[iwar] [fc:Were.DrinkOrDie.Raids.Overkill?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-12-14 10:13:44

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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 10:13:44 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Were.DrinkOrDie.Raids.Overkill?]
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Were DrinkOrDie Raids Overkill?
By Farhad Manjoo 

2:00 a.m. Dec. 13, 2001 PST

To hear the federal government and piracy experts describe it, DrinkOrDie,
the network of software crackers that was the focus of worldwide anti-piracy
law enforcement action on Tuesday, is the al-Qaida of Internet software
theft. 

The U.S. Customs Service called the group "the oldest and most well known"
of Internet piracy organizations, describing it as a loose affiliation of
computer experts who operate as sleepers in our midst, ready to drop their
cover and crack the latest copy of Photoshop at any instant.

"They come from all walks of life. Many are successful white-collar business
people by day, and DrinkOrDie members by night," the department said in a
statement. Customs said that it has "identified members who are corporate
executives, computer network administrators at major U.S. universities,
employees of large hi-tech companies, students, and even government
workers." 

But when the news broke that the Customs Service, the Department of Justice
and foreign authorities executed at least 100 search warrants in the United
States, Australia, England, Finland and Norway on Tuesday in an attempt to
"dismantle" DrinkOrDie, a lot of people were puzzled. According to the
evidence available from several cracking sites, Internet newsgroups and
members of the Warez -- or "software cracking" -- community, DrinkOrDie was
small potatoes in the world of software theft. The group made its name in
1995 by cracking Windows 95 before it was released; since then, it has kind
of disappeared. 

"I knew of but didn't know the DrinkOrDie guys," wrote a 24-year-old
Australian software pirate who asked to remain anonymous, "but I thought
they were mostly out of the Warez scene actually -- heard their main guys
were doing Web design. Yeh, they were respected, they did some good work,
y'know? But they aren't the first to come to mind when you think to yourself
'whose (sic) the big deal in the scene?'"

Some members of the group were indeed reported to be working in Web design
rather than piracy in recent years. The group even had a website -- at
www.drinkordie.com -- that has been called one of the premier resources for
Russian hackers, but which has been offline since Tuesday's raids.

A search of the "binaries" newsgroups at Usenet, which is where many
software-cracking utilities are traded, similarly illustrates DrinkOrDie's
absence from the scene. You might find evidence of a DoD program to "rip"
DVDs or to crack some expensive image-processing software, but nothing there
is very recent, or very compelling.

"A search on www.newscheck.cc reveals there were 40,865 Warez releases in
the last seven months, of which only 411 were by DoD," wrote a poster called
Cryogenes on Slashdot. "Even if DoD is knocked out completely, every
application and every game will still be cracked and distributed within 48
hours of release." 

According to the Customs Service, "the group was founded in Moscow in 1993
by a Russian individual known as 'Deviator.' Membership quickly expanded
from a group of Russian nationals to worldwide membership by 1995."

Deviator is likely Jimmy Jamez -- not his given name -- who, along with
another guy called Cyber Angel, is credited with DrinkOrDie's early success.
In a 1995 interview with a Warez 'zine, he described the group:

"This is all for fun," Jamez said. "Like another side of your life. I plan
to stay active for some more time and after all, quit. We have a
well-prepared internal work system -- I can call it an infrastructure.
Different dudes do different work for the main aim of the group, DoD."

Cyber Angel, the deputy, said that DoD "will all leave the scene when we are
tired, but in the case with me and (Jimmy Jamez) it will probably be way
past the year 2000 :)."

In the mid-'90s, the group seems to have cracked anything that came out --
big, expensive programs like 3Dstudio as well as small, forgettable programs
that nobody uses anymore. A 1996 Warez 'zine rates a week in which DoD
cracked 13 programs as being "nothing serious," though it was "quality
work." 

Bob Kruger, who heads anti-piracy efforts at the Business Software Alliance,
a software company trade organization, thinks that DrinkOrDie is still at
the height of its piracy game.

"They are a notorious elite Internet pirate organization," he told the
Associated Press. "I doubt there's much (software) out there that people
want that (DrinkOrDie) can't provide."

He singled out a DrinkOrDie programmer called ForceKill as "one of the
premier software crackers in the world."

But other crackers weren't so kind, especially since the feds seemed to have
clued in to DrinkOrDie's game.

"Only peasants get caught," wrote MoRf, a cracker in Moscow, in an online
chat room. 

Michelle Delio contributed to this report.

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