Garrett M. Graff's Blog

I wrote a quick WIRED story today about the arrest in Spain over the weekend of one of the world’s top spammers. The operation, which also involved the take-down of the Kelihos botnet—one of the world’s longest-running and most nefarious networks of infected computers—was done, in part, by the same team I wrote about for my cover story in this month’s WIRED about the hunt for the hacker behind GameOver Zeus.

This weekend, Spanish police nabbed Russian hacker Peter Yuryevich Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, or “Peter of the North,” while he was on vacation with his family. It’s the latest in a string of high-profile hackers who have been arrested while vacationing—which, as silly as it sounds, does show part of the challenge of the hacking lifestyle: These guys are making tremendous amounts of money, but limited in their opportunities to spend it at home in Russia—and their desire to live a life of high-luxury ends up putting them in places where western law enforcement can snag them.

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My first cover story in WIRED focuses on a cybercrime case that’s long fascinated me, the hunt for the hacker behind the GameOver Zeus botnet and perhaps the most successful bank robber in the world.

It’s a fascinating story about a decade-long chase, most of which unfolded when the FBI didn’t even know the name of the person it was chasing.

The case also shows how Russian cybercrime has evolved—what started in the 1990s as individual hackers was taken over by large, sophisticated organized crime groups in the mid-2000s (like the group I write about here, known as “The Business Club”), and, most recently, these criminal groups have linked up with Russian government and intelligence agencies, effectively creating state-sanctioned criminals.

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Here’s my Bloomberg BusinessWeek story about Donald Trump and Air Force One—and how the new president will shape the future of the presidential fleet. As it turns out, Donald Trump might, depending on how long he serves and the always-shaky schedule of government procurement, might be the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to get both a new helicopter and a new plane.

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My latest article for POLITICO Magazine, “The Green Monster,” examines the problems inside the U.S. Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, which has seen dramatic (and poorly managed) growth since 9/11.  As I write in the piece, “What emerges is the largely overlooked story behind the story of the perennial border crises, in which the best intentions and worst impulses of the Bush administration met the laissez-faire management and political cynicism of the Obama administration. The result? A massive agency—freshly militarized by billions of dollars of weapons and technology and thousands of poorly vetted gun-carrying personnel hired in the panicky years after 9/11—was left adrift as violence and corruption in its ranks rose dramatically.”

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I’m excited to be joining POLITICO Magazine as a senior staff writer. The official announcement here, and the staff memo from Magazine Editor Susan Glasser is below:

Dear Politicos— The Magazine is delighted to announce that Garrett Graff is starting today as a senior staff writer. The editor of Washingtonian magazine for the last five years, he is also an accomplished author at work on his third book and he’ll bring his sharp eye to long form narratives and big reported pieces for us.

From 2009 to 2014, as Washingtonian’s top editor, he led an ambitious revamp of the publication and landed many prestigious awards for the magazine, including the Gerald R. Ford Prize for National Defense Reporting, two James Beard Award nominations for its food coverage, and the City/Regional Magazine Association award for general excellence. This year, Washingtonian was a finalist for a record 15 awards from the City/Regional Magazine Association. He managed to do all that while also finding time for writing, and he was a finalist this spring for the Livingston Award for national reporting for his article, “Angel is Airborne: JFK’s Final Flight from Dallas,” which traced the story of the Air Force One flight back from Dallas on November 22, 1963, following the assassination of President Kennedy. His first book, “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House,” examined the role of technology in the 2008 presidential race. His bestselling second book, “The Threat Matrix: The FBI At War in the Age of Global Terror,” is the definitive history of the FBI since the death of J. Edgar Hoover,, and he is now at work on a book about the Cold War and the government’s Doomsday plans.

A Vermonter and Harvard graduate, Garrett was deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and later a cofounder of an Internet strategy consulting firm. In 2005, when he was the founding editor of mediabistro’s blog FishblowlDC, he was the first blogger accredited to cover a White House press briefing.

We are delighted to welcome him to POLITICO Magazine, and hope you’ll all find a chance to meet him soonest.

Susan and Blake

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