DARKMARKET

While the Russian sites rumbled along happily, by the summer of 2006 Iceman had killed off almost all English-language opponents. And when he noticed any of them attempting to resurrect themselves, he would launch a devastating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

DDoS attacks had emerged as the most common weapon in cyberspace. They were the work of so-called botnets, the cyber equivalent of the 1950s Hollywood classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A virus 'captures' a computer, which then falls under the influence of a so-called Command and Control Server. The virus would infect thousands of computers in this way, which were referred to thereafter as zombies, enjoying the status of drones that carry out the bidding of the mighty C-and-C Server. To most intents and purposes, they continued to function as normal computers. An ordinary user would be unaware that his other machine was now a soldier in a vast Army of the Digital Dead. If an especially active zombie, the innocent victim might have noticed his or her computer running a little slowly, usually because it was being overworked to assist unseen in the distribution of billions of spam emails, either advertising penis enlargements and Vicodin or containing a new copy of the virus that could infect still more computers.

But often botnets are instructed instead to mount DDoS attacks whereby the zombies are all ordered to access a specific website at the same time. If a website or a server is subject to a DDoS, it simply collapses under the strain of having to accommodate so much computer traffic. The page freezes. If the attack is powerful enough, whole systems freeze.

His relentless use of DDoS attacks ensured that Iceman was widely loathed among the criminal hacking community for his arrogance. But his tactics also aroused the suspicion that he was working for the Feds, because so many of his victims were hackers and criminals.

However, nobody could argue with his figures and turnover, as CardersMarket now had several thousand members, all of them still active, buying and selling credit cards, bank accounts, viruses, identities and more. By August 2006 he was cock of the cyber walk.

There was only one thorn in his flesh. One criminal website wouldn't die. Every time he hit it, whether by clearing out its database and wiping all its files or by ordering his army of zombies to take it down from the Web, it just kept coming back like a weeble, those funny dolls that always spring back up when you knock them down.

The battle with DarkMarket had begun.