more geeky and driven, and many were clearly along the outer reaches of spectrum disorder such as Asperger’s Syndrome.” In Russia, cybercriminals had “perfect conditions for emergence of cybercrime”, Glenny says – economic uncertainty, a good educational base, and a strong aspirational culture in a region where economic avenues were blocked for young people.

In the years that followed, Glenny gained access to DarkMarket, an underground Web arena where criminals could buy and sell tools for committing cybercrime, stolen IDs, passports and data. While DarkMarket was subsequently closed down, there are still numerous sites invisible on the generic Web, which are accessed through anonymising devices and through contacts. “There are strange, weird and perhaps undesirable treasures there,” Glenny has noted.

THE BRAINS BEHIND CYBERCRIME

Having engaged in interviews with many cyber criminals, Glenny notes that they are generally very intelligent, and not usually driven purely by greed. “First and foremost, it’s about recognition for most of them. One I met has a spectrum disorder and another relates a difficult childhood. They were not making  much money – they just wanted to demonstrate their skills and ability to their peers.”

Hacktivists, meanwhile, are now seen as “cool” among the next generation. “Anonymous is absolutely fascinating – they are not motivated by financial gain; but in part they are an authentic expression of youth feeling alienated from conventional political forms. People may have ranted and raved about Anonymous after Wikileaks, because they attacked PayPal, MasterCard and Visa. But people neglect to mention they were also first to help the Syrian opposition; they attacked Boko Haram; and took on Mexican drug cartels at personal risk. They are not just mischief makers.”

Glenny believes if people such as these were identified at an early age and their skills were nurtured, a lot more could be done to combat cybercrime. And those who have already been arrested for cybercrime have the potential to become the great IT minds of industry, if their abilities were channelled. “There are no programmes for the rehabilitation of hackers – they are treated as ordinary criminals . One of them I know of is sitting in federal penitentiary – he has a brain the size of a planet.”

Glenny adds: “People who show hacking ability should be encouraged, nurtured and engaged with – they should be seen as a tremendous social resource, not seen as evil. I have met too many who have fantastic skills, but were let down by their peers for not engaging.”

BECOMING ORGANISED

In the early years of the Internet, the hackers were lone wolves who understood the criminal potential of the Internet. By the middle of the 2000s, cybercrime was spreading and individuals were collaborating in inventive and entrepreneurial ways. After 2006/7 when law enforcement had major successes against carding sites, the lone wolves went underground and regrouped. Now, cybercrime is highly organised, Glenny notes.

“They started experimenting with new models – it took on hierarchical, cell-like forms. There are areas of specialisation, with some just writing botnets, some laundering money and so on. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of large-scale industrial corporate espionage.”

“You only have to look at the growth rate of the worldwide cyber security industry as an indicator of what’s going on – in 2011 alone, it was a $100 billon dollar industry.”