Now this is a very un-TED-like thing to do,
but let's kick off the afternoon
with a message
from a mystery sponsor.
Anonymous: Dear Fox News,
it has come to our unfortunate attention
that both the name and nature of Anonymous
has been ravaged.
We are everyone. We are no one.
We are anonymous. We are legion.
We do not forgive. We do not forget.
We are but the base of chaos.
Misha Glenny: Anonymous, ladies and gentlemen --
a sophisticated group
of politically motivated hackers
who have emerged in 2011.
And they're pretty scary.
You never know when they're going to attack next,
who or what the consequences will be.
But interestingly,
they have a sense of humor.
These guys hacked into Fox News' Twitter account
to announce President Obama's assassination.
Now you can imagine the panic that would have generated
in the newsroom at Fox.
"What do we do now?
Put on a black armband, or crack open the champagne?"
(Laughter)
And of course, who could escape the irony
of a member of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
being a victim of hacking for a change.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Sometimes you turn on the news
and you say, "Is there anyone left to hack?"
Sony Playstation Network -- done,
the government of Turkey -- tick,
Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency -- a breeze,
the CIA -- falling off a log.
In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry
told me the other day
that there are two types of companies in the world:
those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.
I mean three companies
providing cybersecurity services to the FBI
have been hacked.
Is nothing sacred anymore, for heaven's sake?
Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous --
and they would say this themselves --
they are providing a service
by demonstrating how useless companies are
at protecting our data.
But there is also a very serious aspect to Anonymous --
they are ideologically driven.
They claim that they are battling
a dastardly conspiracy.
They say that governments are trying
to take over the Internet and control it,
and that they, Anonymous,
are the authentic voice of resistance --
be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships,
against global media corporations,
or against intelligence agencies,
or whoever it is.
And their politics are not entirely unattractive.
Okay, they're a little inchoate.
There's a strong whiff
of half-baked anarchism about them.
But one thing is true:
we are at the beginning
of a mighty struggle
for control of the Internet.
The Web links everything,
and very soon
it will mediate most human activity.
Because the Internet has fashioned
a new and complicated environment
for an old-age dilemma
that pits the demands of security
with the desire for freedom.
Now this is a very complicated struggle.
And unfortunately, for mortals like you and me,
we probably can't understand it very well.
Nonetheless,
in an unexpected attack of hubris
a couple of years ago,
I decided I would try and do that.
And I sort of get it.
These were the various things that I was looking at
as I was trying to understand it.
But in order to try and explain the whole thing,
I would need another 18 minutes or so to do it,
so you're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion,
and let me assure you that all of these issues
are involved in cybersecurity and control of the Internet
one way or the other,
but in a configuration
that even Stephen Hawking would probably have difficulty
trying to get his head around.
So there you are.
And as you see, in the middle,
there is our old friend, the hacker.
The hacker is absolutely central
to many of the political, social
and economic issues affecting the Net.
And so I thought to myself,
"Well, these are the guys who I want to talk to."
And what do you know,
nobody else does talk to the hackers.
They're completely anonymous, as it were.
So despite the fact
that we are beginning to pour billions,
hundreds of billions of dollars,
into cybersecurity --
for the most extraordinary technical solutions --
no one wants to talk
to these guys, the hackers,
who are doing everything.
Instead, we prefer these really dazzling technological solutions,
which cost a huge amount of money.
And so nothing is going into the hackers.
Well, I say nothing,
but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit
in Turin, Italy
called the Hackers Profiling Project.
And they are doing some fantastic research
into the characteristics,
into the abilities
and the socialization of hackers.
But because they're a U.N. operation,
maybe that's why governments and corporations
are not that interested in them.
Because it's a U.N. operation,
of course, it lacks funding.
But I think they're doing very important work.
Because where we have a surplus of technology
in the cybersecurity industry,
we have a definite lack of --
call me old-fashioned --
human intelligence.
Now, so far I've mentioned
the hackers Anonymous
who are a politically motivated hacking group.
Of course, the criminal justice system
treats them as common old garden criminals.
But interestingly,
Anonymous does not make use of its hacked information
for financial gain.
But what about the real cybercriminals?
Well real organized crime on the Internet
goes back about 10 years
when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers
developed a website,
which led to the industrialization
of cybercrime.
Welcome to the now forgotten realm of CarderPlanet.
This is how they were advertising themselves
a decade ago on the Net.
Now CarderPlanet was very interesting.
Cybercriminals would go there
to buy and sell stolen credit card details,
to exchange information
about new malware that was out there.
And remember, this is a time
when we're seeing for the first time
so-called off-the-shelf malware.
This is ready for use, out-of-the-box stuff,
which you can deploy
even if you're not a terribly sophisticated hacker.
And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket
for cybercriminals.
And its creators
were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial,
because they were faced
with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals.
And that challenge is:
How do you do business,
how do you trust
somebody on the Web who you want to do business with
when you know that they're a criminal?
(Laughter)
It's axiomatic that they're dodgy,
and they're going to want to try and rip you off.
So the family, as the inner core of CarderPlanet was known,
came up with this brilliant idea
called the escrow system.
They appointed an officer
who would mediate between the vendor and the purchaser.
The vendor, say, had stolen credit card details;
the purchaser wanted to get a hold of them.
The purchaser would send the administrative officer
some dollars digitally,
and the vendor would sell the stolen credit card details.
And the officer would then verify
if the stolen credit card worked.
And if they did,
he then passed on the money to the vendor
and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser.
And it was this
which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web.
And after that, it just went wild.
We had a champagne decade
for people who we know as Carders.
Now I spoke to one of these Carders
who we'll call RedBrigade --
although that wasn't even his proper nickname --
but I promised I wouldn't reveal who he was.
And he explained to me how in 2003 and 2004
he would go on sprees in New York,
taking out $10,000 from an ATM here,
$30,000 from an ATM there,
using cloned credit cards.
He was making, on average a week,
$150,000 --
tax free of course.
And he said
that he had so much money
stashed in his upper-East side apartment at one point
that he just didn't know what to do with it
and actually fell into a depression.
But that's a slightly different story,
which I won't go into now.
Now the interesting thing about RedBrigade
is that he wasn't an advanced hacker.
He sort of understood the technology,
and he realized that security was very important
if you were going to be a Carder,
but he didn't spend his days and nights
bent over a computer, eating pizza,
drinking coke and that sort of thing.
He was out there on the town
having a fab time enjoying the high life.
And this is because
hackers are only one element
in a cybercriminal enterprise.
And often they're the most vulnerable element of all.
And I want to explain this to you
by introducing you to six characters
who I met
while I was doing this research.
Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT --
born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982.
Now he developed his social and moral compass
on the Black Sea port during the 1990s.
This was a sink-or-swim environment
where involvement in criminal or corrupt activities
was entirely necessary
if you wanted to survive.
As an accomplished computer user,
what Dimitry did
was to transfer the gangster capitalism of his hometown
onto the Worldwide Web.
And he did a great job in it.
You have to understand though
that from his ninth birthday,
the only environment he knew
was gangsterism.
He knew no other way of making a living
and making money.
Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam,
aka JiLsi --
founder of DarkMarket,
born in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
As an eight year-old,
he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital
because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city,
looking for Tamils like Renu to murder.
At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military,
accused of being a terrorist,
and his parents sent him on his own to Britain
as a refugee seeking political asylum.
At 13,
with only little English and being bullied at school,
he escaped into a world of computers
where he showed great technical ability,
but he was soon being seduced
by people on the Internet.
He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud,
and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs jail in London
in 2012.
Matrix001,
who was an administrator at DarkMarket.
Born in Southern Germany
to a stable and well-respected middle class family,
his obsession with gaming as a teenager
led him to hacking.
And he was soon controlling huge servers around the world
where he stored his games
that he had cracked and pirated.
His slide into criminality
was incremental.
And when he finally woke up to his situation
and understood the implications,
he was already in too deep.
Max Vision, aka ICEMAN --
mastermind of CardersMarket.
Born in Meridian, Idaho.
Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers
working out of Santa Clara, California
in the late 90s for private companies
and voluntarily for the FBI.
Now in the late 1990s,
he discovered a vulnerability
on all U.S. government networks,
and he went in and patched it up --
because this included nuclear research facilities --
sparing the American government
a huge security embarrassment.
But also, because he was an inveterate hacker,
he left a tiny digital wormhole
through which he alone could crawl.
But this was spotted by an eagle-eye investigator,
and he was convicted.
At his open prison,
he came under the influence of financial fraudsters,
and those financial fraudsters
persuaded him to work for them
on his release.
And this man with a planetary-sized brain
is now serving a 13-year sentence
in California.
Adewale Taiwo, aka FreddyBB --
master bank account cracker
from Abuja in Nigeria.
He set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup,
bankfrauds@yahoo.co.uk
before arriving in Britain
in 2005
to take a Masters in chemical engineering
at Manchester University.
He impressed in the private sector,
developing chemical applications for the oil industry
while simultaneously running
a worldwide bank and credit card fraud operation that was worth millions
until his arrest in 2008.
And then finally, Cagatay Evyapan,
aka Cha0 --
one of the most remarkable hackers ever,
from Ankara in Turkey.
He combined the tremendous skills of a geek
with the suave social engineering skills
of the master criminal.
One of the smartest people I've ever met.
He also had the most effective
virtual private network security arrangement
the police have ever encountered
amongst global cybercriminals.
Now the important thing
about all of these people
is they share certain characteristics
despite the fact that they come from very different environments.
They are all people who learned their hacking skills
in their early to mid-teens.
They are all people
who demonstrate advanced ability
in maths and the sciences.
Remember that, when they developed those hacking skills,
their moral compass had not yet developed.
And most of them, with the exception of SCRIPT and Cha0,
they did not demonstrate
any real social skills in the outside world --
only on the Web.
And the other thing is
the high incidence of hackers like these
who have characteristics which are consistent
with Asperger's syndrome.
Now I discussed this
with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen
who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge.
And he has done path-breaking work on autism
and confirmed, also for the authorities here,
that Gary McKinnon --
who is wanted by the United States
for hacking into the Pentagon --
suffers from Asperger's
and a secondary condition
of depression.
And Baron-Cohen explained
that certain disabilities
can manifest themselves in the hacking and computing world
as tremendous skills,
and that we should not be throwing in jail
people who have such disabilities and skills
because they have lost their way socially
or been duped.
Now I think we're missing a trick here,
because I don't think people like Max Vision should be in jail.
And let me be blunt about this.
In China, in Russia and in loads of other countries
that are developing cyber-offensive capabilities,
this is exactly what they are doing.
They are recruiting hackers
both before and after they become involved
in criminal and industrial espionage activities --
are mobilizing them
on behalf of the state.
We need to engage
and find ways of offering guidance
to these young people,
because they are a remarkable breed.
And if we rely, as we do at the moment,
solely on the criminal justice system
and the threat of punitive sentences,
we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame.
Thank you very much for listening.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: So your idea worth spreading
is hire hackers.
How would someone get over that kind of fear
that the hacker they hire
might preserve that little teensy wormhole?
MG: I think to an extent,
you have to understand
that it's axiomatic among hackers that they do that.
They're just relentless and obsessive
about what they do.
But all of the people who I've spoken to
who have fallen foul of the law,
they have all said, "Please, please give us a chance
to work in the legitimate industry.
We just never knew how to get there, what we were doing.
We want to work with you."
Chris Anderson: Okay, well that makes sense. Thanks a lot Misha.
(Applause)