A Servant Of Two Masters

For reasons never understood, Cyric would pick a target, like RedBrigade, who had exploited Shadowcrew to such lucrative effect in New York. Then he would set out to destroy his reputation among fellow carders with a thousand cuts. A little hint here or a little insin- uation there that RedBrigade was not all he appeared, or coded drop-ins to suggest that RedBrigade was in fact working for law and order. His language was snarly and childish, yet carefully designed to cause maximum distress to the target of his attacks.

Yet Cyric had his champions, too - none more stalwart than Cha0. With an oversized brain and a superiority complex to match, Cha0 only ever recognised two computer users as his equal. His contempt for the FBI's cyber division was boundless, but he warmly acknowledged the hacking skills of Max Vision, aka Iceman, even though the two had often found themselves at loggerheads due to Iceman's attacks on DarkMarket. And when talking of Lord Cyric, Cha0 almost went so far as to recognise his old friend as being even more elevated in the hackers' pantheon than he himself was.

In a short space of time, Lord Cyric had succeeded in positioning himself as a key moderator and administrator on boards like The Grifters, CardersMarket and finally DarkMarket. Nobody understood what his game was or what he was trying to achieve, although those whom he targeted immediately assumed that he was working for law enforcement either as an officer or as a confidential informant.

In Pittsburgh, FBI Agent Keith Mularski had no idea. Like many others, he believed that the person behind Lord Cyric lived in Montreal, Canada, but his enquiries of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police cyber division brought him no joy. In fact, although Cyric's IP addresses could be traced to Montreal, they would occasionally show up as being located in Toronto, which is where some sleuths suspected he really lived.

Several carders picked up and ran with the rumour that Lord Cyric was in reality Brian Krebs, a journalist writing on cyber security who at the time worked for The Washington Post. There was no evidence for this - indeed, quite the contrary, for Krebs is far too serious a writer to risk ruining his reputation by becoming involved with the people he is actually investigating. There followed a slew of rumours, but nobody ever got to the bottom of who Lord Cyric really was or what he was doing.