Front cover of Khaker (‘‘XAKEP’) Magazine, 1999

Disclaimer before we get started, all translations were done online using Google Translate as I do not know Russian. I fully accept that some meaning or nuances of language will be lost. Where possible I have included screenshots so that the original text is presented alongside the translated versions.

XAKEP Magazine contains a lot of casual racism, sexism, outright misogyny and homophobia. This was by no means a purely Russian hacker affliction in 1999, but still worth taking note of if you want to dive in and check out the publication.

Having said all of that, let’s take a look at what we can glean from the introduction to this, the first issue of the magazine, which you can find over at archive.org.

I find it fascinating that there is this palpable tension throughout the magazine, visible even on this first issue’s cover, mocking and casting aspersions on the US whilst clearly marinading in American popular culture and products.

many consider hackers such half-humans-half-bots, such frostbitten computer scientists who spend days and nights in front of the monitor, constantly hacking something. Shit. which! Hacker – – first of all, Human. He also plays like you. computer games, also crawls on the Internet, also reads books, also meets girls and drinks beer no less than you. trust me mate, THEY are just like you. The main thing that makes them different is that they are. know a little more than you. They are interested in all sorts of boring things, such as “protocol details”

Introduction to XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999 (Translation: Google Translate)

As expected this sets out not just the intention behind the magazine’s creation but also an attempt by the editors to demonstrate that in all of the ways that count hackers are normal, red-blooded Russian men (this last part seems implicit) but that they in fact have added technical knowledge that, if anything, elevates them.

The second page gives us a summary of the contents, with some articles given particular prominence.

We get an article about the imminent release of Quake 3, an article that includes the summary “it is carding that we will deal with today” and at the bottom on the left an article about Y2K.

Along the right hand column we get a list of what I’d assume will come to be regular sections that are included monthly.

For the purposes of this blog I’m going to primarily focus on the three articles given their own left-hand column on the contents page.

A page of “cyber news” also caught my eye, this seems to detail the operations of the ‘UEP’ of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate of Moscow, who are described as a “Subdivision for the detection and suppression of crimes committed using counterfeit credit cards and crimes committed by unauthorized access to computer networks and databases”.

This news snippet goes on to describe how this ‘UEP’ arrested “a 17-year-old lamer for stealing some miserable 11 pieces of bucks from the bourgeoisie credit card. This “hero” was called a cool hacker and with cries of hop-hey-la-la-ley was given 5 years, fortunately, on probation” and includes the hope that “there will be a kind soul and will smash their [UEP] entire website to hell”. This recounting of the news ends with the words “let’s wait and see who turns out to be cooler, these show-offs from the UEP, who justify their existence in such a way serving before the people, and most importantly, before the authorities, or still a Russian “real” hacker, or Vanya the cracker”.

As you know, in the very foreseeable future, we will have a digital paradise in which every microwave or coffee maker will be given a permanent IP-address. Those. We will cook without taking our asses off the chair. There, you see, they will also fly or, at worst, they will ride. Generally because of the computer will not get out

XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999 (Translation: Google Translate)

Discussing Y2K in XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

As the first issue of XAKEP Magazine came out in 1999, Y2K is of course a hot topic, the magazine’s writers tackle explaining it with a particularly vivid thought experiment:

“imagine that a commercial pornography site that you and your parents have placed on the Internet is automatically updated with the latest information. For an automated system, this is the norm when the server replaces outdated pictures, messages and data with new ones, slowly destroying the old ones. As soon as the year “00” comes, the server, comparing files with this date, will naturally decide that the data for “97”, “98” and “99” is newer – of course, because these numbers are much larger. As a result, everything coming in the year 2000 will be automatically destroyed, and even the withered black-and-white pornographic pictures of 1932, filmed by the antediluvian “ZM Change”, will be presented as exclusive fresh stuff. Paysite customer numbers plummet, frustrated audiences demand refunds of tickets, and six months later you and your parents are heavily in debt, with the result that you spend the rest of your life in debtor’s prison.”

That’s certainly one way to sum up the existential threat that Y2K represented in the minds of people in 1999.

“It is carding that we will deal with today” – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

First, let’s figure out what “carding” is. In general, it is the illegal use of credit cards to purchase goods or services. It’s that simple. This branch of the hacker trade is very useful, especially for those of you who are without a job, without a scholarship, etc. Doing carding; you can either get information information about a real card, or generate all these ‘data, but in such a way that all systems will accept it as real

“It is carding that we will deal with today” – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

The only shocking thing about this article from my perspective is that is in a proper print publication and not a text file being passed about online. None of the information in the article itself is particularly surprising or innovative, and a lot of it was covered in equivalent texts from the US hacking scene in the 80s. I wrote a two part blog series about the rise and fall of mid 80s hacking group called “Nihilist Order” that were one of the first groups to get caught trying to systematise credit card fraud that I can find records of, in 1986.

If anything the interesting aspect of this XAKEP article is that the methods for acquiring credit card details for fraud, dumpster diving, social engineering or having a friend who works in retail swipe carbon copies of receipts, are much lower tech than I might have expected for 1999. Speaking of retail accomplices, the writer observes that “in 1998, the UEP, which deals with carders, detained more than 40 cashiers, precisely for such operations”.

The article is littered with warnings, including to “Never order in Russia! In our country, unfortunately, the ‘credit card payment system’ is not yet so widespread; on the other hand, credit card hacking is a folk/creativity, and therefore every credit card purchase is taken too seriously”.

This potential for increased scrutiny and the resulting fears of being caught seem to pervade the article. I have to think that the main issue was that the carder techniques detailed in this piece seem to require that fellow Russians would be the targets of fraud and that, depending on how the credit card details were obtained, they would even be in the same city as the carder.

The suggestion for circumventing this, and the need to presumably have a place to drop off physical items, is to “download a bunch of paid software from the Internet” or purchase subscriptions to online porn.

It is done like this: you order some product, you receive it and immediately sell it. Never keep any item for yourself. By doing this, you will only simplify the work of the police when they come to meet you. When the account arrives to the owner of the card, he will call the bank and say that didn’t make such an order.

“It is carding that we will deal with today” – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

If you want to read more about how Russian hackers dealt with the issues that came with living in Russia and the difficulties in performing credit card fraud that came with that in the early 2000s I recommend reading ‘Industry of Anonymity’ by Jonathan Lusthaus. As Jonathan observed in the university thesis that was the precursor to his book:

Many of their targets were in the West, which meant that the money from compromised credit cards and other scams often had to be “cashed out” in the West to avoid the suspicions of Western financial institutions and banks. In many cases, purchases shipped directly to Eastern Europe would be blocked or were not even possible.

‘Cybercrime: The Industry of Anonymity’ by Jonathan Lusthaus, 2016

“Article 159 FRAUD” – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

The XAKEP carding article ends with a warning about the law in Russia in regards to fraud, complete with a little drawing of a very unhappy looking prisoner.

The text of the description of the relevant Russian law opens with “fraud, that is, theft of someone else’s property or the acquisition of the right to someone else’s property by deception or breach of trust, is punishable by a fine in the amount of 200 to 700 times the minimum wage, or in the amount of the wage or salary, or any other income of the convicted person for a period of 2 to 7 months, or compulsory works”.

What I think is surprising about this article in general is not that it exists, it is more that it is unapologetically not presented as “for educational purposes only” and that it was printed in an actual glossy magazine for general distribution. 2600 magazine was started by people who had just had a very close brush with the law in the US in 1983, they knew the danger of giving the authorities any reason to crack down on them or their publication and I feel they have walked a careful line as a result.

Phrack, the LOD Technical Journals and other similar text file based publications were distributed online or through BBS systems, with the authors themselves fairly removed from these methods of distribution as the text files spread. XAKEP Magazine didn’t have this buffer or relative anonymity, and it is interesting to consider why they felt so emboldened even back in 1999.

About a third of the remaining pages of issue #1 cover video game related topics, like the imminent release of Quake 3 Arena. In this regard XAKEP is different from any English language hacking related publications I am aware of, while video games might be mentioned I can’t think of any others that would feature gaming related content to this extent.

In this way XAKEP is a weird mix of technical hacking journal, men’s magazine and gamer publication.

Baldur’s Gate also gets a good looking three page spread.

“World Wide Web” – – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

XAKEP #1 includes a multi-page spread about useful links on the web, a mixture of tools and websites like http://www.love.sp.ru (no longer online), which from what I can glean was dedicated to “Virtual LOVE. Dating and Romance.”

We also have http://www.beavis-butthead.ru, which has been online since 1996, the site seems to be a portal for viewing pirated shows online with a blog reviewing various TV series.

Another featured site is http://www.fuck.ru (no longer online) which is described in this way by the Global Informality Project:

Deliberate misspellings and puns were first developed by the Russian FidoNet in-group in the late 1990s. A massive Internet users’ movement ‘for spelling mistakes, against automatic spell-checking’, a denial of the social taboo of using mat publicly, has spread across the Russian Internet since 1999. Their main goal, manifested on http://www.fuck.ru (currently defunct), was to question language correctness as a marker of social status

Larisa Morkoborodova, Åbo Akademi University, Finland

In terms of tools we have Ventafax, which is software for sending faxes using modems or IP telephony, NetZip which is an archive utility and SmartWhois which “is a useful network information utility that allows you to look up all the available information about an IP address, hostname or domain, including country, state or province, city, name of the network provider, administrator and technical support contact information”

“Netmonitor” – – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

Finally we have Netmonitor from Leech Software, Leech Software describes it as “small program which monitors TCP/IP connections to your machine. Meant for systems administrators who wish to keep track of access to a machine, it can also be useful in network programming or troubleshooting.” So basically a Windows GUI for netstat.

The last 3 pages of issue #1 is an FAQ style letters page, although because this is the first issue these questions don’t match the format of future issues that include the name of the person requesting information or making comments.

The questions are about what you’d expect computer users to be asking in 1999. We have “Is it possible to increase the speed of the Internet connection programmatically?”, “What are the benefits of the new ATXg format?” and “How to protect yourself from a virus that infects
BIOS?”, the questions and answers in this first issue are surprisingly innocuous.

“How to protect yourself from a virus that infects
BIOS” – – XAKEP Magazine #1, 1999

That wraps up Khaker #1, an interesting look back at not just the Russian hacker scene in 1999 but the web itself and how members of the Russian computer underground viewed internet and western pop culture.

Despite these magazines being in print circulation and archival copies being available online for anyone to seek out and download I have not seen a lot written in English about Khaker.

The mixture of advice on credit card fraud, review of Quake 3 and gallows humor on the topic of Y2K gives us a snapshot of opinions, interests and fears from 1999 and the focus on freely downloadable tools and apps is something we can still see used by current day Russian ransomware groups.

https://realhackhistory.org/2023/06/02/lessons-from-1999-a-look-at-issue-one-of-khaker-xakep-magazine-for-russian-computer-hooligans/

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