Chris Tarbell is a former FBI special agent and cybercrime investigation specialist who brought down Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road, and Hector Monsegur (aka Sabu) of LulzSec and Anonymous. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - True Classic Tees: https://trueclassictees.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off - InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex to get 25% off premium EPISODE LINKS: Hacker And The Fed podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hacker-and-the-fed/id1649541362 Naxo: https://naxo.com/who-we-are PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:05) - Silk Road (18:28) - Mass surveillance (22:40) - Operation Onion Peeler (27:56) - Hacker Avunit (38:45) - Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road (51:29) - Edward Snowden (53:33) - NSA surveillance (1:05:40) - Silk Road murders (1:14:26) - Dark web (1:18:28) - Ross Ulbricht's arrest (1:26:27) - Aaron Swartz (1:29:45) - Donald Trump and the Mar-a-Lago raid (1:32:50) - Tech companies and censorship (1:41:49) - War in Ukraine (1:45:47) - Anonymous and LulzSec (1:55:59) - FBI (1:59:00) - Personal threats (2:04:47) - Hector Monsegur a.k.a Sabu (2:17:57) - Cyber attack threats against civilians (2:34:45) - Most secure operating system (2:38:33) - Cyber war (2:46:28) - Advice for young people (2:51:39) - FBI's credibility (3:00:10) - Love
Chapter 1: What is Silk Road and its significance?
The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cybercrime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Ulbricht, the leader of Silk Road, the billion-dollar drug marketplace. And he tracked down and arrested Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu, of LulzSec and Anonymous, which are some of the most influential hacker groups in history.
He is co-founder of Naxo, a complex cybercrime investigation firm, and is a co-host of a podcast called The Hacker and the Fed. This conversation gives the perspective of the FBI cybercrime investigator, both the technical and the human story.
I would also like to interview people on the other side, the cybercriminals who have been caught, and perhaps the cybercriminals who have not been caught and are still out there.
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I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by True Classic Tees. High quality, soft, slim fitted t-shirts for men. They also make other menswear staples like polos, workout shirts, and boxers. But I have a lot of their black t-shirts. That's my main go-to. I'm not exactly sure why. But there's a certain kind of comfort in having a great t-shirt that all looks the same.
Having many of them. So it removes that extra little decision in your life. So you can liberate your mind to focus on the more difficult decisions in your life. So it's just this reliable thing I can count on. Either I wear a suit or I wear a true classic t-shirt. That's it. That's all I need to worry about. Life is simple.
And there's a kind of minimalist aesthetic to a black t-shirt that just brings out the best in me. Makes my soul sing. I think it's also in part a programmer aesthetic, engineer aesthetic. I'm not exactly sure. But I do know that a lot of programmers I hang out with often wear black t-shirts. So I'm not sure what that's about. That could also just be in general a guy thing.
I'm going to have to get some data on that. Anyway, go to trueclassic.com and enter code Lex to get 25% off. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. Your lifestyle decisions should be made based on data coming from your own body.
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Chapter 2: How did the FBI track down Ross Ulbricht?
become jaded and exhausted by the criminal, um, mind.
It's funny. Um, you know, I, I'm, I'm, you know, fast forward in our story. I'm very good friends with, with Hector monster. You're at the Cebu, the guy arrested. Um, and he tells stories of what he did in his past. And I'm like, um, that Hector, you know, you know, but then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson and I was like, this guy stealing money from the U.S.
government and welfare fraud and all this sort of thing. It just pissed me off. And I don't know why I have that differentiation in my head. I don't know why I think one's just, oh, Hector will be Hector, and then this guy just pissed me off. Well, you didn't feel that way about Hector until you probably met him. Well, I didn't know Hector. I knew Sabu.
So I hunted down Sabu and I learned about Hector over those nine months.
We'll talk about it. Let's finish with, let's return tangent to back to the tangent. Oh, One tangent up, who's AV unit? I don't know. That's interesting. So he's at the core of Anonymous. He's one of the critical people in Anonymous. What is known about him?
There's what's known in public and what was known because I sat with Hector. And he was sort of like the set things up guy. So if... low stack had like their hackers, which was Sabu and Kayla. And they had their, uh, their, their media guy, this guy topiary, uh, he lived up in the Northern end of England. And, uh, they had a few other guys, but, but AV unit was the guy that set up infrastructure.
So if you need a VPN in Brazil or something like that to pop through, um, one of the first things Hector told me after we arrested him is that heavy unit was a secret service agent. And I was like, Oh shit. Um, just because he kind of lived that lifestyle, he'd be around for a bunch of days and then all of a sudden gone for three weeks.
Um, and I, I tried to get more out of Hector and that early on in that relationship. Um, you know, I'm sure he was a little bit guarded, uh, maybe trying to social engineer me. Maybe he wanted that, uh, that, Oh shit, there's law enforcement involved in this. Um, and, And not to say, I mean, I was in over my head with that case, just the amount of work that was going on.
So to track them all down, plus the 350 hacks that came in about just military institutions, you know, it was swimming in the deep end. So it was just at the end of the case, I looked back and I was like, oh, fuck. He'd be unique. I could have had them all. Maybe that's the perfectionist in me.
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Chapter 3: What are the ethical implications of using Tor for cybercrime?
I mean, have you ever held a Bitcoin?
Yeah. Oh, you have?
Well, he never did. What do you mean held a Bitcoin?
You can't hold it. It's not real. It's not like I can give you a briefcase of Bitcoin or something like that. He liked the idea of it growing. He liked the idea. I mean, I think it started off as sharing this idea. But then he really did turn to, like, I am the captain of this ship. And that's what goes. And he was making a lot of money. And again, my interaction with Ross was about
maybe five or six hours over a two-day period. I knew DPR because I read his words and all that. I didn't really know Ross. There was a journal found on his computer, and so it sort of kind of gave me a little insight. So I don't like to do a playbook for criminals, but I'll tell you right now, don't write things down.
There was a big fad about people, like remember kids going around shooting people with paintballs and filming it? I don't know why you would do that. Why would you videotape yourself committing crime and then publish it? If there's one thing I've taught my children, don't record yourself doing bad things.
It never goes well. And you actually give advice on the other end of logs being very useful for the defense perspective for... information is useful for being able to figure out what the attacks were all about.
Logs are the only reason I found Hector Monsegur. I mean, the one time his VPN dropped during a Fox hack, and he says he wasn't even hacking, he just was sent a link and he clicked on it. And in 10 million lines of logs, there was one IP address that stuck out.
Yeah. This is fascinating. We'll explore several angles of that. So what was the process of bringing down Ross and the Silk Road? All right, so that's a long story.
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Chapter 4: How did the Silk Road operations impact law enforcement strategies?
They make your job harder. but they prevent you from abusing the power of the job. There's a balance. That's a tricky balance. So the chat logs in Iceland, gave you evidence of the heroin and all the large-scale czar-level drug trading. What else did it give you in terms of how to catch?
It gave us infrastructure. So the Onion name was actually running on a server in France. So if you like... And it only commuted through a back channel, a VPN, to connect to the Iceland server. There was a Bitcoin vault server that was also in Iceland. And I think that was so that the admins couldn't get into the Bitcoins, the other admins that were hired to work on the site.
So you could get into the site, but you couldn't touch the money. Only Ross had access to that. And then, you know, another big mistake on Ross's part is he had the backups for everything at a data center in Philadelphia. Don't put your infrastructure in the United States. I mean, again, let's not make a playbook, but, you know.
Well, I think these are low-hanging fruit that people of competence would know already. I agree. But it's interesting that he wasn't competent enough to make, so he was incompetent in certain ways.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't think he was a mastermind of setting up an infrastructure that would protect his online business because keeping chat logs, keeping a diary, putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be, bad decisions. How did you figure out that he's in San Francisco? So we had that part with Jared that he was on the West Coast. And then- Who again is Jared? Jared DeAgan, he was a partner.
He was a DHS agent. Worked for HSI, Homeland Security Investigations in Chicago. He started his Silk Road investigation because he was working at O'Hare and a weird package came in. Couldn't find out. He traced it back to Silk Road. So he started working at a Silk Road investigation long before I started my case. And he made his way up undercover all the way to be an admin on Silk Road.
So he was talking to Ross on a Jabra server, a private Jabra server, private chat communication server. And we noticed that Ross's time zone on that Jabra server was set to the West Coast. So we had Pacific time on there. So we had a region, 124th of the world was covered of where we thought he might be. Yeah. And from there, how do you get to San Francisco?
There was another guy, an IRS agent that was part of the team, and he used a powerful tool to find his clue. He used the world of Google. He simply just went back and Googled around for Silk Road at the time it was coming up. and found some posts on some help forums that this guy was starting an Onion website and wanted some cryptocurrency help.
And if you could help him, please reach out to ross.albrick at gmail.com. In my world, that's a clue.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the FBI's relationship with Facebook?
So, but the interesting thing there is the FBI is saying that they didn't really make that implication. They're saying that there's interference activity happening. Just watch out. And it's a weird relationship between FBI and Facebook because, you could see from the best possible interpretation that the FBI just wants Facebook to be aware.
Because it is a powerful platform, a platform for viral spread of misinformation. in the best possible interpretation of it, it makes sense for FBI to send some information saying like, we were seeing some shady activity. Absolutely. But it seems like all of that somehow escalated to a political interpretation.
I mean, yeah, it sounded like there was a wink wink with it. Um, the, the, I don't know if Mark, uh, meant for that to be that way. Again, are we being social engineered or was that a true expression that Mark had?
And I wonder if the wink wink is direct or it's just culture. Maybe certain people responsible on the Facebook side have a certain political lean and then certain people on the FBI side have a political lean when they're interacting together.
Chapter 6: How does the culture in tech companies influence their operations?
And it's like literally has nothing to do with a giant conspiracy theory, but just with a culture that has a particular political lean during a particular time in history. And so like maybe it could be Hunter Biden laptop one time and then it could be uh, whoever, uh, Donald Trump jr's, uh, laptop, uh, another time.
It's a tough job. I mean, if you're the liaison, if you're the FBI's liaison to, to Facebook, uh, you know, there, there are certain people that I'm sure they were offered a position at some point. It seems we, you know, there's FBI agents that go, I know, I know a couple that's gone to Facebook. Um, there's a, there's a really good agent that now leads up their child exploitation stuff. Uh,
Another squad mate runs their internal investigations, both great investigators. So, you know, there's good money, especially when you're an FBI agent that's capped out at a, you know, a 1310 or whatever pay scale you're capped out at. It's alluring to be, you know, maybe want to please them and be asked to join them. Yeah.
And over time that corrupts. I think there has to be an introspection in tech companies about the culture that they develop, about the political ideology, the bubble. It's interesting to see that bubble. I've asked myself, A lot of questions. I've interviewed the Pfizer CEO, what seems now a long time ago.
And I've gotten a lot of criticism, positive comments, but also criticism from that conversation. And I did a lot of soul searching about the kind of bubbles we have in this world. And it makes me wonder, pharmaceutical companies, they all believe they're doing good. And I wonder, because the ideal they have is to create drugs that help people and do so at scale.
And it's hard to know at which point that can be corrupted and it's hard to know when it was corrupted and if it was corrupted and where and which drugs and which companies and so on. And I don't know. I don't know that complicated, it seems like inside a bubble you can convince yourself if anything is good.
People inside the Third Reich regime were able to convince themselves, I'm sure many, just Bloodlands is another book I've been recently reading about it. And the ability of humans to convince they're doing good when they're clearly murdering and torturing people in front of their eyes is fascinating. They're able to convince themselves they're doing good. It's crazy.
Like there's not even an inkling of doubt.
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Chapter 7: What led to Hector Monsegur becoming an informant?
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that. So it has taught me to be a little bit more careful. When I enter into different bubbles, to be skeptical about what's taken as an assumption of truth. You always have to be skeptical about what's assumed as true, is it possible it's not true? If you're talking about America, it's assumed that in certain places that surveillance is good.
Well, let's question that assumption. And also it inspired me to question my own assumptions that I hold this true constantly, constantly.
It's tough. It's tough. But you don't grow. I mean, do you want to be just static and not grow? You have to question yourself on some of these things if you want to grow as a person.
Yeah, for sure. Now, one of the tough things actually of being a public personality when you speak publicly is you get attacked all along the way as you're growing. And I'm in part a big softie as well, if I may say. And it hurts. It hurts. It hurts. Do you pay attention to it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very hard. Like, I have two choices.
One, you can shut yourself off from the world and ignore it. I never found that compelling, this kind of idea of, like, haters going to hate. Yeah. Like... This idea that anyone with a big platform or anyone who's ever done anything has always gotten hate. Okay, maybe.
But I still want to be vulnerable, wear my heart on my sleeve, really show myself, open myself to the world, really listen to people. And that means every once in a while somebody will say something that touches me in a way that's like... What if they're right?
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Chapter 8: How can individuals protect themselves from cyber threats?
Do you let that hate influence you? I mean, can you be bullied into a different opinion than you think you really are just because of that hate?
No, no. I believe not. But it hurts in a way that's hard to explain. Like, yeah, it just gets to, like, it shakes your faith in humanity, actually, is probably why it hurts. Like, people that... call me a Putin apologist or a Zelensky apologist, which I'm currently getting almost an equal amount of, but it hurts.
It hurts because it damages slightly my faith in humanity to be able to see the love that connects us and then to see that I'm trying to find that. And that's, I'm doing my best in the limited capabilities I have to find that.
And so to call me something like a bad actor, essentially, from whatever perspective, it just makes me realize, well, people don't have empathy and compassion for each other. And it makes me question that for a brief moment. And that's like a crack and it hurts. How many people do this to your face? Very few. It's online e-muscles, man. I have to be honest that it happens.
Because I've hung around with Rogan enough. When your platform grows, there's people that will come up to Joe and say stuff to his face that they forget. They still forget he's an actual real human being. They'll make accusations about him.
So does that cause him to wall himself off more?
No, he's pretty gangster on that. But yeah, it still hurts. If you're human, if you really feel others, I think that's also the difference with Joe and me. He has a family that he deeply loves, and that's an escape from the world for him. There's a loneliness in me that I'm always longing to connect with people and with regular people, just to learn their stories and so on.
And so if you open yourself up that way, the things they tell you can really hurt in every way. Like just me going to Ukraine, just seeing so much loss and death. Some of it is like, I mean, unforgettably haunting. Not in some kind of political way, activist way, or who's right, who's wrong way, but just like, man, like so much pain. You see it and it just stays with you.
When you see a human being bad to another human, you can't get rid of that in your head. You can't imagine that we can treat each other like that. That's the hard part, I think. I mean, for me, it is. When I saw parents, like when I did the child exploitation stuff, when they rented their children out, they literally rented infant children out to others for sexual gratification.
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