Ex-BBC journalist and organised crime expert Misha Glenny has followed up his fascinating McMafia with another exploration of modern international crime networks - this time focusing specifically on the little-understood and discussed, but increasingly important, issue of cybercrime. It is that rare thing: an engaging and clear book about a messy and complicated subject, which is 'unputdownable' as they like to say in the publishers' ads. Moreover, it is a subject relevant to every single global web and computer user and one about which we are currently very under-informed.
For those who are unaware of Misha Glenny's work, he has built up an increasingly distinguished career reporting on the region of Eastern Europe, first as Balkan correspondent for the BBC and then more recently as an independent author (covering extensively the fall of Yugoslavia), freelance speaker and journalist.
His experience of Eastern Europe undergoing post-Socialist transformations in the 1990's enabled him to closely observe some of the key fallout from those rapid and unpredictable socio-political changes, especially the rise of organised crime networks in Russia and former USSR states. This research formed the basis of his 2009 book, McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime, which looked at less well-known and under-studied global crime networks covering everything from Nigerian 419 fraud, the Japanese Yakuza, Eastern European smuggling and global money laundering operations (see his TED talk on this here).
Glenny has now followed this up with Darkmarket, a book-length study of one of the most modern, fast-growing - and, consequently, little understood - forms of organised crime: cybercrime. He spent two years (between 2009 and 2011) conducting a wealth of interviews with key players in a number of high-profile busts related to credit card and bank fraud, centred in particular on three notorious websites Shadowcrew, CarderPlanet, and Darkmarket. Everyone from cyber security experts, police officers (from as far afield as Istanbul, Pittsburgh, and Scunthorpe), fraud victims and, most crucially of all, hackers and carders themselves are included in the research.
All of those interviews have been carefully adapted and compiled into a mazy and fascinating book, that will inform you of all those things you didn't understand about the web - like why spam exists (who sends it, how, and why) to what those ads that invite you to 'earn $$$ while working from home' really mean (in short: using your online bank account to assist in money laundering for credit card fraud). Likewise, the absolute headache that the internet presents to legislators, the judiciary, and many police forces (who are often equally caught out and outmanoeuvred by the fast moving nature of cybercrime) comes through very clearly as one of the key areas of our legal system that requires reform and clarification for such purposes.
As well as meticulous research, the other thing that Glenny does exceptionally well is build human relationships with those involved - including many now-jailed hackers. This, combined with his snappy and effective writing, enables us to see both the online identities of renowned cybercriminals - and their 'real-world' human personalities and characters. Understanding the hacker as a human being (and not only as online or criminal entity) is essential - according to Glenny - if we are to truly get to grips with an issue that could be increasingly central to matters of national and global economic and military security, as well as personal privacy.
It is this aspect of Glenny's book that really elevates it to being more than an account of a few illicit web forums and the police cases surrounding them and instead a fully fledged and perceptive new contribution to thinking about cybercrime - what it is and how and why it exists. As the book makes clear, this type of crime, while often mirroring traditional organised crime networks in many ways, does have one unique element to it - the complete and utter reliance on people with an extreme level of computing ability and intelligence. Unlike most crime, it requires individuals who are at the pinnacle of human ability in a certain field (programming, maths, etc) and is totally reliant on these relatively rare creatures. Getting to the core of who the hacker is, and why he hacks is therefore the central question for those interested in understanding or reducing cybercrime (this is also the core message of his second TED talk).
Anyway, Darkmarket reads like a police/espionage thriller with all the classic elements: double agents, backstabbing, undercover cops, glamorous playboy lifestyles and so on. As befits a book about the web, the chapters are very short (almost like blog posts) and multiple narratives unfold simultaneously, overlapping, and intersecting - sometimes in the virtual world, sometimes the physical. Likewise, as we would expect with a tale of the web, the multiple identities belonging to many of the main characters also often overlap, proliferate (or are appropriated by others) - which can sometimes be confusing as a reader, but only because that is a consequence of the increasing ubiquity of the online world - identity sometimes gets very complicated and as a result we need to update our concepts somewhat for the 21st century.
In short, Darkmarket will make your head spin - both with excitement at learning and discovering something which is a tangential aspect of everyone's (virtual) reality and with confusion at the sheer complications that this creates for law enforcement and legislators. As I said earlier, Glenny's book is that very rare thing: a study of an important and complex, but potentially dry, subject - that is executed with such skill that it is never anything but thrilling, engaging and informative.
