DarkMarket Quotes

“Il crimine non era l’unica opzione per Vision. Esistevano altre possibilità da prendere in esame. Si sarebbe potuto rivolgere ad amici e famiglia. Ma era stanco, si sentiva abbandonato e [Jeffrey] Normington era convincente. Un’altra svolta, un altro errore.
Max Vision, un bravo ragazzo sotto tutti i punti di vista, si ritrovò di nuovo in fondo al baratro. Al suo posto emerse Iceman, un cattivo ragazzo sotto tutti punti di vista, anche se con un alter ego, Vision, che aveva precedenti come collaboratore dei federali.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

“Matrix passò il Rubicone in uno stato di trance psicologica, incapace di percepire le acque che gli mulinavano intorno. Era un ragazzino e stava scivolando in maniera lenta e inesorabile nella delinquenza. In qualche recesso della sua mente era consapevole che forse qualcosa non andava, ma nel cyberspazio le linee di demarcazione sono molto confuse, sempre che siano visibili.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

“Despite habitual protests by civil servants and politicians that no such process is under way, the tortured and slow death of Internet privacy in the West, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, is a sad – albeit visible – reality and is probably inevitable.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

“Nonetheless, the gamers had taken up with gusto the challenge laid down by software manufacturers, and before long a significant subculture of cracker groups had flowered. Its members’ sole aim was to crack games and other software the minute they came onto the market and then parade their cracking skills to their peers.

The cyber underworld was born, although it would quickly start fracturing into very different communities – some good, some bad.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

“Many of the criminal skills on the Web have emerged from an essential division in the philosophical debate generated by the Internet.

In simple terms the debate is between those, on the one hand, who believe its commercial role is paramount and those, on the other, who argue that it is in the first instance a social and intellectual tool, whose very nature changes the fundamental moral code of mass communication. For the former, any copying of computer ‘code’ (shorthand for the computer language in which software or a program is written) that is not explicitly sanctioned is regarded as a criminal violation. The latter, however, are convinced that by releasing software you are also relinquishing copyright.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

“Would a Catholic turn down the chance to visit Lourdes? Or a Muslim an opportunity to see Mecca? Well, no self-respecting criminal would pass up the offer of a week in Odessa.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You

“Given the strength of the civil-liberties community in the West and the KGB’s comprehensive surveillance of the Internet, one might assume that Russia would represent an implacably hostile environment for cyber criminals. Yet the Russian Federation has become one of the great centres of global cybercrime. The strike rate of the police is lamentable, while the number of those convicted barely reaches double figures. The reason, while unspoken, is widely understood. Russian cyber criminals are free to clone as many credit cards, hack as many bank accounts and distribute as much spam as they wish, provided the targets of these attacks are located in Western Europe and the United States. A Russian hacker who started ripping off Russians would be bundled into the back of an unmarked vehicle before you could say KGB.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia

“In humanity's relentless drive for convenience and economic growth, we have developed a dangerous level of dependency on networked systems in a very short space of time: in less than two decades, huge parts of the so-called 'critical national infrastructure' (CNI in geekish) in most countries have come under the control of ever more complex computer systems.”
― Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You