by Kate Fazzini
Victor instructs him to avoid engaging in any political debate and recognizes that all teachers, especially those who teach in the public schools he attends, are probably intellectually limited.
Don’t trust anyone who asks you for money or tells you a sad story about his life too soon after meeting him, Victor tells him. Never share any personal information until you’ve known someone for well over a year. If someone tells you they’re not a good guy, believe them the first time. Never download any apps onto your phone. Never allow some company to track your location.
He worries he is too dark with the kid, but the kid smiles a lot. His boy humors him. Laughs sometimes at things Victor’s not joking about.
Indeed, these are things a hacker actually worries about.
In fact, what worries him most is what he believes is an increasing lack of attention to detail in all things—engineering, security, car manufacturing. There’s more stuff but so much of it sucks that it introduces more risk.
Victor immigrated to Israel from Russia when he was a child, and then to the United States when he was eight years old. His father, a government engineer, stayed behind in Russia while Victor, his mother, and Victor’s older sister went ahead.
For several years, they lived without Dad, in a world of impossible freedom. It was the beginning of what would turn him deeply capitalist and conservative. He only works with American cars, he says frequently, because he loves America. From the get-go, Victor’s father—who rejoined the family after five years in purgatory—marveled at the inadequacy of American engineering and how it seemed to be growing worse as the years wore on. He referred to his own experience in industrial engineering—not computer code, but in bridges, tunnels, subway systems, and skyscrapers. He pointed out lopsided entryways and inelegant angles each time they would go into the city.
Victor sees parallels to this everywhere. Inefficiencies. Poor design. Lopsided and inelegant are the least of these. Sloppy code that invites problems. Sloppy thinking that invites manipulation.
It doesn’t surprise him at all when computer engineers in Russia are able to do any number of things the media accuses them of doing. But he doesn’t know that he would call it hacking. You can’t break into a house whose doors have been left open.
You can’t break code that was written with giant holes. You can’t break weak minds. They’re already broken.
9.
The Teenager
René Kreutz, now a teenager in Arnica Valka, Romania, never learned a single thing about evasive maneuvers from her father, even though he was a cop. He retired well before she was born. And he really retired. He sat down in a big, soft chair in front of a television and never—or so it seemed to René—got up again.
René’s mother makes nice Romanian dinners and buys her good conservative clothes, but offers no life advice. When René asks either of them what they think she should do with her life, all they have to offer are blank stares. “Whatever you want, I guess.”
René feels as if she is always tripping into and out of trouble, lighthearted trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
A few of the girls René grew up with and went to clubs with managed to wend their way into a life of casual prostitution. This isn’t something René wants, so she leaves them behind. She gets involved romantically with a few feckless, aimless boys, but for no more than a few weeks. When they ask her for money, she rids herself of them quickly. She tries to be practical. Often in warm water but never hot.
Both she and Arnica Valka are growing up. And it’s not just her nineteenth birthday that’s making her feel wiser and older. It’s much more concrete than that.
* * *
Arnica Valka is a quiet town, just 100,000 people, nestled in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, two hours west of Bucharest. It has, in fact, right under René’s nose, become one of the world’s most notorious cybercrime villages, with an underground economy funded almost entirely by ransomware, stolen credit cards, and identity theft. Media will later call some of its neighboring towns among the most “dangerous places on the internet” and “hackervilles.” To her, it is just home.
René was born in Arnica and grew up in Nicolae Ceaușescu–era housing projects. About two years prior to her nineteenth birthday, she noticed her hometown changing. Tech start-ups were percolating in warehouses and old barns, furnished like American social media companies with beanbag chairs and exposed brick walls. René heard the pay at these start-ups was fantastic—too good to be true.
René never mastered math like her parents had wanted and had no desire to marry a nice, older rich man, as her mother had suggested. She decides to go into advertising. As a student in marketing at Arnica Community College, she fantasizes about landing a job in tech, but she can’t write code. Besides, it’s not like these start-ups she keeps hearing about actually advertise job openings. It is all very hush-hush.
In her free time, René likes dancing and reading detective novels. She smokes cigarettes with her friends that she rolls herself with fresh tobacco. She is paying her way through college by working at City Italia, one of the fancy new restaurants that has just cropped up to meet the demands of the tech economy. She jokes to patrons that her only tech skills are texting with one hand while pouring coffee with the other.
One thing René is good at is talking. She argues her way to better grades in school even when she has cut classes. She talked her way into a job at City Italia and talks her way out of parking tickets. She is pretty, too, slender with long auburn hair. Then again, most of the young women in Arnica are pretty. As the economy grows, she can’t help but notice how the local pool of beautiful young women grows with it.
Sig Himelman first sees René at Sunday brunch at City Italia. He watches as she flirts with each table, just enough to get a good tip, but not enough give them the wrong idea. He sees potential in her right away. Sig sits with a group of other well-dressed, 30-something men. Tall and engaging, with a new, neatly trimmed beard and a brand-new set of custom-made white veneers, he’s clearly the ringleader of the table. René flirts with him accordingly.
They talk in English—Sig with a German accent—but right away she thinks he asks too many questions for her comfort.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“Your voice is too low for a nineteen-year-old,” he says.
“I roll my own cigarettes and I often forget the filters.”
“It’s a good voice. Reassuring. Do you like your job?”
René is always on guard for when a less-than-wholesome proposition might be coming. She leans in and whispers, “I am a child of God. You can find your whores elsewhere.”
She grabs the tip from the table and walks away. He follows her and she debates whether to get the manager. No, she will handle this herself.
“Wait, wait,” he says to her. “You misunderstood me.”
She turns, arms crossed, and listens.
“I work at a company called TechSolu,” Sig says. “We just opened a few months ago on General Maleur Street. We need a call center operator. Someone who sounds mature and who likes to solve problems. Whatever they pay you here, I’ll triple it.”
It sounds too good to be true, René thinks, but she wants a job at a start-up. Maybe this is how it works.
Sig can tell she’s reluctant. He hands her his card along with a stack of crisp American bills.
“Meet me at the address on the card, Monday at nine a.m.” He gestures behind him to the restaurant floor. “What do you have to lose?”
* * *
Monday morning, René finds herself walking down General Maleur Street, her father’s pistol in her handbag, just in case.
The neighborhood is changed, indeed. Block by block as she nears the center of town, she sees new streetlights, more police cars. There are more people, too—young people—moving quickly in the cool morning air as they make their way to work.
Stores that once sold cheap cell phones are now vend
ing expensive tablets. Computer servers are advertised in the windows like puppies. Some of the storefronts promote the fact that they accept Bitcoin as payment. René passes the old, yellow-drab laundry where her mother would take her when their washing machine wasn’t working. It is now called Cafe Americain and looks just like a Starbucks.
Wedged between a health food store selling some kind of Korean drink with bubbles in it and a law office advertising financial crime defense is TechSolu. René grips her handbag a bit tighter as she enters.
Inside she finds a beautifully appointed open floor plan. The workers, all men, stare intently at their computer screens. Sig leaps up and greets her like an old friend, then ushers her into a glass office. On his desk, five laptops are stacked up like most people stack paperwork.
“I’m so glad you came, René!”
“I didn’t think I would.”
He offers her a seat and then leans back in his desk chair. “Do you know what we do here?”
“Technology, I presume,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “But I am no good with computers. I am an excellent typist, though, and can certainly answer phones. I would require my first paycheck up front.” She shifts her weight in the chair and smiles. Negotiating is a strong suit.
He smiles. “Do you speak any other languages besides English?”
“Russian and French.”
“Both will definitely come in handy here. We have customers all over the globe.”
René remains expressionless.
“We do penetration testing,” Sig offers. “That is, we hack into companies and then they pay us to show them where they are vulnerable, so they can fix the problem. We’re a cybersecurity company.”
“Cybersecurity? Not hackers?” she ventures.
Sig grins. “Well, yes and no. We are hackers, but the good kind. Ethical hackers. White hats.”
“So why do you need customer service?”
“Sometimes, when our clients have problems, they need to vent, they get mad because they don’t like to find out that their computers were vulnerable. I’ll be honest, sometimes they need to vent a lot. Or they can’t figure out how to pay, so you have to guide them through the process. Most of our customers pay in Bitcoin, and it can be a little tricky for them to get it right.”
“You don’t pay your workers in Bitcoin, do you?”
“No. Of course not. You will be paid in leus or euros or U.S. dollars.”
René knows of no legitimate business in Romania that gives its workers a choice to be paid in whatever foreign currency they want. But Sig is growing on her. He seems genuine and charming. And the workers in the open-plan office are all well dressed and appear happy. There are even beanbag chairs. It’s just how she imagines working at Facebook must be, but on a smaller scale. Plus, she is really good at customer service.
“U.S. dollars,” she says.
“Excellent! Let me show you your desk!”
Her desk is inside a small alcove office, slightly removed from the rest of the team so that she doesn’t disturb them with her phone calls.
On her first day, René helps four “customers” transmit Bitcoin into a digital wallet held by TechSolu. The executives she speaks to on the phone are distraught. Sig explains the executives are angry because they don’t find out how to fix the cybersecurity problems until after they pay.
She catches on quickly. The workers on the main floor of TechSolu are hackers and by no means ethical. They are breaking into American and European companies, freezing their important files, and demanding payment in exchange for a digital key that will unfreeze those files. Along with the digital key, TechSolu will also deliver a helpful PowerPoint deck on how to keep hackers like them from doing the same thing again. One of her colleagues sometimes gets on the phone, too, and walks the executives through what they did wrong.
Despite the consultancy feel, it’s clear Sig and the rest of the team are cybercriminals. TechSolu’s business model is ransomware.
But here they are, in a completely normal office, one that René really likes. They offer some health benefits. There is a foosball table. René rationalizes the criminal aspects away. Cybercrime isn’t the same as “regular” crime, she thinks. You have to be smart and savvy to pull it off. Plus, no one gets hurt, at least not physically.
She sometimes gets a nice bonus in cash. Every so often, she tapes some of the cash in a small bundle underneath her desk in the office. Just in case.
* * *
What René lacks in computer skills she makes up for in street smarts. She quickly becomes hooked on customer service.
Every day, she talks to distressed businessmen and -women, calms them down, and explains that they have been hacked, that they can restore their data immediately for a small fee, and they can make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The “customers” often go from pleading, crying, sometimes screaming to thanking her. Some even say that the money—often just a few hundred dollars—is a small price to pay for recovering their files and making sure it never happens again.
René soon learns that all tech start-ups on General Maleur specialize in ransomware or similar work. Above the Korean tea shop is a company that hacks into the databases of American retailers and steals credit card numbers. Next to Cafe Americain, another company buys those credit card numbers and manufactures fake credit cards that work like the real thing. They hire mules to go out and purchase goods that can easily be turned around and sold, thereby creating “clean” cash from the illegal credit card transactions.
Sig was wrong when he said he would triple her pay from City Italia. In fact, she makes four times what she had been making at the restaurant. She quits community college but uses what she’d learned in class to make TechSolu’s PowerPoint decks prettier and more readable. Soon René is optimizing TechSolu’s ransomware racket.
She creates a much more compelling screen for customers to see when they are hacked. It no longer read “You’ve been hacked!” in green font on black. Now a subtler, almost reassuring message appears on an all-white background:
We are sorry to disturb you, but a flaw in your operating system has allowed hackers to disrupt your operations. Your files have been frozen, but you have a number of ways to get them back.
She creates a menu of options for the customers, which allows TechSolu to increase its margins by 20 percent in only a few months. Most of the ransoms that clients pay are only around $300 or $400, but some are paying over $1,000 with the new menu. Clients can choose to pay quickly at a discount or wait and face an ever-increasing payment. If they do not pay by a certain time, their files will be destroyed. They can also pay extra for the latest and most up-to-date PowerPoint deck. In a few cases, René convinces customers to actually allow TechSolu’s hackers access to their full network to do legitimate penetration testing. Sig promotes her, gives her a raise and her own glass office.
Shortly thereafter, one of TechSolu’s hackers manages to get into a large technology company in San Francisco. A company René has heard of. The file cache the hacker accesses contains company emails, and a quick look reveals some very embarrassing messages from the CEO.
He is a well-known name, and as René pages through the trove, she is disgusted by his attempts to use vendor contacts to procure hookers. Other messages he sends internally to female employees include egregious innuendo and commentary on their looks and clothes.
René simmers. She’s making good money, but this guy is a billionaire. Some executives at Sony had just been roasted all over the internet for far lesser crimes than these. He needs to be put in his place, she thinks. She churns through revenge scenarios in her mind, then hits on one that could be a huge win for TechSolu.
While the boys on the floor laugh about the treasure trove of filth they have hacked, René ducks into Sig’s office.
“I have an idea. We contact the CEO and we ransom him for his emails. We don’t ransom the company’s files. We stay under the radar and spook him just enough to g
et him to pay up, but not enough for him to call the FBI. I’ll reach out and explain the situation. I mean, how much do you think it’s worth to him, a million dollars?”
“Do it,” Sig says.
She researches the CEO but can’t find a private email address, only a work address. She writes him something very discreet but references one email in particular, one that the CEO will know is from his emails: “I’ll bet it tastes like chicken, but really good chicken.” She shudders a little from writing it out, proofreads the rest, adds a burner phone number that will call back to her office phone. She uses the pseudonym Katrina and hits send.
It takes three minutes for her phone to ring, even though it is 1 a.m. in San Francisco. The call comes over a WhatsApp line—encrypted. On the other end, a tired man’s voice with a surfer’s affectation speaks.
“Hello? Is this Katrina?”
“Yes.”
“I would like to ask … how much does it cost to use your … shredding services?”
“The current rate is two hundred Bitcoin.”
“That’s…” His voice trails off while he does the math, but she could have easily finished the sentence for him. “More than a million dollars.”
“Yes,” she says.
“And the documents … they are completely destroyed … after this service?”
“Yes.”
She can, as she has grown accustomed to with other customers, hear him talk himself into accepting her proposal.
“Can you guarantee it?”
“Yes. I can put it in writing if you like and send it to—”
“No! No. That’s fine. Your word is sufficient. After all, if you didn’t keep your word, nobody would ever pay you again, would they?”
“No, sir.”
Long pause.
“You have a nice voice. Where are you from, Russia? How much are they paying you? I’ll bet you’d love to work in the U.S. H-1B visas are hard to get, but I just want you to know that I love women. I respect them.”
