Corrupted by Greed


Although Sendai feels that this plan is legal and ethical, greed has taken over and waiting nine months is unacceptable. He thinks about other market moving events, such as mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. How can he predict those in advance? One way is to watch new domain name registrations closely. In some mergers and partnerships, a new entity combines the name of both companies. They must register the new domain name before the announcement or risk being beaten to it by domain squatters. But if they register more than a trading day in advance, Sendai may be able to find out early. He obtains access to the .com TLD zone files by submitting an application to Verisign. This gives him a list of every .com name, updated twice daily. For several days, he vets every new entry, but finds nothing enticing. Again, impatience gets the best of him. Sendai decides to cross an ethical line or two. Instead of waiting for a suggestive name, he will create one! Sendai takes a large (for him) position in a small Internet advertising company. A few minutes later he registers a domain combining that company name with a major search engine. The public whois contact information is identical to that used by the search engine company. Payment is through a stolen credit card number, though a prepaid gift credit card would have worked as well. That was easy!

The next morning, the ad company is up a bit on unusually high volume. Maybe Sendai wasn t the first person to use this domain watching strategy. Message board posters are searching to explain the high volume. His heart racing, Sendai connects through a chain of anonymous proxies and posts a message board response noting the new domain name he just discovered . The posters go wild with speculation, and volume jumps again. So does the price. A company spokesman denies the rumors less than an hour later, but Sendai has already cashed out. What a rush! If this little episode does not receive much press coverage, perhaps investors of another small company will fall for it tomorrow. Sendai clearly has forgotten the hacker ethic that he used to espouse, and now dons his black hat for profit rather than solely for exploration and learning.

Freed from his misgivings about outright fraud and other illegal methods , Sendai s investment choices widen immensely. For example, his fundamental research on a company would be helped substantially by access to the CEO and CFO s e-mail. He considers wardriving through the financial district of nearby cities with his laptop, antenna, GPS, and a program like Kismet or Netstumbler. Surely some public company has a wide open access point with an identifying SSID. Standard network hacking through the Internet is another option. Or Sendai could extend his domain name fraud to issuing actual fake press releases. Sendai has seen fake press releases move the market in the past. Still giddy from his first successful investment hack, Sendai s mind is working overtime contemplating his next steps.

Sendai has plenty of time to research investments during work hours because pen-testing jobs have been quite scarce now that the dot-com market has collapsed . Sendai is pleased by this, due to the free-time aspect, until one day when the whole security department of his office is laid off. So much for the best job he has ever had. Sendai takes it in stride, particularly because his severance pay adds to the investment pot that he hopes will soon make him rich.




Stealing the Network. How to Own a Continent
Stealing the Network. How to Own a Continent
ISBN: 1931836051
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 105

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