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💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › shorts › defcon › 19 › Coin_Flip.txt captured on 2022-07-16 at 15:43:28.
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Coin Flip

By Alep Luup

Most people never have to stare down the barrel of a gun and take in the
abyss therein. Muzzle so close to the eye that you're afraid a blink
will set it off, your eyelid touching the abyss will get you pulled in.
You experience temporal relativity as the moment grows near-infinite,
and perhaps you're hoping the second never ends and you stay alive; or
perhaps you're hoping the hole you're looking into would suck you in
already, so you could be free of the uncertainty. You experience
absolute focus as your whole being is suddenly unaware of the rest of
the world, or the man holding the gun, or even itself. All that remains
is the promise of a bullet springing from the abyss, and you wonder if
you'll have time to see it.

Anatoli was surprised how, a year to the day after the fact, his
impressions of that second were as vivid and accurate as experienced in
the moment. He'd always wondered how other people have life-defining
moments, because no matter the hardships he'd endured as a child in his
home country, or on the long and painful journey to escape that and find
a better life in the West, or after, he'd never had a moment like that.
A moment that held its effect on Anatoli so long after it transpired,
and that had defined his life every day since. A moment he couldn't
share with anyone.

"Anatoli, my boy, you don't want anything to happen to your old man, do
you? We take care of him now, the Bratva is all the family he's got, all
the family he ever needed. But nothing is free in this world. So you
need to do this favour for us, or else we'll have to let him be on his
own. And he's got plenty of enemies that would love a shot at payback."

So did one of the men say, in a kind tone, as the other one (the bald
burly brute acting as 'muscle') pulled the gun back from Anatoli's face.
And every weekday after that Anatoli would make his way to the corner of
Hyde and Ellis, up a narrow, addict-infested stairwell, and into the
dark and smokey room that the two shared. Boris would always enjoy
giving him a pat-down, rough and angry as if he'd always wished Ivan had
let him pull the trigger that one time, in the alley they first met. And
Ivan would always be smoking and drinking, cigarette ash and drunken
spit decorating the keyboard in front of him, usually with one or two
windows opened to disrobing cam-girls. With a big grin on his face, Ivan
would always tell Anatoli never to be late again (he wasn't), and get to
work faster already or the old man is going to die tomorrow. Anatoli sat
down at the computer the two had for him, by Ivan's side, and flicked
the monitor on quietly. "Would Ivan or Boris face the barrel of a gun
the way I did? Would they think of it every day after it had happened,
dissecting the moment like I do?" The gun was not too far from reach.
They had it lying on the table since the first week he started coming to
this dump of an apartment, and Anatoli had too often fantasized about
just grabbing it and shooting both men. But his plan will be a much
better punishment.

"My boy, you must finish this today! We take a trip tonight, and your
work will finally pay off for the Bratva! We're all going to be very
proud of you, and tomorrow your father's going to be well again!"

The drunk Ivan was very enthusiastic about all of this, as if reuniting
the boy with his father had been a personal dream of his. Anatoli was
tired of Ivan always playing the role of a concerned uncle (with
advanced psychosis and chronic alcoholism), not in the least because it
did remind him of an actual uncle, a man so repugnant to those around
him that his wife stabbed him in the throat with her knitting pins one
evening. When this had happened Anatoli was only 7, so he couldn't
understand why something like that would happen—but after spending a
year with Ivan, he'd very much like some knitting pins himself.

Anatoli logged into the machine and looked at his bot command window: a
few thousand more clients had checked in, and he had nearly 10 million
computers at his disposal right now, all ready to do his bidding at the
push of a button. He felt a rush of adrenaline as he tried to grasp the
magnitude of what he'd achieved. The Bratva took him because they knew
he used to be a Sibear, and the hacks he pulled for the brotherhood
weren't any more spectacular than what he'd done in school. But this
time, his actions were going to have important consequences on a scale
he'd never thought of before. And he was about to make some powerful
enemies — but, hopefully, some damn impressive allies too. No way to
go back now even if he'd want to.

The Bratva had understood that the next big heists — like the next big
wars — were going to happen online, and they'd long established
themselves on that playing field. From semi-legal gambling and
pornographic ventures, to anonymous online narcotics outlets and
straight-up phishing and carding operations, they had been the only
organized digital cartel. Anybody else looking to get a slice quickly
got sent either to the Police or to the mortuary. They were ruthless in
how they operated, but Anatoli knew their biggest weakness: they handled
problems online the way they did on the street, with a generous
application of punches and bullets.

A knock on the door startled Anatoli: nobody ever came to this apartment
before, for a whole year. Not during the 12 hours in the daytime when
Anatoli had to be here, at least. Boris lets two scantily-clad girls
come in, as a man about Anatoli's age follows them, laughing and
smoking. Ivan's grin subsides, but he doesn't move at all, just takes
another swig from his bottle and nods to the newcomers.

"Boris, what do you think you're doing?" says the man, gently pushing
the brute aside as one of the girls looks angrily at the bald man. "They
are my guests, and unless you're going to start patting me down too,
just let'em be." Ivan nods to Boris, and he sits back down on his chair
besides the door, watching TV.

"I-van, my man!" lamely tries to rhyme the man. "What is happening,
what's the 4-1-1 up in here? We ready?"

"Yes, we can go, everything is ready here. Right, my boy?"

Anatoli nods affirmatively as he's scanning the newcomers. The girls
appear to be twins, though maybe it's just their identical clothing and
the platinum hair tricking the eye. The guy tries to be flashy, a poor
imitation of the pimps in the '70s, only instead of purple fur he dons
some ridiculous shirt that looks like a tattoo artist's scratchboard.
The gold chains seem thicker than the man's scrawny neck, and they give
him what appears to be a slight hunch. A pair of white shades rest on
the back of his head.

"Oh, is this the princess that did all the work for us, Ivan? Yo, I'm
going to be your daddy on this trip, so from now on you listen to me,
kid! Here" — Anatoli felt how heavy the gold rings on the man's left
hand were as they impacted with his left cheekbone — "that's so you
don't forget me. Name's not important, you just call me Warlock. My code
can tear through the online world like a warlock's magic would tear
through a kingdom."

Anatoli had to stifle a chuckle hearing the lengthy introduction and
especially Warlock's comparison. Right, magic. Only the gold would
bedazzle anybody.

Warlock introduced the girls as Kaya and Maya, though Anatoli didn't
make a point of trying to differentiate them anyway. He looked back to
the screen, staring at the blinking cursor in the command window,
thinking how quick it would be to just disband this digital army he'd
created and not let the Bratva have it. Maybe one dead man was better
than whatever these thugs had in mind.

"Let's go, Ivan, I've got a busy evening tonight!" winked Warlock,
motioning to the twins, then grabbed the bottle and took a swig himself.


	**


Anatoli couldn't tell where they were going from the sounds of the road,
and the bag over his head prevented him from seeing anything. It didn't
really make much difference, but the hour-long trip was very boring this
way. Boris was driving and, from the sound of things, Ivan was napping.
Alcohol and heat don't mix well.

The trip eventually ended and, when his bag was removed, Anatoli saw
four nearly identical vans stopped alongside theirs, in the courtyard of
a large warehouse. Four other young men looked at one another as their
handlers also unloaded them from the vans and shoved them towards one of
the warehouse entrances. Some of those other boys had been treated much
worse than Anatoli, as blackened eyes and bloodied ears stood witness.

They went through one of many identical entryways into the warehouse.
They were shepherded through back-scatter scanners and down a long
corridor, passing many closed doors along the way, all with
military-type armed guards posted. This seemed like a serious operation,
and Anatoli found himself surprised of how well the Bratva had been
organized. For a while, Ivan and Boris' attitudes were all that he
experienced of the Brotherhood, and he even began to wonder how and
organization that employed their kind was any good at crime. But Ivan
and Boris were babysitters, pretty low on the food chain, despite their
scars and their tough-guy attitude. This was a proper operation, worthy
of the kind of reputation the Bratva had.

They went into an elevator, and Anatoli could only tell from the slight
jerk, when they started moving, that it was going underground. There
were no buttons or lights anywhere in the elevator, and as far as anyone
could tell one of the two armed guards posted by the door was remotely
operating it. Anatoli took this moment to observe the other boys a
little better: all in their early 20s, like himself, looking scared and
staring at the ground with tired eyes. The tell-tale sparkle that
Anatoli say in his own eyes after hours upon hours of coding and
hacking, when everything but the eyes looks dead, flushed of blood or
life. But the eyes want more, and the glimmer speaks volumes about the
addiction they're all consumed by: the hack. So Anatoli could, at the
very least, assume they were all like him, pretty good hackers forced by
the Bratva to work on some kind of project. He was curious what kind of
work they had to do, but something told him he wasn't too far now from
finding out.

Warlock waited for the elevator and spat as they arrived, then commanded
everyone to follow him down a somewhat poorly lit corridor. Anatoli
could tell they passed a communications room as he heard the hum of an
HVAC. Red lights leaked from under the doors, and at one point, just as
one of the doors closed, there was a glimpse of two naked girls and some
old men surrounding them. A whiff of something illegal followed the
closing door and, insofar as Anatoli knew anything about these things,
it wasn't herbal.

They went down a narrow staircase at the far end of the corridor and
into a vaulted room (which Warlock 'summoned' open, probably with the
aid of some sort of voice recognition software). A platform extended
towards the middle of the space, and 6 computers were arranged in
alcoves around the tip of the platform. Warlock pointed to the other
machines, and sat himself down at the centre console from where he'd
also be able to watch what all the other monitors were showing. One by
one, the boys sat down at the computers, and Anatoli ended up in one of
the two spots directly in front of Warlock's post (though the swivel
chair their apparent master sat on made any notion of 'front' relative).
He'd realized his mistake as soon as Warlock's boot tapped the back of
his head not so lightly, but there was nowhere else to go. Only the
place next to him was empty, for now, and Anatoli wondered why.

"OK, barbarians, listen up! I am Warlock, I am your master, your daddy,
your god, really, and you better do what I tell you or I'm going to use
you for certain unpleasant experiments in cybernetics. You all worked
for me for the last year, you just didn't know it. I've been watching
your computers remotely and I must say, your code is crap! I could write
better exploits doing tequila shots while I'm getting head and have a
gun in my face! You're all pretty pathetic, but apparently you're the
least pathetic of'em all. So you'll have to do."

Another kick to the head, though this one didn't seem as convinced as
the first one. That's two — Anatoli planned to return them very soon.

"What you peons don't know is how brilliant my plan is, and how I'm
going to make the Bratva very rich today! While you were writing
exploits and building botnets, I tuned up the Digicoin client with a
little special something. And pretty much everyone in the swarm got
'upgraded' to that client, and today they're all going to be donating
their money to our cause."

Well, that was kind of the truth. Anatoli did most of the work Warlock
claimed as his own, including the hack on the official Digicoin servers
and mirrors. He was particularly proud of replacing the checksum and
signing toolchains on some of the core developers' machines, so that
they wouldn't know they'd been compromised. He hacked the CDNs serving
Digicoin, and the ISPs upstream from the servers and mirrors, some of
the big Cisco routers along the way, anything and everything he could do
to erase his own traces, and make it seem as if the clients had never
been tampered with.

Digicoin was Bitcoin renamed, and nothing much else. Some company found
a way to claim some patents on the core Bitcoin technology and, while
unable to entirely shutdown the network, they managed to seize domains,
have ISPs court-ordered to do deep-packet filtering against possible
uses of the 'illegal' client, and have two core developers forced to use
Digital Monitoring Software (the equivalent of a trojan/rootkit, only
you can't try to remove it, because the Government put it there) so that
they wouldn't keep working on the old software. The net effect is that
many switched over to Digicoin, but there was also a great influx of new
users as media attention to the court case brought the technology on TV.
Good marketing made the system very popular, so much so that nearly all
of the 21 million coins had been generated, and many exchanges allowed
dollars and euros to be traded for Digicoins. For a long time now, the
exchange rate had been pretty constant, around $100 for a Digicoin.

Anatoli knew this because the Bratva knew this. While they'd search him
everyday for flash drives and guns and recording devices, Ivan and Boris
never thought to carefully inspect his wristwatch, or his belt for that
matter. So that's what Anatoli used as a Van Eck (electromagnetic)
sniffer, picking up on just enough information from the drive of the
machine to reconstruct it at his home and craft an exploit. And once he
had remote access to the machine, he managed to access the warehouse
server farm by piggybacking on Warlock's snoop link using a network
stack 'tweak' that let his packets fly on top of the TCP stream Warlock
would open. Yet another hack, to be able to bypass the stream altogether
and get himself a direct link into their server farm, came when he
realized that Ivan's cam-girls were in fact slaves in the warehouse
underground. The stream from Ivan's computer wasn't encrypted, was
on-demand, and made for a much easier target to exploit than anything
else he'd found up to that point. It would let Anatoli disguise his own
work as a video stream, avoiding unwanted attention from the server IDS
or any of the system administrators that would be watching the traffic
everyday.

The door flew open and a loud, expletive-ridden diatribe directed at the
guards, the Bratva and the Warlock could be heard. Anatoli turned in his
seat enough to notice who was delivering the very risky speech, just in
time to see the Warlock slap a young woman once, and then quickly again
after she spat him in the face. Something resembling the barbell of a
tongue piercing flew out of her mouth, and a little blood dripped on the
floor.

"You little... We'll need to make sure you learn some manners before you
come back here. Guards! Take her to the Barracks, as a gift from me to
all of you, and don't bring her back until she's quiet. Whatever you do,
mind the hands and the eyes, or she'll be worthless to me."

Anatoli shuddered thinking what the Barracks treatment might be like. He
wasn't sure if torture was all they had in mind, but he knew there
wasn't much time left before things would be getting really ugly at this
compound.

Warlock moving away from his overview post meant Anatoli had time to
load up a little kernel module he wrote a long time ago. It was for fun
at the time, but it got to be quite useful in the last few months. He
had a little module that would run two commands even though only one was
typed: it would execute what was typed, literally, but it would also
pick characters from the command string and covertly run a secondary
task on the machine. There were some tricks and some tweaks he had made
to the module especially for today, and anyway he didn't need to run too
many hidden commands. Just enough to make some people on the outside
aware of his digital and physical addresses, here in the Bratva's
compound. And there was one other ace up his sleeve.

"What the heck are you doing, dumbo?" scowled Warlock towards Anatoli,
reading off his screen. "Why do you `cat` to `grep`, you bloody moron?
Geez, who ever thought you were a hacker?" Another kick in the head, and
this one could've been serious, it wanted to follow through all the way.
But it was slow, weak rather, as if a slower, or a more tired, man had
done it. Anatoli had seen the tell-tale signs of steroid use in Warlock,
and the garbage bin was full of empty energy drink cans and short, thin,
plastic straws. He had a hard time picturing Warlock 'tired' in any
common sense of the word.

Yet something had changed in his demeanour. He was sluggish, lazy,
leaning back in his chair and scratching constantly his cheek until it
started bleeding.

"Enough, let's do this! Make those 10 million accounts give me all their
Digicoins! You!" — the fourth kick — "bring up your control console
and tell those machines to donate the money to these accounts! Kill
everything else, I need the swarm to verify the transactions as quick as
possible!"

All the hacked Digicoin clients had a remote trigger programmed in. Not
a backdoor per-se, but rather a code path that was waiting for a certain
hash, a known transaction to make its way in the network. Anatoli
rewrote some tiny bits of the client to avoid generating a certain
transaction verification hash. When the network did see the hash,
however, every client would donate all of its account balance to one of
40 peers, all operateed by the Bratva.

One of the other hackers brought up his own console, ready to make the
40 Bratva accounts hit up the exchanges and convert the digital cash
into various world currencies. Yet another brought up the bank accounts
on the other side, ready to make some transactions and make the money
even less likely to be traced in case anyone would try that.

"I need the transaction block that generates the hash" spoke Anatoli,
without facing Warlock, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. Warlock
tried to type some commands in his own computer, but somehow managed to
mistype thrice in a row before getting it right.

"Read if from your computer's /dev/random, it's mapped to the data now."

Anatoli piped the data into his tool, hit enter, and waited. Warlock's
interest was directed to the display of the 40 Bratva accounts, each
slowly growing as they were receiving donations. A status indicator
showed 5, then 10, then nearly all of the accounts being verified by the
network, and a total of nearly 20 million Digicoins were transferred.
The exchange process had started, and Warlock was now standing up,
leaning forward over his desk at the computer screen showing all the
transactions being processed. Some bounces through Caiman banks, and
soon the Bratva would be 2 billion dollars richer, all thanks to
Warlock.

Warlock's phone rang as the alarm started blaring, and the guards
initiated lockdown for the room. He rushed towards the pod besides
Anatoli, as the height of the platform sheltered him from the infernal
noise of the alarm.

"Yes, yes sir! What? What do you mean, gone? No, we just transferred 2
billion INTO the accounts. No, the alarm's going off, I don't... cops?
How? Damn it!"

Warlock was visibly shaken, and very pale, but the urgency in his voice
wasn't matched by his movements. He stumbled as he tried to stand up,
and fell face first on the floor. The thud his head made as he bounced
on impact was accompanied by a good splatter of blood from his nose and
mouth. He couldn't stand up, and a faint noise came from his direction.

Anatoli didn't stop at hacking the official Digicoin client: he hacked
those 40 Bratva accounts also, some time ago, setting them to report
false transactions when they saw the trigger hash. The network verified
some transactions, that was true, but they weren't the ones Warlock was
expecting. Instead of Digicoins going into the Bratva accounts, the
Caiman bank links had been used to siphon the brotherhood's financial
holdings, convert them into Digicoins briefly (to lose their trace) and
then have all those funds donated to women's shelters, to drug
rehabilitation clinics, to orphanages, and to any other institutions
that could help the Bratva's victims.

Muffled shots could be heard outside, and the guards opened the door to
leave. Behind them snuck the brunette from earlier, seemingly unharmed
by her trip to the barracks. She went straight to Anatoli and jumped in
his arms, kissing him without restraint, while the other young men in
the room cheered and hugged.

The Bratva seemed to take as many precautions as they could, yet somehow
they missed the fact that all the hackers they had rounded up for this
job had worked together previously in DEFCON CTFs, and some were even
fellow Sibears. Or that Kayla, the spunky brunette that spat Warlock
with a neurotoxin she'd concealed in the barbell of her tongue ring, was
Anatoli's girlfriend.

The Police had a warrant out for Dave "Warlock" Brennan and between that
and what this warehouse was, Anatoli and his friends hoped they might be
able to get out of the whole deal without handcuffs.

Anatoli walked over to Warlock's convulsing body and kicked him in the
head four times.

"Magic."