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How the Secret Service Busted ShadowCrew 262

Posted by CmdrTaco from the breakin-the-law-breakin-the-law dept.
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. ' "
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How the Secret Service Busted ShadowCrew More

How the Secret Service Busted ShadowCrew

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  • Now I haven't RTFA completely yet, but I have just one question.

    Why would somebody in a phishing group give out their information to fellow members? This kind of thing seems to happen so often, you'd think that there would at least be a layer of secrecy between the members, just in the case somebody is going to rat on them.

  • At what cost? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xorowo ( 733585 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @03:46PM (#12708035) Homepage Journal
    I'm all for catching these guys, but I wonder about publicizing the details at this time. Is this supposed to make us feel better about the Patriot Act -- "look here! See how we can bust the bad guys with the 'right' tools!" -- or are we just supposed to be happy that something was done about this gang of thieves? I don't expect everything to be about freedom and democracy, but it is too easy anymore to question why authorities give us this information, rather than look at the information for information sake...if that makes any sense.

    • Re:At what cost? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @03:59PM (#12708158)
      but it is too easy anymore to question why authorities give us this information

      Actually, if you've ever met anyone in counter intelligence, or their bretheren in law enforcement that deal with these somewhat less tangible threats, being able to crow about a successful bust is a rare thing. Most of the time these guys have to go home every day without even being able to talk about what they do all day, even when they've really mopped up after a particularly unpleasant character or group. They can talk to each other, but they really feel (correctly, I think) that without coverage of some of their more high profile victories, that people will either not get what they do, or (worse) dream up versions of what they do, mostly based on X-Files re-runs.

      Certainly there are always going to be political components to public releases of this sort of thing. But by that I mean "political" in the sense of "making sure that people appreciate you." Not partisan politics, per se, just run of the mill See, I'm Valuable spin. No different than what happens in every office/school/church/family every day. The real accomplishments of a lot of the stealthier intel and defense people are simply never going to make the news, and it's a great frustration to the people that work in those fields. A lot of them quit and go back to the private sector just so they feel they can breathe a little. Of course, anyone in the R&D lab of a private company is going to feel the same way about drug research or battery engineering.

    • Re:At what cost? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RodgerDodger ( 575834 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @04:33PM (#12708426)
      These things need to be published for their deterrent value. One big problem with cybercrime is that the criminals feel that they'll never be caught, and if they ever are, then the punishment will be a slap on the wrist.

      As long as this perception (which is very valid!) exists, the risk-reward ratio makes cybercrime attractive. Busting the crooks isn't enough to change the perception - you need to let the other crooks know that they could be busted next.

      Organised crime, in particular, is a business. If they start to feel that their criminal ventures are too risky, they'll go elsewhere (quite possibly into legit business, where their complete lack of ethics will help them fit in with the rest of the corporate sharks)
      • I've personally always thought that some major publicity is what is really needed. Like take a TV news crew with, show the people being drug off in handcuffs ala Cops, try to get it on CNN, etc. Make a real production out of it.

        As you said, the feeling of anonymity is a big problem, they believe they can't get caught so they don't worry about it. Well, if it's generally kept quiet when busts are made, then the problem continues. Remember: The media these days is quite lazy, they need to be fed stories if y

      • Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by flithm ( 756019 )
        I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The punishment for computer crime is significantly harsher than that of its non-technical counterpart.

        You could walk into a bank and rob it at gun point, all the while threatening to kill people, and there's a good chance you'd only be jail for about 7 years.

        On the other hand, rob the same bank, of the same amount of money, without a gun, and without threatening anyone, but do it with a computer, and you could be looking at 20 years!

        In Canada, a simple DOS at

    • Yeah, thugs armed with machine guns taking down a bunch of 12-18 year old kids and some silly 20 year olds sure makes me feel great about the patriot act.

      The reality is that most of the people they arrested did not commit crimes and weren't even capable of committing crimes-- they were just kids who wanted to be hackers who read these forums.

      There may have been a thief or two there, but they were not significant criminals.

      Its all propaganda, and the blatant spin put on the article from businessweek is fu
      • You win the Kneejerk Reactionary Award.

        Yeah, thugs armed with machine guns taking down a bunch of 12-18 year old kids and some silly 20 year olds sure makes me feel great about the patriot act. The reality is that most of the people they arrested did not commit crimes and weren't even capable of committing crimes-- they were just kids who wanted to be hackers who read these forums.

        You would feel differently if they had managed to hijack your identity and sent your credit rating into the toilet. I'm gl


        • ...people who are smarter and more influential than you are--which is nearly everybody, to be honest--who are actually doing something about the Patriot Act other than smoke dope and bitch about it.

          The funniest thing I've read on /. Ever! I'm amazed at your patience for replying to this hallmark of human sapience. Geez... People like these make me embarrassed to say where I am from...

    • Don't worry. if the quality of information from this reporter is indicated by his (lack of) knowledge of firearms, the article will be totally worthless to the bad guys. They already know law enforcement people hate them.

  • Costs (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 )
    From TFA:

    Part of the problem is that cops don't have all the weapons they need to fight back. They clearly lack the financial resources to match their adversaries' technical skills and global reach. The FBI will spend just $150 million of a $5 billion fiscal 2005 budget on cybercrime -- not including personnel -- in spite of its being given the third-highest priority.

    Maybe I'm being naive here, but it seems that these people are getting away with whatever they're doing and incurring much lower cost

    • I can't see how 150 million dollars is not enough to take down at least a couple of the big rings given that they operate on Jolt and Hot Pockets (or whatever passes for that in Romania).

      It seems that way, but do some math. It can cost millions just to prosecute a couple of local New York mobsters and have the case stand up to judicial review. Say, $2M. That's 75 such cases, and doesn't take into account the huge overhead of turning up the cases in the first place. Combine that with the costs of internat
    • Law enforcement needs to stop worrying about (and identifying as such) the average script kiddie and focus on the large mob-like operations.

      There's no full-proof way of determining when you are dealing with one instead of the other. Sure, there is a sophistication of attack angle at which you can look but I'm sure there are plenty of script kiddies who are members of cybergangs hoping to move higher in the organization...

      The script kiddies of today may be analagous to the foot soldiers of the mob in ma

  • I liked this:

    The HangUp Team has been operating in Russia with impunity for years. Some members are allegedly based in Archangelsk, an Arctic Circle city of rusting Soviet nuclear submarines and nearly perpetual winter.

    The people we put in jail for cracking and phishing are more comfortable than pretty much anyone living (with impunity or otherwise) in Archangelsk. Never the less, this whole concept of phishing/malware 'colonies' sure implies a complicit (or way, way negligent) government.

  • Shadowcrew Forum (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Andorion ( 526481 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @03:53PM (#12708107)
    For a short time after Shadowcrew was busted, their private forums were accessible to the public. I archived about 12 threads, one of which was a 10 page long "shadowcrew being investigated" thread.

    Here are some excerpts:

    10 full info cc's for sale

    Hello

    info details:
    NAME ON CARD: CARD NUMBER: DATE: CVV: PIN: ROUTING: CHECKING: ADRESS: CITY: STATE: ZIP: COUNTRY: PHONE: SSN: MMN: DOB:
    price is 100$ for 10 infos
    I accept e-gold
    icq xxxxxxxx

    for buyers: we can use escrow if you like

    CALIFORNIA Lic
    if you are willing to sale a real cali lic. with a clean record. iam looking for one, with these details.
    hispanic or indian, male, 5'9 to 5'11, brown eyes, black or brown hair. 160lbs to 180lbs, DOB: 1964 TO 1974..
    drop me a PM with the info & price.
    thanks for your time & be safe.

    Offering DDOS Service
    Hi,

    Firstly I can understand if the owners, and
    moderators of SC do not want this kind of service offered here, and I'll apologize in advance. However I couldn't find anything against it, other than SC being the victim of such attack.
    I'd like to be reviewed for this service, if
    possible. Thanks.
    PayPal accounts - many
    All kinds of PP ACCZ...

    Verified/No Verified, Active/No Active, Mail
    access/without, Any balance/0, USA, UK, Europe...

    icq: xxxxxxxxx

    2Admins: i can give you some for review -
    knock, knock

    people for instore... will provide dumps and matching plastic

    I am looking for people out there who would be willing to do instore for me if I provide dumps (high quality) and matching plastic. Please PM me for more info. I dont want to discuss too much here in the open.



    Scary stuff. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters. Please use fewer junk characters.

    • Re:Shadowcrew Forum (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PseudoThink ( 576121 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @05:13PM (#12708820)
      Interesting...but what I'd REALLY love to see is the chat-log of the group meeting mentioned in the article. I'm guessing that around 9pm, it starts getting rather entertaining.

      From the article:

      To ensure the suspects were at home, a gang member-turned-informant had pressed his pals to go online for a group meeting.

      At 9 p.m., Nagel, the Secret Service's assistant director for investigations, issued the "go" order. Agents armed with Sig-Sauer 229 pistols and MP5 semi-automatic machine guns swooped in, aided by local cops and international police. The adrenaline was pumping, in part, because several ShadowCrew members were known to own weapons. Twenty-eight members were arrested, most still at their computers. The alleged ringleaders went quietly, but one suspect jumped out a second-story window. Agents nabbed him on the ground. Later, they found a loaded assault rifle in his apartment. The operation was swift and bloodless.
  • ...but it reminds me too much of this guy [wikipedia.org].

  • From TFA:

    Agents armed with Sig-Sauer 229 pistols and MP5 semi-automatic machine guns swooped in

    "Semi-automatic" means fires only one round when the trigger is pulled. "machine guns" means fires lots of rounds when the trigger is pulled. The sentence is an oxymoron, and implies the reporter is just throwing buzzwords around without knowing what he is talking about. To correct the sentence, this is the Secret Service we are talking about. They are not going to mess around with some semi-auto HK94 ty

    • Actually, those aren't machine guns anyway. The MP5's are submachineguns because they fire pistol ammunition, not full sized ammunition.
    • Actually, IIRC, there are models of the MP5 which won't do full-auto. They're built to only fire in single shot semi-auto, or a "burst fire" of three rounds with each trigger pull.

      Still, the sentence was badly written no matter the facts.

  • ENOUGH! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) *
    Nothing like sensational journalism:

    A huge map of the U.S., spread across 12 digital screens, gave them a view of their prey, from Arizona to New Jersey.

    Yes, they were "prey" and the Secret Service were eagles flying high in the air to protect freedom. Give me a fucking break. But of course this wasn't just a single sentence to get the readers interested, nope, the entire "article" is full of this crap:

    The target: the ShadowCrew, a gang whose members were schooled in identity theft, bank account pil
    • "MP5 semi-automatic machine guns"

      I particularly like that part.

      Evidently the USA isn't as much of a gun culture as I'd thought if they could get away with such blatant bullcrap.


  • The HangUp Team has been operating in Russia with impunity for years. Some members are allegedly based in Archangelsk, an Arctic Circle city of rusting Soviet nuclear submarines and nearly perpetual winter.

    That's really sad, to think about; rusting Soviet nuclear submarines. Such technology, such virtue. I would absolutely love an ex-Soviet nuclear submarine. It'd make a neat houseboat. Just seems like kindof a massive thing to leave laying around.
    • Neat houseboat? no. There used to be one (a cruise missle boat) for sale in Tampa that had been converted to a restaurant. I'm not kidding, you'd load it with passengers then take them on a tour of the bottom of the harbor. Their business model, shall we say, s(t)unk, and the vessel ended up for sale. A million dollars was the asking price, and you'd need an export permit to sail it out of US waters.

      If the navy saw an ex-soviet sub sailing towards the US, I think they would sink it without asking question


    • You'd be better off with one of these... [ussubmarines.com]

  • Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll (Score:3, Informative)

    by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @04:07PM (#12708221) Homepage
    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.
    • I had to look him up on the internet. He has a web page here:

      http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/ [berkeley.edu]

      It is funny, because it is really simple and it is actually invalid. I had to view the page source to find the intended links.

      It has the answer to one of the number puzzles that he mentioned in the book (but never gives the answer to if I remember correctly).
    • There is a really good book by a guy called Cliff Stoll called Cuckoo's egg

      He does other cool stuff too. After you're done reading his book, don't forget to buy one of Cliff's bottles [kleinbottle.com].

  • If you want to bust a phisher, be a phish. Basically give them false information, made up credit cards etc. Flag the credit card as stolen, and retrieve where it was used. I'd guess this stuff would be easy to catch.
    • That'd work wonderfully, if phishers didn't do silly things like purchase things online with their stolen credit cards and obfuscate the physical trail with things like PayPal and p.o. boxes.
    • You see, the thing about action-based MMORPGs is that people want to play them, and if people want to play, they will pay to play! So if i make a game with puzzles and intergalactic bounty hunters, people will buy it and I could make millions. I found out that if I was a game designer, I'd probably be employed at a game company, not a grocery store, so China and India wouldn't make money off of outsourcing. Also, because of that my car, without ABS I might add, would handle like some new kind of competetive

  • Nice to see actual criminals for a change.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @04:13PM (#12708270) Homepage
    It used to be the Secret Service wasted their time going after people publishing electronic magazines like Craig Neidorf (Phrack), people making a board game with "Hacker" as the name like Steve Jackson Games, or people looking to just break into computers for fun and understanding.

    Now they're going after actual criminals that the above people warned us about. I've got to say that's a real improvement. Of course it took actual electronic criminals to make them realize who the real enemy is.
  • Part of the problem is that cops don't have all the weapons they need to fight back. They clearly lack the financial resources to match their adversaries' technical skills and global reach. The FBI will spend just $150 million of a $5 billion fiscal 2005 budget on cybercrime -- not including personnel -- in spite of its being given the third-highest priority. (Terrorism and counterintelligence come first.)

    Can someone explain when budgets and financial resources will not be a problem? Everywhere you look,

    • Re:Money (Score:3, Funny)

      by ArsonSmith ( 13997 )
      You think someone in the public service is going to say, "We had plenty of money. I just fucked up and browsed slashdot all day rather than actually do something usefull with it."

      • That was the point I was trying to make...though you achieved it through sarcasm. In either case, it seems as if it's never going to end.

    • Re:Money (Score:3, Informative)

      by plover ( 150551 ) *
      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,"

  • I wonder wether FunWithHeadlines is still holding his breath?
    From the dupe story: Re:SCO mydoom [slashdot.org] :-)
  • Wait a second, I thought information wanted to be free?

    Is it good or bad that these guys were caught?

    * smirk *

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @04:35PM (#12708445)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • shadowcrew.com (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02, 2005 @04:44PM (#12708538)
    I received an unusual spam message advertising warez, cardz, etc. and took the time to trace the message back to the shadowcrew website. The forums on this site were amazing. Basically it was a hub for people to advertise very highly illegal services, or sell lists of credit cards, passwords, etc... a hub for Identitity theives, and fraudsters.

    I reported this site to the FBI, and received the following response from them (back in October of last year).

    "Thank you for your submission to the FBI Internet
    Tip Line. Inasmuch as the FBI has recently
    received numerous reports concerning the
    "www.shadowcrew.com" Web site, there is no need to
    forward any such additional emails to us. Our
    Cyber Division is aware of this Web site, and is
    addressing the matter."

    It was only a matter of time until these idiots were caught. You can't be this open about such illegal activity and not expect a response from the feds.

  • This isn't a very good version of the story (Score:5, Informative)

    by illumin8 ( 148082 ) on Thursday June 02, 2005 @05:01PM (#12708736) Journal
    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.

  • ... a là Hackers, that's bad ju ju. Anyone reading it will get this picture of Angelina Jolie naked on the kid's bed as the SWATs rammed the door. Many, many, more would be hackers tonight...
  • While that was a very nice bedtime story about the bad guys, I think people should really go back and re-read it carefully. To anyone who'se read it a few times - the description of this group is far more like a government hierachy than a criminal one. That should tell you all you need to know right there.

  • FBI shoud have their own anti-virus experts. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by S3D ( 745318 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @02:43AM (#12712010)
    FBI relying on the cooperation of arbitrary(?) choosen commertial anti-virus developer and implicitly promoting them doesn't sound right. It's as if FBI subcontracted part of their work to private secutity company to break some crime ring. It should be other way around. FBI should have experts of such quality that anti-virus companies would ask them for advice.

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