href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/66373" target="_blank"> style="width: 200px; float: right;" alt="EVE 01"
src="/image/view/66373">

Beyond
the bleeding edge of the metagame, in the whispered realms of
myth, supposition and paranoia, exist the wizards of EVE: the hackers.
Not a day passes in New Eden without some foul event being credited to
their misdeeds. Depending on who you listen to, hackers are
simultaneously responsible for corp thefts, account seizure, alliances
being disbanded, random items being misplaced, and the Icelandic
banking crisis. Who are these people, and how much influence on EVE do
they really have?



When I got into the spy business around March of 2006, one of the first
things the nascent GIA did was attempt to gauge exactly how prevalent
hacking was in alliance politics. This was a drive primarily fueled by
my own ignorance; knowing nearly as much about code as I do home
decorating, I assumed that surely hackers were a dime a dozen. It
seemed that every other forum drama thread referred to them. But I
swiftly found that while EVE is a magnet for coders of all kinds, the
"0.0 EVE Hacker" may as well be a Yeti. Yet belief in hackers meddling
in 0.0, much like belief in elves in certain island nations with a
penchant for geothermal power who shall remain nameless, is persistent.
Like a communist conspiracy, discovering no evidence of their existence
is simply a sign of the subtlety of the quarry.



They certainly do exist, but the vast majority appear to focus on
hacking the game client, running bots or devising ways to steal isk.
Simply botters, macroers, and exploiters - not glamorous meddlers in
grand politics. Where were the hackers who pulled the strings in 0.0?
Where were the hackers who played the spy game? In my entire time in
EVE, I have confirmed the existence of only one (though there are
rampant rumors of another, who remains anonymous). Six months passed
before I encountered him.
It began innocuously enough. A "rival" spymaster appeared, offering a
variety of espionage services to the highest bidder on the main
alliance forum. Kugutsumen, as he called himself, was almost
immediately made into a laughingstock. Espionage in EVE is primarily a
nationalistic enterprise (at least, in that forum) and outright offers
of intelligence for isk were one of the oldest and most effortless
scams in the book.



Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut and refrained from trolling
Kugutsumen, because he swiftly made himself my nemesis. At first he
contacted me via AIM, offering his services - but since I never pay for
intel (and Goonswarm was chronically out of isk, regardless of
inconvenient principles) that went nowhere. Then he began to turn the
screws.



In September 2006, Goonswarm was in Insmother, living out of Red
Alliance stations and warring with the Southern Coalition. The primary
force behind the Southern Coalition was Lotka Volterra, an alliance
formed by Shinra, M. Corp and UK Corp. Mirroring our later cultural
successes in swaying defectors such as href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/64347" target="_blank">Haargoth
Agamar, one of Lotka Volterra's
directors, Osmodious, had 'flipped' and become a GIA sleeper agent.
Using his access, we began to monitor Lotka.org's director forums. This
gave GS and RA an incredible strategic advantage in the war, as we knew
in advance how much support LV was willing to provide its allied
partners (Slim to none, as Veritas Immortalis and Knights of the
Southerncross belatedly discovered), where they intended to build
future outposts, and how willing their leadership was to 'go to the
mat' with GS and RA.


href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/66377" target="_blank"> style="width: 200px; float: right;" alt="EVE 02"
src="/image/view/66377">

After a month of quietly watching LV's directorate, things took a turn
for the bizarre. Lallante, a Shinra director and LV bigwig, began
posting forum rips from Goonfleet.com - and not the usual member-level
acces (everyone
has a member-level spy in Goonfleet) but our heretofore inviolable
director forums. Panic and chaos immediately followed. It began with
emergency private director meetings, because at first we had no idea if
the leak was evidence of a traitor or something worse. After a frantic
phone call to our server admin, we determined the truth: we had been
hacked. Lallante had been given an altered cookie which allowed him to
log into our forums as Remedial, the CEO of Goonfleet, which meant that
he could see style="font-style: italic;">everything
that took place on our forums. If we hadn't penetrated LV's directorate
with a human agent - or if Lallante had been more sensible about
keeping his access secret, we never would have uncovered this breach.



The Kugutsumen situation was becoming intolerable. On the Xelas
Alliance (a now-defunct BoB vassal alliance based in Fountain) forums,
I discovered a thread listing a chain of emails between Kugutsumen and
the Xelas directorate. He had been offering Xelas his services as well,
and as a demonstration of his abilities he revealed to Xelas a chain of
private messages between me and one of my Xelas agents, exposing and
burning the agent in the process. Not only had Remedial's access been
sold to Lallante, but Kugutsumen had acquired root-level access of
Goonfleet.com and accessed all of my archived forum PMs. Yikes. Worse,
as we discovered in a fury of research in the aftermath of the hacking,
Kugutsumen was the 'real thing'; while a teenager in France, he had
been convicted of defrauding the FBI of $250,000, and had since
expatriated to Jakarta, Indonesia - a place where the anti-hacking laws
are so hilariously lax that it has become an international center for
the 'computer security' industry. The man was a security professional
(with a penchant for setting up swanky nightclubs in his spare time, it
turned out,) and we had no legal recourse whatsoever.

 

When Kugutsumen next contacted me, he readily admitted what he had
done. Lallante had hired Kugu based on his forum advertisement and
agreed to pay 500 million isk per week for access through Remedial's
account - but by the time we discovered the hack and the Xelas
situation, Lallante had refused to pay Kugutsumen his fee. That act of
hubris may come to be known as one of the most foolish and
self-destructive decisions made in the game, because Kugutsumen
promptly outed Lallante to me and began actively working against Lotka
Volterra and their allies.



Having now 'owned' Goonfleet.com and Lotka.org both, Kugutsumen moved
on toward bigger game, the most powerful alliance in the game at the
time: Band of Brothers. It probably didn't help Band of Brothers that
Lallante and most of Lotka Volterra joined BoB after losing their
space. What Kugutsumen uncovered nearly tore EVE apart. In the director
forums of Reikoku, Kugutsumen found evidence of CCP collusion with BoB
- the infamous T20 scandal. When he began publishing the incriminating
material on the eve-online forums, he was summarily banned from the
game. But the damage was done to both BoB and CCP's reputation. Around
the rallying cry of "Band of Developers," the Great War was unleashed.



In the intervening years, CCP has cleaned up its mess - by firing the
ISD volunteers, creating the Council of Stellar Management, removing
the Aurora program and establishing the Internal Affairs department.
Kugutsumen remains banned, though I suspect it is within his
capabilities to play if he so chose. Instead he runs his own href="https://www.kugutsumen.com/" target="_blank">eve-related
forum which has become a
tabloid-esque institution. The word 'Kugutsumen' remains censored, as
if it were profanity, on the eve-online forums. Lotka Volterra fell
shortly after Lallante's access to Goonfleet.com was removed, and
Osmodious remained a director in their organization, undiscovered until
a year after the alliance had disbanded. As for BoB, their reputation
was ruined and their alliance destroyed.



Looking back on the 'Kugutsumen Drama', the confluence of chaos, luck
and happenstance boggles the mind. It is probably a good thing that
there is only one hacker interested in the EVE metagame, given how
catastrophic Kugutsumen's influence on the game and its politics have
been.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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