Mexican Drug Gangs Kidnap Computer Hackers and Programmers

http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/mexican-cartels-infosec/

by voodoochilo • 14 years ago

132 59 14 years ago

resources.infosecinstitute.com

alecdibble• 14 years ago

The section on the feud between Anonymous and Los Zetas was fascinating. It's very interesting that Anonymous has that kind of leverage against such seemingly powerful people.

FreakLegion• 14 years ago

No part of that story has ever been corroborated. Barrett Brown isn't exactly a trustworthy source.

huherto4• 14 years ago

I don't think Anonymous has any leverage against the Zetas. I don't even think the Zetas know or care about Anonymous.

brianbreslin• 14 years ago

I was told by some Mexicans that the cartel is already employing (as in paying salaries to) numerous hackers and IT professionals. They have very high level of banking access and technology that rivals government spy agencies. Unlimited funds will do that for you though.

kevinchen• 14 years ago

That seems to make more sense than kidnappings. If kidnapped hackers have the expertise to break into things and the Internet connection to do it, they'd be able to send messages and get help.

intended2• 14 years ago

To corrupt cops?

vibrunazo3• 14 years ago

> technology that rivals government spy agencies

From my personal experience, that's saying they have bored inexperienced coders, who use outdated tools and techniques that any CS sophomore would laugh at. And are much more worried about working the internal politics to get promoted. Than to get any actual work done.

I bet mexican hackers are better than that.

jamesfrank• 14 years ago

> From my personal experience...

I'm just curious - are you implying that you've personally encountered this sort of thing at government spy agencies or just that much of the government seems to have these characteristics?

coopdog• 14 years ago

Kidnap is funny though, they could kidnap someone and say comply with everything we tell you. If either you or your family leave our control (they could be in separate places) or signal for help we will kill you both. The only escape would be to perfectly synchronize it.

Would work especially well if two or more kidnapped hackers were forced to monitor each other, adding a prisoner's dilemma to the mix. If one failed to catch the other's escape he/she and their family would be killed.

So it isn't impossible to enslave security professionals.

gcb• 14 years ago

But that's a new thing for they to waste time on. Why not just doing what they do usually and move on to other important drug business stuff?

unimpressive• 14 years ago

>Would work especially well if two or more kidnapped hackers were forced to monitor each other, adding a prisoner's dilemma to the mix. If one failed to catch the other's escape he/she and their family would be killed.

And you just described what would be an amazing cyberpunk novel.

Two security professionals both try to escape and prevent the other from escaping at the same time. If done right it could quickly become the best kind of thriller; the one where you're actually speculating as to what happens next.

neilk• 14 years ago

It's not a prisoner's dilemma; if they are monitoring each other, they can communicate. This will rapidly break down into a mutual win.

But maybe that's your third act right there.

huherto4• 14 years ago

Mexican hacker here. I haven't heard anything related to that.

malandrew• 14 years ago

Were I an activist involved with this, I think that providing a "dead man's switch as a service" could be quite useful. Were I to engage in risky journalism, while living in close proximity to these gang wars, I'd want a way to spill additional information to the media were I to go missing.

there• 14 years ago

http://www.deadmansswitch.net/

pyre2• 14 years ago

Depends on the information you have. They just might kill you and take the hit on the information to send a message not to mess with them like that.

kingpharoah• 14 years ago

HN readers around the world should be able to do something to take heat off the Mexican people.

user2459• 14 years ago

Events like this are the main reason why The War on Drugs™ is so dangerous for everybody. It's not the drugs or gangs killing gangs. It's the gangsters that live through it sitting on piles of money who now have the resources to expand into crimes that take more than a gun, friends with guns, and some luck. Because of the prohibition they can now hire hackers to commit crimes for them in any place in the world. It's going to get harder to implicate them in crimes, and yet easier for them to make money off them.

Possibly the worst part is that this happened to us(and is still affecting us) in almost exact detail during the prohibition of the 20s and yet we continue to shrug our shoulders and keep giving them more money.

vibrunazo3• 14 years ago

> we continue to shrug our shoulders and keep giving them more money.

Aren't the ones shrugging their shoulders (who are for the war on drugs), and the ones giving them money (who buy drugs), two completely separate and opposite groups?

Don't look at me, I don't belong to neither. But that sentence sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem.

lucisferre• 14 years ago

Ironically its your's that is the real oversimplification. Fortunately that wasn't the view taken when they finally ended prohibition.

It's pretty well known that you dont get far treating the symptoms.

Taft• 14 years ago

The correct lesson to learn here is "markets amass when there's demand," or, more simply put, "people will always buy their drugs."

paulhauggis• 14 years ago

unfortunately, legalizing drugs isn't going to solve anything. Gangsters will still have piles of money because they will now have a legal business.

The real problem is police/government corruption. It's the reason they were allowed to get this powerful in the first place.

z92• 14 years ago

The whole point of legalizing drugs is gangsters won't be able to generate piles of money through a legal business.

gregbair2• 14 years ago

Well, first of all, this article is complete BS with no corroboration or even references.

Secondly, even if there weren't a war on drugs, the gangsters would find something else to peddle, like people. Gangsters existed before prohibition and existed after, they just moved into different rackets.

oinksoft• 14 years ago

Oh, come on. Joe Blow wants to buy weed, blow, crank, and dope because his life sucks, he's bored, or he just likes the stuff. Very few people like that are in the market for a human being. You really can't compare the profitability of an easily produced and smuggled commodity with something like the trafficking of persons.

JackC• 14 years ago

> Gangsters existed before prohibition and existed after, they just moved into different rackets.

Sure, but it's not like there's a fixed supply of "gangsters", like "continents" or "elements" -- some constant number of people floating around out there spending their time committing crimes. Prohibition is the perfect counter-example -- it turned half of America into gangsters or customers of gangsters for a little while.

On the flip side, if you increase the cost and decrease the benefit of earning money illegally, then a portion of the labor supply will move to legal markets. The war on drugs started with exactly that plan -- increase the cost and decrease the benefits of selling drugs, by locking people up when they do it. It made intuitive sense. But since demand for addictive drugs is inelastic, prices rose proportionally to risk and that plan didn't work. It just increased the revenue available to organized crime.

So I mean, maybe I'm not saying anything too astonishing. It's obvious that changing the incentives to commit crime will change the level of crime. But it's also really important, because when you assume there are a fixed number of gangsters in the world, you're labeling real people as inherent "gangsters" who will always be "gangsters." But that kid slinging crack in the projects because it's less work and more money than his other options, and it's what his friends are doing -- he's not a lifetime gangster. We don't win if we lock him up, stamp "gangster" on his hand, take away his right to vote and let someone else take his place for a little more money. We win if we turn him back into a citizen.

huherto4• 14 years ago

Drug trade is a gateway to other crimes. Once they have the money, weapons and the organization it is easy to expand.

shareme• 14 years ago

What is sad is that US citizens do not understand that this un-civil war has been going on for the past 30 years and we as US citizens have done nothing that has a statistical impact of reversing the damage.

Instead we invade Iraq and Afghanistan based on the political connections of a former Haliburton employee and stockholder.

And if we do not wake up soon.. WWII will be on our doorstep.

bjg• 14 years ago

WWIII?

Akram• 14 years ago

Sword Fish

armandososa• 14 years ago

I've thought about it too. You guys catch Saddam and Osama, why can't you launch some drones and put a missile trough capo's asses?

I guess our lives and peace are not worth the intervention.

dagw2• 14 years ago

Can you imagine the magnitude of the political shit storm on both sides of the border the first time a US drone operating in Mexican airspace with the blessing of the Mexican government blows up a few Mexican kids?

sunraa• 14 years ago

Use of drones the U.S. is a done deal courtesy of the recently passed aviation bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/house-approves-aviation...

huherto4• 14 years ago

It is not about firepower. The Mexican army and marines have more than enough resources to kill the Cartel leaders. Almost, every time they have met the Mexican military wins. The problem is finding the leaders. It took 10 years for the U.S to kill Osama bin Laden, because it was hard to find him. The cartel leaders do the same, they are always in the run, it is believed that El Chapo lives in the mountains.

So far, they have captured or killed 24 out of the 37 most wanted drug lords.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexicos_37_most-wanted_...

einhverfr2• 14 years ago

Indeed. I suspect the anti-immigration, anti-drug, and anti-worker policies from large sections of the political landscape have sown the seeds of the destruction of the United States as surely as anything else.

I was reading Herwig Wolfram's "The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples" and he makes an interesting case that the collapse of the Western Empire a thousand years before the collapse of the Eastern Empire was due in large part to undue concentration of wealth in the West. Despite this, most of the book is about the rise of the Goths within the Empire as essentially a non-state armed force.

It occurs to me that the drug cartels are in a similar place to the Goths, although they are arising in neighboring countries rather than our own country. They are, however operating on both sides of the border and so have a tangible presence in US border states. Perhaps these are all similar as well?

dannyobrien• 14 years ago

There's nothing in this article to confirm that headline, apart from the sentence "Recent claims that computer programmers are being forcibly recruited by Mexican drug gangs, if true, suggest that these groups are acquiring the ability to reap the potential profits of cyber-crime", which has no citation.

I'd be very interested to hear of corroborated incidences of such kidnapping or recruitment occurring. I was in Sinaloa, Mexico this month actively looking for such evidence as part of my work. There's some indication that the cartel have reasonable IT infrastructure (which isn't surprising, given their size), and some growing involvement in physical piracy (counterfeit items in markets have to be marked with a cartel symbol, which is purchasable). But I've yet to see strong evidence that they are involved in "cybercrime" in any organized fashion.

They certainly take discussion forum flamewars pretty seriously though: http://www.cpj.org/internet/2012/03/online-news-sites-as-bat...

sebastianavina2• 14 years ago

From what I understand, drug cartels need software for running their bussiness, and because they can't take a call to SAP and have a representative build a custom solution, they just kidnap programmers, extortion them and make them build the software they need for bookeping and all the stuff made by computers on this days.

zby• 14 years ago

Slave is not a good worker - with tedious manual tasks you can force someone and measure his performance - but I cannot imagine how this could work efficiently for any professional work.

einhverfr2• 14 years ago

Why don't they use open source accounting software? I am sure we could recommend a few packages ;-)

adambyrtek• 14 years ago

This doesn't seem very convincing. Simply paying programmers lots of money would be a simpler and more effective solution. They could certainly afford that, and bookkeeping is too critical to their business to risk. Would you suggest that they kidnap lawyers and doctors as well?

hef198983• 14 years ago

Sounds too much like Password: Swordfish 2.0 to me. Unfortunately I can't access the article right now. For me, one thin gis sure, the cartels aren't stupid. At least the leaders and the heads, that is. Don't judge the organization by the goons welding guns and that get killed. They are running a multi-billion dollar business, and I'm pretty sure that they know that forced labour only gets you so far in anything more important than packaging (even thats not sure, given the budget they have and mexican salaries). So I think they are rather hiring the best IT-guys they can get along with the best intel-guys they can get. These hackers may not be of the "don't be evil"-type, what after the cartels aren't in that kind of business neither.

hef198983• 14 years ago

I'm quite new to HN, so I have a question. Was anything wrong on my comment that I'm the only one to get down voted on this topic? I'm not going to bitch around due to that, don't get me wrong, I only want to understand why, tht's all. :-)

dagw2• 14 years ago

Random downvotes are a fact of life on HN, if for no other reason than the close proximity of the vote buttons (I know I've accidentally down-voted more than a couple of stories over the years). These things tend to correct themselves if you're patient and wait a few hours.

dkersten• 14 years ago

A lot of comments start off being downvoted for one reason or another and after a few hours end up being upvoted instead. Its nothing to worry about, seems pretty normal on HN and good comments rarely stay downvoted.

disusered• 14 years ago

As a programmer based in Mexico that's had some contact with the underworld, this is correct. Greed is a powerful motivator.

ernirulez• 14 years ago

This is a very good opportunity for governments to make public opinion even worse against hackers and therefore make new laws to control us even more. That will be very easy for them: Hackers -> Help drug gangs -> Hackers = Criminals

trotsky• 14 years ago

bullshit

Mexican Drug Gangs Kidnap Computer Hackers and Programmers

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