Professor Dubstep
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It might actually be true because a lot of dubstep is kind of self-referential.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I mean, you've got a point. You've got a point. Dolphins are a very intelligent animal, so dubstep is very intelligent music, clearly.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, I mean, we all do come from the sea originally. So, you know, some common ancestor might have, you know, we're just going back to our roots in a way.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It was kind of like a little triangle. There was me, Dino, Jay, and a spin tire. And we'd sit there. It was like a four, kind of not talking to each other, but relaying between each other. And these tracks would go around in that little circle like that. Dino Driller, he was, at the time, a 14-year-old dubstep producer, same age as me. We'd just hang out on Skype now and then.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, because Excision does a lot of things to support the underground artists in the scene and help them get some exposure and things. He owns a record label that was called Russian Recordings, which he signed a lot of up-and-coming people to actually help them get a head start. So Dino was one of these up-and-coming producers that Excision was trying to help out.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So he invited young Dino over to the house in Canada to make some new tunes. Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering if Excision uses dolphins in their music, here's a snippet from his song Asteroid.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
When Dino goes to Excision's house, Dino will go and dig through all the old hard drives and things and search for some unreleased or work-in-progress goodies and things from people in the scene.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
That's exactly it. I'm going to grab some hard drives. We were sitting there on Skype like, oh, look for this and that and this and that. Sending him file names like, look if there's this thing and this clicks thing and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Excision was out at the gym. We'd just be sitting there like, hey, get this, get that. Eventually, Dino ran out of old hard drives to comb.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So we're like, well, there's stuff missing from here that should be there. So the final location that was searched was Excision's actual sock drawer for CDs and USB drives. And what did he find in Excision's sock drawer? old CDs with the things on that we were looking for. I'm not kidding. There was a demo from Skrillex called Dimbo, which was a demo of one of his biggest songs, Kyoto.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And there was just all kinds of things on there, just work-in-progress things that had never come out, that no one had ever heard before.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Well, there was some Excision, there was some Skrillex... There was some knife party, some nausea, all kinds of things that these communities had been looking for for years and begging for. It was right there on these CDs in the sock drawer. And they were now being sent to us on Skype.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, shares it with me and Spintire and we just listened to it together like, oh, this is amazing. This is really interesting stuff. That's kind of unbelievable. And I thought that would be the end of it. But no. After a week or so, literally just a week, some of these things started to leak onto Reddit. Dino was trying to blame me for it and saying, oh, well, you must have traded this.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
and telling everyone that I was trading it and leaking it and this and that. And I nearly got the blame pinned on me for it. I nearly did. But the way that I found him out was that some of the things that leaked were things that I was never sent. So it must have meant that he'd traded two batches of things that were slightly different.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
One to me, and other batches to whoever else, which contained different files. So I caught him out, and I managed to spin it back around and say, no, I can prove that it was you, that this is the reason for these leaks. So Dino leaked it and blamed it on you. Yeah, well, he didn't leak it. He sent it to the traders, like Jay Brown.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
just have the status of having these rare things so they can go to can go to people and say oh i've got this and that and i want i want that and this and they can trade them for that and then eventually it just everyone goes in the loop and carries on doing that between each other until eventually someone posts it online then once it's posted that song is burned in the trading community it's no longer a rare item to have
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Christmas 2015, there was an event called Leakmas, where hundreds of things got leaked onto Xtrill, onto Reddit. All of the things that Dino had taken from Excision's house, all of them leaked. There wasn't one single thing that didn't get leaked. And it was all just because it was being traded like crazy. Did Excision ever figure out that Dino did this? No, to this day, he's never realized.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Professor Dubstep was getting deeper into the unreleased Dubstep trading scene. 2016 comes around. The tactics that traders were using to obtain the unreleased music files was changing a little bit. And there were a couple of incidents where artists had played a DJ set at a club and someone would go up after the show and just take the USB drive straight out of the mixer. Whoa!
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
With all the secret stuff on it. Yeah. They'd go right up on stage and grab the equipment. Yeah, well, it's Pioneer CDJ systems. You basically just put a small USB flash drive into the top. So if someone walked past it, they could just swipe it really easily. And no one would notice until it was too late. Well, I mean, doesn't the music immediately stop?
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
If it's after the show's just finished, there's like a small window where someone could grab it and no one would notice.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, it's been known to happen about three or four times in the space of one year.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, it happened plenty of times. There was a guy called Snails who was blowing up in the scene in late 2015. He had his USB stolen. All of the files from it leaked onto Reddit. Skrillex had his USB stolen as well. All of those things ended up leaking in late 2016 onto Reddit. Again, you know, it's something that keeps happening.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I think it still happens to this day that artists have their USB drives stolen out of the equipment on stage.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Leakers in the scene were frowned upon. So things actually being leaked, whoever leaks something is, you know, it burns their reputation.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Because it was, you know, it just goes, one thing, they're traders, they don't like things leaking. And two, it does damage things. Three, it invites trouble, it invites legal trouble if you are the one to leak something.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So the outside, Extral, looked like a place that was just a rampage of things, totally uncontrolled. But actually behind the scenes, it was kind of a front. So if an artist was cool and contacted the moderators of the subreddit or the people in charge, they could say, please prevent this thing from leaking. There's release plans for it soon. Would you mind keeping it off?
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
If they were nice about it, they could get their brand added to the filter so that nothing could be posted.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So late 2016 rolls around. Spintire comes to me on Skype and says, look, we've got this old password of Skrillex's. I say, okay, well, how? How does this happen? And he kind of hesitates to explain it at first and just says, oh, just look at it. Just try it on these things. Just try it on the old Skype account. Okay. It works. It logs straight in. To Skrillex's Skype account.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, and it was an old inactive account. It was dead. It was not being used. But the password worked, and I said, well, how'd you get this? Yeah, good question.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And I said, well, how'd you get this? Eventually he explains, he says that databases have leaked from all kinds of sites. There was quite a lot of databases that got stolen and uploaded online in 2016. There was Dropbox, had their database stolen. Last.fm had their database stolen. Myspace had their database stolen as well.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And they're all just uploaded to this thing called, I think it was Leaked Source. And you could basically pay $20 a month for access to this. and it would give you access to all of these databases, so you could just view the results, the hashed passwords and things.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
You could just take the hash and just decrypt it yourself, because they were really poorly protected, just standard MD5, which almost the whole MD5 table had been cracked by that point.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
my goodness my brain is running a million miles an hour right now there is going to be an all-out onslaught of people they're going to be trying to hack into these musicians files hey yo i'm eating fun dip right now so what we've done basically is just put the email in that we that we knew of of these artists and if they had a result come up from some old old database that had been leaked
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
that was poorly encrypted, you could take that hashed result and decrypt it and just hope that their security was not so great and that they kept reusing this password for all this time and use the same one on every site or whatever.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
We got into Skrillex's Dropbox. Skrillex's Dropbox is the... We actually didn't manage to get in there, but... We tried a bunch of different accounts after Skype, and none of it was working. So all of the other things had been closed off. So you couldn't get into his Dropbox? No.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
But they couldn't get in. No. So we decided instead that maybe his manager would be a good target to try and look, to see if there was anything leaked in the databases for his manager. And so we had a look in, and there was... It was a really old result from 2008, but the same result appeared in all of the databases.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So it had a good chance of working in some maybe old sites that had been inactive, would have been used in the past for sharing music and stuff internally. To me and Spintai, we sat there on Skype and we tried it on the Mediafire page, which worked and logged us in. And there was some interesting stuff in there. There was Photoshop documents.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
There were a couple of unreleased tracks that had never come out before, never even been heard. Skrillex tracks?
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
In a way it was, but at that time we were hearing so many tracks from the traders that it kind of didn't seem as big to us as it actually was. And what we were doing as well, logging into the accounts and things, We didn't really kind of realize how deep that was really going because that's way further than just trading something in a small circle that's been got from another trader.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
That's going into someone's account and taking something directly. And we were just doing it as if it was nothing, really, which is really ridiculous when I think back to it now. It's ridiculous. That's a huge invasion of privacy. But, you know, it worked.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
we got these tracks and kind of made a resolve to ourselves that other people would be doing this at the same time as us other people would be figuring this out who would get these things and then trade them and leak them so that's what me and Spintire were basically saying with each other it's better that we're doing it and we can keep these things safe and listen to them between ourselves and have the interest with it and then keep it secret keep it from leaking
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Okay, are we ready to get started? Yeah, that's fine. But could you use the name for me? Could you use Professor Dubstep? Professor Dubstep. I like that.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, so we'd go in, we'd grab the files and then either just change the password straight up so that no one else could get into the account or to contact the person that we'd logged into and say, we've compromised your account, you need to change this password. And which many of the times we actually did that, we'd contact them and said, You know, you've been compromised here.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
We decided to look in these databases for Dino's, if he'd had his passwords leaked in some database, and that we could try them out on the Skype.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah. This is where it gets good. Oh. So we had a look and there was one. There was, well, there was one password that had been leaked five or six times on different services. So that just indicates that he's using it on everything and maybe hasn't realized that it's compromised. So we took that password and we logged into his Skype. It worked first time. It was six characters.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It was really basic. We just logged straight in and we could see his chats and we could see him talking to some guy called Shane. And Shane was the owner of Xtrail. And they were talking with each other about trying to hack into accounts using these databases. So they were doing it themselves and trying to figure it out, as me and Spintire were also doing it between each other.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
The story? Well, picture this. Kind of early 2014, I was 13, sitting there, working on my Minecraft server. It was breaking all the time. The host was terrible. Staff were fighting, and I kind of just wanted to do something else. Knife Party, which is a musical act, had a new album coming out in 2014, and it was delayed, it was taking ages.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So one of the targets that Dino was trying to hack into while we were watching him was us, me and Spintire. So he was looking in these databases trying to find our info and we were watching him do it and watching him attempt to get into our accounts like live in real time.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, anything he could manage. Our Skype, our Dropboxes, SoundClouds, anything basically.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, exactly that. Literally just a real-time feed of watching him try to hack into us. No, I think more what it was was that he was paranoid and he was trying to see if we were sharing stuff behind the scenes and keeping things from him. Because everyone in this little trading game was backstabbing each other. It's just what was happening. Everyone was backstabbing each other.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Well, me and Spintai were just sat there like... wow, we're actually seeing this. They're actually trying to get into our stuff right now. This is strange. This is a lot to break down. But we were just sat there like, oh, well, good thing we have proper security on ourselves, otherwise we'd be screwed.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
We are both in the wrong. Everyone in this story is in the wrong. There is no right here whatsoever. The only thing that is marginally right is contacting people to say that you're compromised. That's the only good thing.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
You're not going to... I'm telling you now, you're not going to get one. I don't want to glorify any of this because it's not. It's a terrible thing. The double plate trading, the hacking, it's all just damaging to everyone involved. The artists, the people doing the hacking, you know, the... It's dangerous stuff, and it's just a bunch of kids who don't know better doing it at the time.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
You know, we were 14, 15, just sat there. Spintire was a lot older. He was about 30.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So we carry on, right? We try and get some more targets. We think of other sites that we can try and log into. So we take a look at Box.com, which is a cloud storage provider usually used by small businesses, big businesses, record labels, production companies, anything. It's very popular because they offer great group collaboration options.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So we take Skrillex's manager's password and we try it on the box.com account and it logs us straight in, straight into the inner workings of Skrillex's record label. We get in there and we can see all their upcoming releases and their production files, promotion plans. Upcoming releases for Skrillex? For Skrillex and all the artists on his label. Wow. That sounds like a big treasure trove.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
There was a couple of terabytes worth of files in there. Holy cow. Box.com is a little bit more advanced. They send login notifications for unrecognized logins. So one of the first things we did was go into the settings and have a look. Did it say that we'd logged in? And this guy, this account that we'd logged into, he turned off the login notifications. So he had no idea that we'd got in there.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah. Leave something on for something like that, which is heavily relating to your business. You need to have these notifications turned on to tell you if your security is compromised.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Okay, so give me a list of things you found on there. There was unreleased Skrillex songs, there was individual audio assets for some Skrillex things, and the other artists on his label, like the individual master stems and things for songs, multi-tracks. so that you could basically break them down into their parts and things. Everything was stored in those.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Photoshop documents, promotion plans, documents saying what they were going to be doing for the next year or two years even. Internal voice recordings, meetings between the label executives and things. It was all kinds of stuff that really should, you know, it's confidential things and it was really unprotected files. There was no individual passwords on folders and things.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It was just all open with 50 other accounts shared on all of them. My gosh.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
A very large amount. What we did is we copied the share link for each folder that was in there. And we set the permissions on that so that anyone with that share link could still view the folder even though they're not logged in. And we also copied the collaborator invite links for the folders because that option was not password protected.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So we could invite a new burner account so that we would still have access for ourselves on new accounts altogether and the original one would be closed down, so no one else would be able to get access to it apart from us.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, because it's a backdoor that you can just, it's built into the site.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
The only reason we were able to get these in the first place is because people don't exercise proper security. They use the same password on every site for years and years and years and don't enable two-factor authentication on their accounts either. So it's just open. If you've got the password, then you can just walk straight in and do whatever.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I was like, well, this is kind of good. I'll chop this together a little bit and I'll upload it to SoundCloud so that other fans can hear it, you know, and enjoy it as well. I put it up there. I didn't expect it to get, you know, much popularity. But a few hours go by, I go back to working on my server.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So I thought, how I wish. Because as usual, a few weeks went by and other people started to hint that they had these files. Well, the traders got access to some things, didn't they? There was no explanation for it other than that Spintire must have shared it with someone. So I quizzed him on it and I said, you know, if you have, I'd rather you just tell me. I won't be angry, I just want to know.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
He still denies it. So I start thinking, oh, well, someone else must have got access somehow. Like, aside from us, someone else must have initially got access to the account. So I treat it as that for a while. Let Spintire have the benefit of the doubt. We carry on going. We think of some more accounts to try and get into different people.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And then I check my SoundCloud after a couple of hours and the plays are just racking up, like 10,000, 20,000. And I open Twitter and Twitter is blowing up too. The EDM, the Electronic Dance Music news blogs have posted about it and said, oh, the track's been uploaded to SoundCloud early and it's a leak, blah, blah, blah.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Another thing we were trying was a management company for Diplo and Major Lazer, who are a bit closer to pop music. And we tried his managersbox.com account based on what we'd found in these leaked databases. And sure enough, password worked. It logged us in. There was another couple of terabytes of data in there. There was a lot more than just Major Lazer in there.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
There was Diplo, there was A-Track, there was Dylan Francis, Kill The Noise. There were about 20 different artists under this management company, and we could view all of their stuff from within this Box.com account.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, this is where it gets a bit more dangerous because some stuff that they had in that box.com account, they were basically keeping all of their artists and people that were involved in touring and things, production crew, this management company was keeping all of these people's personal documents in there. They're calling them contact sheets.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And that contact sheet would have more than just their contact information on them. It would have the artist's social security numbers, bank routing info, passwords, all kinds of insane stuff that was just supremely dangerous to keep in. largely unsecured folders with no extra passwords on them and seemingly no reason to put that info in the document whatsoever.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And then to not secure your own account properly, it's exposing all people that are millionaires. It's kind of just lucky that none of... Me or Spintire or any of the people that eventually were doing this, that none of them were interested in anything more than just the music. Because the amount of damage that could have come from that is insane.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
These folders all had upwards of 50 people shared on them. Everyone in the business could access these things. The interns could access these things. Anyone could grab these things. Or anyone that got into the account could grab these as well and just have it. And there'd be no notification that it had been compromised. Man, that's too many people to have access to all this.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So, checking in my SoundCloud messages and... I saw I had a message from DinoJella. He was saying that I had some cool, well, he thought that I had some cool music, some cool unreleased things. And I had another message from Spintire, who was basically just asking to add me on Skype and talk some more. So I took this opportunity and I'm like, well, we'll see what he wants.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I wasn't into that, but I would like to find out that Spintire was sort of starting to get into that. I mean, after a while of these things keeping leaking, starting to leak on Reddit, that were meant to be just kept between us and that no one else was supposed to have access to, I clocked on that Spintire must have been being dishonest about it. So I confronted him in mid-October.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I said, are you sharing these? Just tell me right now, are you sharing these? And he says, no, it's not quite like that. I said, well, how is it then? He says, I can't say. I say, is someone paying you for them? He says, yeah. So I think, oh, well. Finally, he's admitted it. I've caught him out in his whole game plan. And he goes on to explain that he...
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
quit his actual job to sell these files to some rich kid on the other side of the world. I say, well, this goes against every, you know, the whole reason that we were doing this in the first place was to keep these files somewhat safe and prevent these people from getting access to them to be able to, so that they can't do this thing with it. And then he's doing it himself.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It really made me quite angry. You know, I felt misled on the whole thing.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I said yes, but what I meant was I'll agree so that he keeps, you know, he thinks that I'm on his side still. So I end the chat and I go and talk to Shane from Extril.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So he adds me up and he says, oh, so how are you getting these things? And I explain, I say, well, you know, I don't actually have anything. It's just kind of blown into something that it wasn't.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So he agrees and he's like, yeah, you know, we'll do what we can to prevent Spintire from carrying on with the stuff. So we started working together from that point on. on these things. Me and Shane and another friend called Arnie Kurtz.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what we started doing. Our main plan was just, you know, prevent Spintire from retaining access to these accounts and these folders that we'd spent so long to gain ourselves access to, and then we're locking them off. Specifically to try and prevent things, to prevent this from happening. It is kind of strange that it changed in that way.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I'd cut Spintire off in mid-October. I'd been friends with him for two years at that point. It was difficult to cut him off. It was fun to hang out with. But, you know, it had to be done. Damage was actually being caused and I was recognising that. What a headful to navigate as a teenager, you know?
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
but that I do like to look around and see if there's hidden things that are kind of not really supposed to be in the main public view, but are made public accidentally, and things like that, or things that appear early. And he said that he likes to do the same sort of thing, looking and trying to find open directories on servers and things, and accidentally public info.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I think at the peak of things, we probably had like a network of 25 accounts. It was a lot. I mean, we were doing this sort of stuff just all day, basically, just trying to figure out what could be next, what could Spintire's next target be. You know, what could be something dangerous that he would get access to that he shouldn't get access to, and then go and get access to it ourselves instead.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing as well with Box.com or Dropbox. If you make a shared folder and you invite other collaborators to it, these management companies are inviting 50 people to a folder, and you could go through and browse that list of people and take their names and their email addresses off there, and then you could run those through the database search as well.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So if you spent long enough on it, you could tunnel through to all kinds of places that way by just going on it again and again and again until you get somewhere. And you could build up a network that way.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Quite a few times, they'd not change it very much. They'd maybe just add a capital letter or an extra number on the end. Or there was one manager that we were looking at, his password was the same thing for everything, but he just changed the letter at the end. And the letter at the end would be the initial of whatever site the account was for.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So if the account password had leaked from MySpace, it would be word and then the letter M at the end. So To get to the password for box.com or Dropbox, you know, you just change the letter at the end to a D or a B, and it would work. You would also not get a notification that that password was compromised because it wasn't.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, Purple Lamborghini was something that came from the Diplo's manager's account. One of the artists that they were managing was called Flostradamus. They do DJ sets at the main festivals throughout the year for trap music and dubstep music. And in one of these contact sheets that was stored on this management box was all the passwords for this DJ duo.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And one of them was the password for their Splice account. Splice was a service that offered project file storage for music software. So we got into that and we downloaded it. their DJ set preparation files. And because they were semi-big players, they had all these work-in-progress versions of tracks from other people in the scene. And Purple Lamborghini demo was one of them.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So we kind of connected, and we had a chat about that, and we were talking about that for hours.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And basically what happened was, it's been a few months since I cut Spintire off. And... I was missing my friend and I went and unblocked him and I started talking to him again. I said, you know, are you still doing the selling? Because we'd been trying to prevent him from doing it, preventing him from getting anything to sell. He said, no, you know, I've finished with that.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I've cut off those people, realised that they were trading and leaking the things after, blah, blah, blah. So I say, okay, well, you know, should we be friends again? He says, well, sure. Let's go back to how things were a couple of years ago. Just talk about music and not be involved in any of this dodgy stuff. And I say, okay, sure. You know, we kept talking.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It led into, oh, you know, I've got these couple of cool new things. Do you have anything cool new things? And so we share a couple of things back and forth with each other. Like old times, the purple Lamborghini demo was one of those things. About a week goes by, and as usual, it leaks on Reddit. The one single possible corporate spin tire leak. I just, I blew up at him over it.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I thought, you know, this has happened again. You're the only explanation for this thing leaking. It broke my trust again. So I cut him back off, but it's too late by that point. You know, the thing had leaked. That was my own stupid fault.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
But December rolls around and we had one last big thing that we wanted to try and do, which was to get into a major laser production account for where they held all their song files and their production files for things that they were working on. Things that you could load up in a music software and see all the individual bits of and... and change things.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
So we had the idea to go for one of Major Lazer's production team and see if we could get into their things. So we had one last go on the database and see if we could get the pass to their Dropbox. And we did manage it. We were talking back and forth with each other, me and Arnie and Shane, in a group chat, saying, oh, it's here. There was one specific song that we wanted to get.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It was called Terrorize, featuring Collie Buds. So we logged into this account, and the first thing we searched for was
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
terrorized project file and uh it was there the actual one that they were that the group were working on at this at the very the very day so we're talking back and forth with each other like oh it's terrorized season it's terrorized season goat greatest of all time but there was more than just that in the dropbox there was there was another terabyte of stuff that was being worked on at that minute like the inner workings of a of a major billboard top 100 pop artist
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And everything was there. Individual assets, drum samples, synth files, all kinds. So we grabbed all that stuff. Well, I mean, it was too much to grab. And in many of these cases, it was too much. It was too much there. The things that Spintire had got hold of from before he was cut off had started to, you know, the leaking had really picked up.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And me and Shane and Anu basically decided that we needed to make even more efforts to contact these people who had been compromised. And I'm pretty sure it was Arnie that did this. He rang up the actual manager's phone number and left a message on the voicemail to say, you know, this has happened. This is what will happen next. You need to start taking steps to secure your stuff straight away.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Otherwise the damage would just rack up into hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the legal teams started talking about this, like, oh, how could this happen? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's impossible. We sort of, we ended up in contact with these legal teams on the false identities to explain to them how it had happened, why it was happening, and... how they could prevent it.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
They were basically saying, oh yeah, you know, we had plans for these songs, we had plans for Terrorize, it was going to be like a big thing because so many people wanted the song. And that was, they basically just all cancelled all of that because it was, the potential for it to leak early was there, so they cancelled all of those plans.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
A album that was being worked on at the time, Music is the Weapon, that was cancelled too. Well, not cancelled outright, but really delayed. And it only came out in something like 2020, 2021, which was four years after...
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
all these incidents but we were basically just talking with each other trying to come up with these plans of how can we prevent these things from leaking you know we want to help you to figure this out because we know these people that are involved with this and these legal teams are coming up with these ridiculous plans like oh well we'll fly Spintire out to New York and we'll you know we'll take him to dinner and we'll hand him $30,000 in exchange for his hard drives and
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And then that will secure our files. And I was trying to tell him, no, that will not work. We'll just make a copy of it. It's ridiculous. And they were not having it. They were saying, oh, well, this definitely seems like the best idea to me. And I was saying, no, no, please, no, don't do that.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I'm not sure if they actually did that in the end or if they realized that it was not going to help their case. Well, did they know that you had the hard drives full of stuff too? Um... Well, that's the thing. Me, I didn't download all the things. I'd pick and choose a couple of things here and there, but a lot of it was kind of just not so interesting.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Personally, I'm not really a raving fan. I was just more interested in being able to break these things down and look at the production process. Because it could help me to learn how to make better music myself and see how it was being done, how the Billboard Top 100 stuff was being made. And I could use that to help me create better things myself. It's a valuable learning resource.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Yeah, I see your point, but at the same time, it's kind of unprecedented that you can go into a project file and look at the entire... Start to finish process of it.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
You have to know some in-depth music stuff already to be able to figure out what you're even looking at. The fact that I've been able to look at all this and take some insight from it that can help me later on. is basically invaluable. It's priceless.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
At the end of 2016 was the final, you know, called it quits and stopped doing all this hacking stuff. Which, I mean, it's not right to call it hacking, really. It's not even on ScriptKitty level. It's just searching through things and using logic to try and figure out passwords. It's not... It's not really like complex hacker stuff.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It's just, I don't know a good word to use to describe it, but you know.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
But yeah, fast forward to... to 2019, and I'd just finished college. I did a music course at college. I'd left all this stuff behind. It was all kind of calmed down. Nothing was leaking anymore. No accounts were being compromised, well, not by me anyway. And I kind of thought, you know, I'll find out what the old people were doing in modern day. I had a chat with Shane.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It just allows you to shorten links. But they had a glaring flaw in their system where if you add a plus to the end of any shortened link that was made while logged into an account, And you could click on the public user profile of these accounts and see everything that they'd ever shortened using the service.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I had a small talk with Arnie, and Shane was still going on with the stuff from what I could gather Arnie had moved away from doing it and he'd got I think I'm pretty sure he went to work for the FBI and got security clearance top security clearance for something or other
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
other people in the in the extra crew had some of them had got raided some of them had gone to join the military and things like that you know everyone had gone off to do different things apart from the one guy who who had who had got the most weird and awkward situation possible spentire had gone from being the seller and the leaker of so many hundreds of gigabytes of data.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
He had gone from leaking these Skrillex demos and trading them to being on Skrillex's production team himself. and was now technically Skrillex. And with that, Skrillex is one of the ones that is ghost-written, ghost-produced. He's not real. He's just a face for a brand.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
All of it. In 2019, the team was at least five, six people putting together these songs. And that's what it's always been, really. Skrillex's first release in 2009 and 2010, like Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, his first EP was Ghost Produced by Noisia. to quite a large extent.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Maybe not entirely, but a large portion of all of his sounds over the years have come from other people putting it all together. So yeah, this ghost producing runs deep in the scene. So many of the big players are fake.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And many of the links that we were looking at, music-related, would always be made by a management account, for example. And they would share internal things on the link shortener as well, and we would be able to just see those and download them.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
It would either be audio or Photoshop documents or sometimes there were internal memos like promotion plans for upcoming releases and things. And just being able to get kind of a look into the inner workings of these labels and management companies of how they function, how they put their things together and make their plans, which was really interesting.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
On Reddit, Reddit also has direct messages. And a message came through to my inbox from a guy called Jay Brown. He added me on Skype as well. We got to talking. He was a different kind of person. He was what's known as a dubplate trader. Now, dubplates are a nickname for unreleased music. And in more modern times, that's just come to be on an MP3 file, basically.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Just an MP3 file that's not released to the general public. And there is a whole scene of trading these files in small circles. It's kind of like Pokemon cards. Less valuable cards are treated... way differently to ones that are rarer. And it's the exact same with dub plates. So this guy called Jay Brown comes to me and he says, Oh, I've got some stuff. Do you want to check out what I've got?
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
I've got this and that and this and that. Kind of presenting it as if he was some kind of drug dealer or something. I wasn't really interested in anything he had. There was one specific track, which was Knife Party's Suffer. And I didn't have anything that I wanted to give him because I wasn't a trader. I had my couple of things that I found on my linked shorteners.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
And I decided that I would try and make something out of nothing. So I took a clip of this radio recording and I kind of chopped it together into something that sounded semi-reasonable and presented it to him.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
an original source file when it actually wasn't a source file. So it's trying to make something seem real that wasn't so that he would believe it and send me the thing that he had that was real. It was quite a scheme. It was quite a scheme.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
you know what you're not gonna know if this is from knife party or not but i'll put a little clip in there from knife party just to kind of make you think it is but then i'm just gonna make it up after that yeah that's that's pretty much how it went and um if you were good at this um you know making something sound semi-legitimate these traders didn't really know much better it was it was quite easy to convince them of something and to kind of ignore what their own ears were telling them and it worked
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Well, that's the thing. It's unspeakable. You never speak of that you did an edit to it or something because it would give the whole game away. And me and Spintire kind of kept doing this between ourselves.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
We thought this was quite a good idea that we would make some more fake things or edits and we could use them to float in these trading circles and kind of just drain their whole collection of rare things. without actually causing any damage ourselves to any of these releases. Because the dub plate trading scene, it does cause massive damage, no matter how big or small the artist is.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
If the unreleased track gets leaked online in some way, depending if it had a release planned or not, you know, once it's leaked, it's over for that track forever. So, you know, it really, it's not something to, well, it's just not a good thing for the music scene, really.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Well, I play, I'm a multi-instrumentalist, but also I make Dubstep myself, and And this is something that I was learning to do at the time. So this was a way to learn more about the music-making process. I'm interested in his unreleased music, but more to just listen to it and break down what's going on with it. Because not all of it remained unreleased.
Darknet Diaries
148: Dubsnatch
Some of it was just early versions of things, you know, work-in-progress versions of songs that would then come out and be almost entirely different. So it was interesting to just hear the differences between them for me. Okay, can I ask you a question about Dubstep?