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28
Carder Court

Keith Mularski was screwed.

He got the word first from an agent at the Secret Service field office across town. “I think you may be in some trouble.” One of their myriad informants heard that Iceman had uncovered incontrovertible proof that Master Splyntr was either a snitch, a corporate security spy, or a federal agent. Iceman had forged a temporary alliance with his sometime enemy Silo and was preparing a comprehensive presentation for the leadership of Carders Market and DarkMarket. Iceman and Silo were going to put Master Splyntr on trial.

It had begun with Silo’s code. Master Splyntr’s reputation as a spammer and programmer made him DarkMarket’s go-to guy for malware reviews. It was one of the perks of his undercover operation: Mularski got the first look at the underground’s latest attack code and could pass it to CERT, who would in turn give it to all the antivirus companies. The malicious code would be detectable even before it went on the black market.

This time, Mularski had assigned the code as a training exercise to one of the CMU students interning at NCFTA. As standard procedure, the student ran the program isolated in a virtual machine—a kind of software petri dish that could be scrubbed afterward. But he forgot that he had a thumb drive in the USB port. The drive was loaded with blank malware report forms containing the NCFTA logo and mission statement.