DARKMARKET

JiLsi – in real life he worked for an IT security company in Germany.
It was ironic, but somehow very DarkMarket, that he ended up offering security to criminals and cops alike on the website.

Despite intense efforts, Bilal Şen had failed to match Cha0’s style
(or MO, as the police describe it) with any known criminals in Turkey
itself. The two fundamental aspects of the Internet’s darkside seemed
to coincide in his personality: he was a geek with mesmeric technical
skills, but he was also a gifted criminal who attended to every last
detail and left nothing to chance. It was also possible that Cha0 was
the collective name of a well-organised syndicate, although linguistic
analysis strongly suggested that only one person was actually formu-
lating his posts and messages on the Internet.

So when Bilal got the message from İstanbul that Cha0 was ‘one of
the big boys’, he was not only worried, but he knew that from now on
he would have to tread carefully even in a country that was modernising
as fast as Turkey.

After the millennium Turkey had become an increasingly attractive
venue for hackers, crackers and cyber criminals. In the late 1990s
much cyber criminal activity had clustered in certain regions of the
so-called BRIC countries. An economist from Goldman Sachs had
conferred this acronym on Brazil, Russia, India and China as the
leading countries of the emerging markets, the second tier of global
power after the G8 (though, politically, Russia straddles the two).

The BRICs shared important social and economic characteristics.
Their economies were moving and opening after several decades of
stagnation. They had large populations whose combined efforts regis-
tered huge growth rates, while a resurgence in exuberant and some-
times aggressive nationalism accompanied the transition to the status
of dynamic global actor. Their education systems offered excellent basic
skills. But, combined with extreme inequalities of wealth, this spawned
a new class of young men, poor and unemployed, but – in contrast to
earlier generations – with great material aspirations as they absorbed
the consumer messages that are an intrinsic part of globalisation. To
meet these aspirations, a minority started beavering away in Internet
cafés, safe from detection by law enforcement or indeed anyone else,
where they found myriad online opportunities to educate themselves
in the art of hacking.

Turkey qualified as an honorary BRIC, with an economy that, when