It was just another moment of drama at a conference that is filled with both tension and entertainment. The FBI and any other national security agency interested in the event-which is all of them-knew right where to find him. As a service to the security community, he’d come to Las Vegas to give a presentation on how exactly those techniques had been circumvented, pointing out the weaknesses to other programmers and cybersecurity professionals so they could avoid similar pitfalls.Īnd he’d done it at DEF CON, a hacker convention swarming with all stripes of hackers, federal agents, and security professionals engaged in fun, games, and serious security research that happens every year under the stark desert sun. Skylarov had developed some expertise in the encryption methods used in the ebook formats Elcomsoft had cracked. The Feds couldn’t reach Elcomsoft, but they could nab Sklyarov as long as he was in the United States. Sklyarov was one of a handful of programmers that had worked on the software. The Russian company that Sklyarov worked for, Elcomsoft, had written and published, in Russia, a program that could circumvent the protections placed on ebook files created by Adobe and other vendors.
Instead, he walked into the waiting handcuffs of a team of FBI agents sent to arrest him for violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making him the first person ever to be arrested under that law. Early on the morning of JRussian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov left his Las Vegas hotel room with nothing more pressing on his mind than getting a bite to eat before his flight back to Moscow.
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