DARKMARKET

people behind DarkMarket’s most successful mystery avatar were plan-
ning to expand his/their criminal empire. The article included a photo-
graph of the hacker talking in an Istanbul café. The photograph was
taken from the back, but some of the hacker’s profile was visible.

Bilal did not yet know that the hacker was a young man named Mert
Ortaç. This odd character was thought to be an accomplice of another
cyber criminal called Cryptos, who had been arrested in January 2008
for allegedly hacking into the Akbank, one of Turkey’s biggest financial
institutions. In many respects, the Akbank case was a bigger deal than
DarkMarket because the team had actually hacked into the bank’s main
system, by means of a vulnerability in its operating system. But neither
the Istanbul police nor the Anti-Organised Crime Division had the
faintest idea where Ortaç had been hiding. And suddenly he popped
up talking to a journalist.

Despite being under surveillance both by the Istanbul police and by a
posse of intelligence agents, Ortaç told the paper that he had given them
all the slip in December 2007 and gone underground. He had surfaced
only once to convey his strange and fragmented tale to the newspaper.

The Istanbul police were red-faced about his cameo appearance. The
implications of his interview – the ease with which he had evaded
capture – were troubling. To compound the police’s misery, the hacker
warned them that the arrests in the Akbank case would have no impact
on the security of Turkish banks because an altogether more formidable
criminal was now in the process of skinning them for all the money
he could – and that his name was Cha0. (Bilal Şen, of course, had
heard of Cha0, but this was the first time he had been talked about in
public – and by a mystery man.)

Ortaç had alleged that Cha0 was being protected by government
officials. The interview at least confirmed for Şen that Cha0 existed.
Nonetheless, when he read it, the Inspector felt himself looking into
the abyss. Who could possibly be protecting Cha0, and why?