A FAMILY AFFAIR

attached to traditional mafia structures. Script called them ‘lone wolves’ in an interview with Hacker (Xakep.ru), the great chronicler of Russia’s cyber underworld. ‘They don’t huddle together in groups or form their own distinctive networks; everyone works by himself, for himself.’

The Russians were not the only hackers developing the techniques of cybercrime, but CarderPlanet gave them a structure, hitherto elusive, enabling those lone wolves to form opportunistic packs in order to commit crime (or mere mischief) before evaporating back into a deso- late cyber wilderness, brilliantly camouflaged in the clicking and whir- ring environment of the Web, resisting all attempts to identify who on earth they might be.

Very quickly, its members came to adore CarderPlanet. ‘You must understand,’ said a former consigliere from the website’s inner circle, ‘CarderPlanet was not just a source of information. People lived on CarderPlanet – we referred to it simply as The Planet as though it were our home.’

While theft, spamming and other forms of electronic malfeasance played a very important role, these were by no means the only activities attracting Russian speakers to land on the Planet and make their home there. The average user was gifted with a fascination for electronics, computing, games, network systems and hacking as sport.

These were not mere criminals who identified CarderPlanet as a vehicle through which they might ply their trade. Instead, they created a community of men largely in their teens and early twenties who were struggling to get by in a chaotic, ruthless historical moment and who possessed unique abilities. In Odessa, everybody was compelled to behave in a certain criminal fashion as a matter of course. But most were naturally confined by their location. The Planeteers armed them- selves with the survivor’s logic, from an Odessa in political and economic turmoil, and replicated these behavioural patterns in cyber- space. They were not natural-born killers, but natural-born survivors.

The new site was divided into categories, each devoted to a specific aspect of Internet crime or hacking. The first time one of Odessa’s young hackers logged onto CarderPlanet, he was overwhelmed. ‘I swear it was the same feeling that Ali Baba must have experienced when he first opened the cave and saw it stuffed full of treasure. Each section had heaps of information, which you could use to make yourself stinking rich without ever getting up from your computer!’