The Mob's IT Department

My family had a black sheep, now conveniently dead. One day he showed up at my door with a Mercedes E-class about a year old (an expensive car in nl with all the taxes we have here on vehicles). Why don&#x27;t I spin back the odometer for him, for a couple of thousand guilders. The car was an ex taxi, they drive a lot of miles in a short time and they look really good so this was their idea of making money the easy way.<p>I refused the job in the politest way possible and got on with my life and I cut that whole branch of the family tree out of my life.<p>When I was a kid he&#x27;d always show off how much money he had, in the end it cost him the life of his son (killed by another mobster) and his family. I hope the money was worth it to him but I doubt it.<p>edit: so, I just received a message via email about my &#x27;callousness&#x27; with this comment, let me clarify: if you push your wife, son, daughter into crime, get your son killed and attempt to recruit other family members into your crime empire then the world is (much) better off without you.

I was in a situation kind of like this. I was brought on to a Canadian company to make and end to end software system for gambling kiosks. They kept on making odd requests of me like being able to reseed random numbers on units until they found a set they liked (our games were deterministic). IE ones that payed out how they want. Also wanted me to not use encryption for various portions of the system that handled money.<p>Eventually I got a picture of the business where they were defrauding their investors by winning their own games or through exploiting purposeful holes in the system. Eventually I just delivered them a functioning and secure system. Refused to go down to the Dominican to install it (Since they had considerable pull down there) and walked away. It was really the first large project I had done and walking away hurt me considerably. But it was the right thing to do.<p>Those guys are in jail now and the investors pulled the plug. So at least I have some vague sense of Schadenfreude over the whole thing.<p>Unfortunately ethical software developer isn&#x27;t exactly a winning eye popping line item on the resume.

I used to work at a steamship line, a competitor to MSC, at a US port office. The port terminals take security very seriously, but some of the steamship lines&#x27; offices are a bit lax. It doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all that they were able to sneak in and install this equipment and malware, although I think social engineering (calling import customer service pretending to be the consignee and scamming them into giving you the pickup numbers) would be more effective.<p>Fascinating article though, and the story would make a good movie.

&gt; They decided the prudent course was to let the whole bizarre incident go and hope Maertens never heard from them again.<p>I&#x27;ve noticed that a lot of IT workers tend to be non-confrontational and unwilling to stand up for themselves even if the situation calls for it. I find it interesting that Van De Moere and Maertens show the same tendency here. A reasonable person would go to the police to report an assault. These two men were likely selected because Adibelli sensed that they could be manipulated.

&quot;The sole decoration was a poster of a dozen varieties of mangoes&quot;<p>That&#x27;s so cliche. Ha. I can imagine that conversation &quot;Our front is a fruit import&#x2F;export legitimate business. We should hang up some posters of fruit. That will make it totally legit looking.&quot;

There are distracting writing failures--technical stuff.<p>The phrase &quot;[he] connected the battery to an antenna&quot; breaks the flow of the story because it leads the reader to the wrong idea, then the reader has to backtrack...<p>An IRC channel with 100k users in 1996? Look, freenode has 85k users today, spread across 40k channels... Even worse, <i>the Wikipedia page</i> for <i>securax</i> indicates that it was an online community that had newsletter with 90k subscribers.

Don&#x27;t ever get involved with organized crime. It will never ... ever ... end up well for you.

sidenote: what kind of organization does bloomberg.com have going on? this is under &#x27;&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;&#x27;?

This must be the craziest startup story I have ever read... You complain about VC&#x27;s but these guys.

&gt; How two technology consultants helped drug traffickers hack the Port of Antwerp<p>A fascinating read, thanks for sharing.

TLDR; physical security at second and third-tier European ports is bad.

Bing Image Search.<p>The ITU&#x27;s Child Online Protection initiative notifies Google of child pornography links. Google prmptly removes them from its index.<p>I expect Microsoft is so notified as well but Satya Nadella doesnt remove the links nor cached images, despite the original servers having been dead for years.<p>I am convinced that kim dotcom&#x27;s bust gad nothing to do with copyright but that much of the, uh, &quot;digital media&quot; was distributed from his servers; however most is encrypted, but typically with very obvious or easily brute forced passwords.<p>More or less you start with bing then pay for a premier account with a filesharing service.<p>There is also &quot;link protection&quot; mostly our of India, which hides the referring page. One can earn decent coin by promoting a popular ptotected link.<p>Most of those links are found on what should be dead forums but whose servers are still operating.<p>An easy way to rain on the mob&#x27;s parade would be to scout around for threads that go on for hundreds of pages.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.warplife.com&#x2F;jonathan-swift&#x2F;books&#x2F;software-problem&#x2F;deadly-sins&#x2F;greed&#x2F;pornography&#x2F;child&#x2F;internet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.warplife.com&#x2F;jonathan-swift&#x2F;books&#x2F;software-proble...</a>

I wonder if they (or other drug smugglers) used exploits that the NSA was aware of but chose to leave open?