Track2
Roman Valerevich Seleznev Роман Валерьевич Селезнев (b. 1984) (also known by his hacker handle Track2) is a Russian computer hacker. He was indicted in Washington in 2011, and has been convicted of hacking into servers to steal credit card data. Seleznev's activities have been speculated to have caused damages to banks and credit card companies ranging in the millions of dollars. Seleznev was arrested in July 5, 2014 and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for counts of wire fraud, intentional damage to a protected computer, and identity theft.
He began his activities in early 2003 on the credit card fraud site CarderPlanet, providing paid Social Security numbers and criminal-history research using (among others) stolen LexisNexis accurint.com accounts. Seleznev's employee later created a scanner which allowed a user to scan the internet for MSRDP open ports (3389 by default). Default configurations provided poor protection at the time, and many administrator accounts were not secured by passwords. Exploiting this vulnerability, Seleznev and his partner accessed many remote computers, including those with financial and credit-card data.
He contacted BadB, another hacker, to gain more experience in exploiting financial systems. BadB, a cybercriminal identified in 2009 as Vladislav Horohorin, provided Seleznev with an automated script to look for credit card traces in systems and networks. With this script, Seleznev obtained his first credit-card dumps, which he resold to Horohorin. He became dissatisfied with Horohorin, and decided to begin his own credit-card-dump operation using the nickname nCuX (from Russian: псих, "psycho").
Seleznev expanded his operations in 2008 from scanning MSRDP with default (or no) passwords to developing sophisticated malware which could intercept network traffic and search network shares, distributing it through flaws in Internet browsers by injecting malicious code into advertising traffic. He infected many computers, primarily in the United States.
Seleznev's father, a member of Russia's parliament and an ally of president Vladimir Putin, denounced the arrest as a kidnapping and claimed the charges against his son were "a monstrous lie." But Seleznev himself wrote a letter to the court confessing to his hacking and describing his impoverished early life and his mother's death from alcoholism and thanking the officials who arrested him for saving him from a potentially deadly life.
