Great story. It's not often I find myself reading through to the end.<p>>Hilbert arranged for the FBI to rent Popov an apartment near the beach and pay him a $1,000-a-month stipend to continue working on Ant City.<p>Talk about cheap! They offered him ~$3,000/mo compensation for work that was saving the US potentially hundreds of millions of dollars per year in fraudulent credit card charges?<p>>One victim was the Boston-based multinational EMC, where intruders had stolen the source code for the company’s ubiquitous virtualization software, VMware. If the code got out, hackers everywhere could plumb it for security holes. VMware’s purpose is to allow a single server to house multiple virtual computers, each walled off from the others. So in the worst-case scenario, a hacker might find a way to “escape” from a virtual machine and seize control of the underlying system.<p>And this just screams of the need for more open source projects.
I looked up the hacker's full name in russian - Maxim Igorevich Popov - and found a ukrainian news article dated as back as 2001, the year when this all started. So technically the Wired's article wasn't the first public mention of the incident, but the first big and full story.<p>Here's the old article itself: <a href="http://fakty.ua/96374-grazhdaninu-ukrainy-kotorogo-fbr-obvinyaet-vo-vzlome-kompyuternoj-sistemy-banka-quot-vestern-yunion-quot-grozyat-20-let-tyurmy-i-polmilliona-dollarov-shtrafa" rel="nofollow">http://fakty.ua/96374-grazhdaninu-ukrainy-kotorogo-fbr-obvin...</a>
It's in Russian and has some interesting stuff, like details from Popov's mom and dad (!), and it mostly covers the events that led to Popov's imprisonment. The article is quite long, but some stuff like Popov's background and stuff that's missing from Wired's article<p>>Popov studied English and German languages in Kyiv National Linguistic University<p>>He was already married by the time the shit went down<p>>His parents didn't know he was a proficient hacker, they thought he was just a regular user
Don't miss Hilbert's response to the Wired article:<p>Rogue FBI Agent Vindicated?<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rogue-fbi-agent-vindicated-ernest-e-j-hilbert" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rogue-fbi-agent-vindicated-er...</a>
>One thing Popov had always known about Eastern European hackers: All they really wanted was a job.<p>how true. Making money/living using your [technical] brain. There were only limited possibility for it in Russia until mid-199x, and it only gradually became reality to the end of that decade. As far as i understand, Ukraine it took at least 10 years more.
Good read. Gives perspective of how the security scene has shifted from public hacking, to the private sector. So much is going on behind the scenes, little scoops like this are nice reminders.
Another fantastic piece from Kevin Poulsen. I really enjoyed his book "Kingpin" and this article continues the tradition.<p>If anyone wonders, how an editor at Wired manages to get all the technical details right, this Wikipedia article will help [1].<p>TLDR: Kevin is a former black hat hacker - caught, sentenced, served time who has since become a great journalist and author.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Poulsen" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Poulsen</a>
Where can I read more about this Eastern European hacking scene? A few months ago I listened to a talk by the CEO of Palantir who mentioned that in the Paypal days they unsuccessfully hired PhDs in a battle against the scammers, saying "it turns out you can't outsmart the Russan mob, they're very technical." (the solution was to hire lots of lower skill people and give them some tools to fight the battle)
This is the most painful longform reading experience I've ever had on a computer.
I am 'reading' this from a 15" MBPR at 1440x900 - default resolution.<p>First page load (default zoom), a single paragraph takes up the entire window.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/7gElCv9.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/7gElCv9.png</a><p>Next, I try 'zooming out' twice, aka cmd-. Turns out the text doesnt reflow to fit the window, it just shrinks. This is what it looks like.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/hr98Ryi.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/hr98Ryi.png</a><p>As a last effort, I switched on Reader View in Safari and it only displayed the first three paragraphs of the article.<p>Sigh. I like Wired, and mobile is important - but not this important.
Very Well Written,<p>How hard is it to program these types of systems ? Its sounds quite technically challenging to build an automated system that can easily steal information from Target etc.