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WEB WAR ONE

to the affected banks. Stolen credit cards could be canceled before they were used.

The meeting lasted twenty minutes. When he returned to Pittsburgh on October 7, Mularski had written approval to acquire DarkMarket. Iceman was still listed as a subject of the undercover operation, but now JiLsi and DarkMarket’s other leaders were the primary targets.

Once his wife went to bed, Mularski settled in front of his couch, turned on Saturday Night Live, and looked for JiLsi on ICQ. After some pleasantries, he got down to business. DarkMarket was under yet another DDoS attack, and Mularski, as Master Splyntr, was ready to take the site onto a secure server—JiLsi need only say the word, and his problems with Iceman would be history.

JiLsi had some reservations. DarkMarket was his baby, and he didn’t want to be perceived by the community as ceding control. That wouldn’t be a problem, Mularski explained. Master Splyntr would be a stealth administrator. Nobody but he and JiLsi would know he was running the site. To everyone else, he’d still just be a moderator.

“Bro,” JiLsi typed back. “Get your server ready. We moving.”

Mularski went to work at once. He rented a server from a Texas-based hosting company called the Planet and went to the underground to shore it up, buying $500-a-month DDoS protection services from a Russian named Quazatron and paying for it in e-gold. Quazatron configured the site so its public face was at Staminus, a DDoS-resistant high-bandwidth hosting company. The company’s pipes could withstand a deluge, and Quazatron’s software would channel only the legitimate traffic to Dark-Market’s real server behind the scenes.

Everything would be done the way an Eastern European cybercrook would do it. When Mularski wanted to log in to the site’s back end, he’d go through KIRE, a Virginia company offering Linux “shell accounts”— a service that lets IRC users connect to chat rooms without being traced to their home IP addresses. Nobody would see that the Polish spam king was logging in from Pittsburgh.