cryptogon.com news – analysis – conspiracies

November 2nd, 2007

We’ll see how clever they are when the Good Fellas show up to collect.

At some point, this thing is going to start looking less like a financial crisis and more like a mob war.

How do I know?

Because I got a job that resulted from a decapitation strike against the computer systems of a wholly owned subsidiary of a Wall Street firm that was heavily involved with generating subprime loans and selling the resulting mortgage backed securities.

I haven’t talked about this before in public, but a core Cryptogon contributor wondered if the organizations that wound up with the toxic waste paper would eventually attempt to settle the score in a less than pleasant manner, if you know what I mean…

I wrote a candid response to him because I’ve wanted to tell this story many times, but was afraid to do it here on Cryptogon. After reading about this smug prick, Lawrence Lindsey, in the GATA piece below, I decided to share with all of you what I’ve seen happen to some other smug pricks who thought they were very clever too.

This was my private response to the Cryptogon reader-contributor. I’ve edited the message just slightly for length and readability:

I can’t post this publicly.

You’ve probably figured out by now the name of the firm I’ve been

referring to in the Wall Street Chop Shop piece, and a certain other

post… I’m not explicitly saying it, but people who have been following

this probably get it.

Yes, they even dress like mobsters, and wear the pinky rings.

But here’s a story that I’m afraid to talk about in public.

I and several other IT guys were brought into that company to handle

the aftermath of an attack that was probably undertaken by a “disgruntled

employee.” Well, we were lead to believe that it was a disgruntled

employee. But was it?

Here’s what happened:

At the time, the Mother Ship was content to allow the red headed step

child to run its own systems. As long as the paper got to where it

needed to be at the end of the month, each month, no worries, fuggetaboutit.

Someone compromised this operation at the root level, they understood

the timing and then they launched an attack that literally blew the

support columns out from underneath the entire thing THE DAY BEFORE THE

PAPER DUMP at the end of the month.

I got a call from one of the recruiters I was with on a Saturday. He

told me that this place wanted me to show up on Monday morning.

I asked, “For an interview?”

“No. For work. And they said to bring hip waders and a shovel.”

“Holy shit, what happened?”

“I don’t know but the people I’ve been talking to are panicking. They’re

at the office now (Saturday).” Not an exact quote, but something very

close to that.

Monday morning, bosses were still white faced and panicking. Many people

had been there over the weekend. The place reeked of greasy nerds who’d

been sweating out hundreds of gallons of cheap coffee.

The losses were in the tens of millions of dollars.

Now, here’s the interesting thing.

The firm didn’t call the cops. No state or federal law enforcement were

involved. There was no media coverage of the event at all. Not one story

anywhere. The firm handled the thing internally. They brought in “some

forensics people from New York” to find out who did it. If one of these

people wanted access to something, they didn’t even go to us, the IT

support and operations people. They called the CIO and that guy, always

drunk/hungover, moved like his life was on the line.

We never heard anything about how it wound up, what they found, or what

they did about it. The incident simply became known as, “That thing.”

The firm built a completely separate, parallel network infrastructure

along side the existing one. New cabling, even. New servers, new

routers, new client side systems. Everything new. Two factor

authentication, including hardware based crypto key generators. This

became known as the “clean” network, the Mother Ship’s network. The

existing network became known as the “dirty” side. Money was no object

in terms of this build out. [It is interesting to note that since I wrote this,

a few months ago, the entire operation has been rolled up, all employees fired

and offices vacated. It went down exactly the way I said it would in the

Wall Street Chop Shop piece.]

Anyway, I don’t want to know what “connected” actually means when it

comes to this firm. I can’t begin to imagine what that thing does, off

the books. That’s why I’m not posting this in public.

Obviously, anyone who bought that shit they were selling is going to be

pissed.

Disgruntled employee?

When I was a boy, we called an attack like that, “strategic information

warfare.” Maybe the attackers looked at the Mother Ship’s network and

found that it was too locked down. Someone or something tried to hurt

that firm bad and used the easiest vector to accomplish the most

financial damage. They also committed several federal crimes to do it.

Best,

Kevin

That was a taste of what happened when “very clever” wasn’t clever enough.

Via: GATA:

Lindsey’s charts went into the collateralized debt obligation problem, the asset-backed commercial paper, mortgage-backed securities .. the lot. He said that it will “force banks et al. to mark these products to market (over time) instead of their current practice of marking to model … or to myth.” He wasn’t the least bit worried about how the hedge funds would manage because, as he said, they were very good at looking after themselves.

He appeared delighted that Wall Street had been able to unload hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of (now toxic) CDOs on the rest of the world, saying that “we Americans were very clever” in doing this.

Research Credit: She Knows Who