Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn

If they acted together, they had the best chance of cutting off the providers who served the worst cybercriminals.

    Barrett’s talk, “In the Trenches of Cyberwarfare,” included the Maksakov story and updates from the denial-of-service struggle. He impressed the crowd, and a number of listeners came up afterward to introduce themselves, including Jay Adelson, the founder and chief technology officer at giant hosting and connection provider Equinix. He was also approached by Paul Betancourt, who said he was from the Miami office of the FBI and would love to chat more. Barrett hadn’t grown much more impressed with the FBI since his days in California, but at least this agent cared enough about Internet crime to come to a conference for hard-core technologists. Betancourt dressed in slacks and an untucked shirt with a collar, dark sunglasses perched on his hair. Straight out of Miami Vice, Barrett thought. Betancourt offered to take Barrett shooting at the FBI range, and Barrett accepted, giving him some advice on a few technology cases in return. Betancourt got in touch with Barrett’s old FBI handler in Sacramento, Matthew Perry, and told Perry that he would be in charge of the informant from now on. Betancourt bumped Barrett up in the hierarchy of those who helped the agency, telling him that he was now part of a council of elders who could advise the FBI on a wide range of topics, not just cases he was personally involved with.

    Barrett knew that Darren was no fan of the FBI. He had faulted Barrett for working so closely with the feds on the Russian case, even though the agency had mainly passed Barrett’s information on to the British. But Barrett felt that was Darren’s problem. He told his CEO that the new FBI man would be stopping by the office for some further education. Darren cursed, then spent a long time getting rid of anything in the suite that described Prolexic’s clients. Barrett blanched.

    Within a few months, Darren’s concerns made a lot more sense. Over Barrett’s objection, Prolexic had been protecting some gaming companies by hosting their traffic on machines in the U.S. With gambling on sports banned in most of the U.S., that sure felt like it made Prolexic an accessory to criminal activity. And Sacco wasn’t the only customer with an alarming reputation. In early 2005, Prolexic was hit with a subpoena by prosecutors in New York who wanted information on another rough bookmaker, Casablanca, best known for its Wager-Web site. An executive there emailed Prolexic and said that the subpoena followed the arrest of one of the gambling firms’ U.S. agents. “We have had a problem with the New York police,” the man wrote. He asked Prolexic what it had given the cops. And to make sure the “problem” didn’t continue, he suggested ending the current contract with Prolexic in order to “create a new one under a different company name.”

    Meanwhile Brian’s Digital Solutions, a major Prolexic client from the young company’s beginning, was in bed with all manner of questionable offshore firms. Worse still, Darren had Digital Gaming Solutions paperwork spread around his office, had demonstration software loaded on his computer there, and was selling the programs right out of the U.S. office. To Barrett, the Digital Gaming business was a cancer. He repeatedly asked Darren to keep it away from Prolexic, getting only vague promises in response. “You need to get the DGS stuff in the office OUT, I am sick of this crap,” Barrett exploded in a final email to his boss. “Please make sure you only use your Prolexic laptop and clear out any DGS stuff on it.”

    In the end, what pushed Barrett over the edge was simply bad management. He had developed a new method for assessing the risks to clients from a denial-of-service attack. Barrett sold it to the Royal Bank of Scotland for $100,000, then told his bosses he needed to take some vacation. Rachelle’s grandmother was dying, and the couple