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WEB WAR ONE

networks. He could easily spend years on either one, just looking for the data and the access he needed to make a big score. Max was having trouble staying motivated for the mind-numbing follow-through to his intrusions; cracking the networks had been the fun part, and now that was over.

Instead, Max put the banks on the back burner to focus on the carding war. Max's new hosting provider was getting complaints about the rampant criminality on Carders Market. Max saw one of the e-mails, sent from an anonymous webmail account. On a hunch, Max tried logging in to the account with JiLsi's password. It worked. JiLsi was trying to get him shut down.

Max retaliated by hacking into JiLsi's account on the Russian forum Mazafaka and posting an avalanche of messages reading, simply, "I'm a fed." Then he went public with the evidence of JiLsi's malfeasance; snitching to Carders Market's hosting company was a scummy tactic.

DarkMarket just didn't have the decency to die. Max could have dropped the database again, but it would do no good—the site had come back before. His DDoS attacks had become ineffective, too. Overnight, DarkMarket had come into expensive high-bandwidth hosting and erected dedicated e-mail and database servers. It was suddenly a hard target.

Then Max heard an intriguing rumor about DarkMarket.

The story involved Silo, a Canadian hacker known for an uncanny ability to juggle dozens of false handles in the community, effortlessly switching writing styles and personalities for each one. Silo's second claim to fame was his compulsive back-dooring of other carders. He was constantly posting software with hidden code that would let him spy on his peers.

Both traits were at play when Silo registered an account at Dark-Market under a new handle and submitted a piece of hacking software for vendor review. True to form, Silo had secreted a hidden function in the software that would smuggle a user's files out to one of Silo's servers.

When Silo looked at the results, he found a small cache of blank Microsoft Word templates, including a "malware report" form. The tem-