The Great Cyberheist
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The coolest guy there was MacGyver. He knew everything about everything. You'd ask for feedback on the new SSN cards you were selling and he'd casually drop that the SSA used band printers back when your card would have been issued, so there should be little marks here or there.
From what I could tell, he never profited from any activity there, but being a senior member and receiving goods for review, receiving credit card blanks and numbers was enough to put him away. By the time it occurred to me I could send him a letter in prison, he was already out.
Sure, he was indirectly contributing to illegal activity, but to a kid looking for fake ID info, he was a god.
Gonzalez not only hacked computer networks, but also personal networks. He may not have been great at code, but he was definitely good at navigating social structures. Gonzalez was certainly a great hacker, but not necessarily good.
I'll be keeping my eye out for author James Verini in the future, this was a great read.
It seems that Gonzalez is not actually a talented cracker at all — he just found relationships with people that did. In that way, he's more of a standard crime lord than a hacker (using the NYT's definition of hacker).
The wardriving and SQL injection, that's kid stuff, right? But what do you do once you're inside the system? That's where he seemed to shine.
The fact that he wasn't a great coder I think is more reflective of the fact that he didn't spend a lot of time writing code, but I don't think it reflects on his computer skills in general.
This is the epitome of irony.
I'm not sure the Secret Service realizes what message they're sending to criminals. Sure they punished Gonzalez for his betrayal, but they basically advertised, "If you become an informant, you risk getting a much much worse sentence."
Uh, you mean if you not only continue your crime, but escalate it to unprecedented levels after agreeing to be an informant? I think that pretty much goes without saying.
Assuming the Secret Service's goal is to reduce fraud, they should prefer informants who commit crimes to no informants at all.
Did they?
Depends what you're talking about. He's described in the article by his peers as "barely [able to] write simple code", but the US attorney who prosecuted described him as the type who knows how to manage talent around him (which seems obvious given how he leveraged friendships to accomplish some very high-level stuff.
"They pulled James’s police records and found that in 2005 he was arrested by a Palmetto Bay, Fla., police officer who found him in the parking lot of a retail store in the middle of the night. The officer didn’t know why James and his companion, a man named Christopher Scott, were sitting in a car with laptops and a giant radio antenna, but she suspected they weren’t playing World of Warcraft."
Sabrina Rubin Erdely, "Hackers Gone Wild: The fast times & hard fall of the green hat gang," Rolling Stone, June 10, 2010, p. 64. http://sabrinaerdely.com/docs/HackersGoneWild.pdf
(google must be the referral for the links to work)
"He is not a gifted programmer — according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code — but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace."