Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

by Kevin Poulsen Narrated by Eric Michael Summerer

Overview

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone-some brilliant, audacious crook-had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy.



The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents. Together, the cybercops lured numerous unsuspecting hackers into their clutches. Yet at every turn, their main quarry displayed an uncanny ability to sniff out their snitches and see through their plots.



The culprit they sought was the most unlikely of criminals: a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain's double identity. Together with a smooth-talking con artist, he ran a massive real-world crime ring.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"[A] brisk and entertaining tale."—The New York Times

"Even though he has done jail time for his cyber crimes and credit card hacking, it’s hard not to like Max "Max Vision" Butler.... The capers of this misfit genius, and the FBI’s attempts to infiltrate credit card hacking rings, combine to make this a fast, fun read."—Newark Star-Ledger

“Hello, Hollywood, Kevin Poulsen has a tale for you. Deftly told.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"What will make this book endure is Poulsen's elegant elucidation of how the hacking world evolved from its pimply, ideological beginnings into a global criminal enterprise"—Atlantic.com

“Poulsen renders the hacker world with such virtual reality that readers will have difficulty logging off until the very end.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“The lead figures of KINGPIN are brilliant, crooked geeks and the sleazy women who love to help them steal. Their mortal enemies are a cyber-savvy swarm of undercover cops.  Kevin Poulsen gets so close to these paranoid, shadowy people that you can smell the sweat on the keyboards and hear the handcuffs clack shut. No other book can match this intimate, expert portrait of a truly modern criminal underworld.”—Bruce Sterling, Hugo Award-winning novelist and futurist
 
“An exciting crime thriller, a compelling psychological study, and one of the most accurate stories of hacker culture that I’ve ever read…Poulsen deftly explains the technology behind these ultramodern computer crimes and shows how they’re committed.”—Annalee Newitz, Editor in Chief of io9.com
 
“With the tense drama and future shock of a William Gibson novel, Kevin Poulsen spins a scary-true tale of the dark-side hacker underground and its most adept sorcerer.”—Steven Levy, author of Hackers and Crypto
 
"The most thorough portrait to date of a top modern U.S. cyber criminal and an engaging tale of cops against robbers against other robbers. No one writes with more authority than Kevin Poulsen about how hackers actually go about their business."—Joseph Menn, author of All the Rave and Fatal System Error
 
“Building on the best of the police procedural tradition, Kevin Poulsen lays out in clear language the technologies and methods employed by the criminals and crime fighters alike, all the while crafting a sympathetic character study of the conflicted gray hat, Max Vision, at the heart of it all.”—Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard professor and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
 
“A superb, insider tour of the dark Internet that lies below "the whitewashed, commercialized" world of the Web. Kevin Poulsen is one of the very few people who understands the territory: the scammers, the scammers of the scammers, and the law enforcement officers trying to catch them. KINGPIN describes a parallel business world, including "the underground's first hostile takeover," where characters who call themselves names like DarkCyd and Matrix and Ghost23 battle for control of digital scams. It is a fascinating, scary ride.”—Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine and The Bug
 

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"A compelling ride." —Kirkus

Kirkus Reviews

Max "Vision" Butler—currently in a federal penitentiary—once sat atop a billion-dollar criminal empire trafficking in stolen credit-card numbers. How he got there and how the authorities finally managed to topple him is a harrowing tale shot through with technology and tragedy.

Butler was a just another American outcast working in Boise, Idaho in the late 1980s when the Internet began to take off. An incredibly gifted computer geek, he caught the gathering cyber wave—and could have ridden it all the way to untold riches. All he had to do was play it straight and use his incredible programming prowess for good instead of evil. Alas, that's something Butler found harder to do than cracking computer codes. He tried for a while, even becoming a "white hat" cyber-security consultant, but something about the black-market world of online thievery always called him back. In this complex story full of multifaceted machinations both mortal and machine, Wired editor Poulsen successfully sifts through Butler's many sordid capers. While the author avoids alienating readers who don't know their bits from their bytes, he also provides enough jargon for technophiles. Even though readers may not exonerate Butler for swindling so many for so long, Poulsen makes them care enough about him to wonder why he kept doing it.

A compelling ride.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170460267
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/17/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

The taxi idled in front of a convenience store in downtown San Francisco while Max Vision paid the driver and unfolded his six-foot-fi ve frame from the back of the car, his thick brown hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. He stepped into the store and waited for the cab to disappear down the street before emerging for the two-block walk to his safe house.

Around him, tiny shops and newsstands awakened under the overcast sky, and suited workers fi led into the offi ce towers looming above. Max was going to work too, but his job wouldn’t have him home after nine hours for a good night’s sleep. He’d be cloistered for days this time. Once he put his plan into motion, there’d be no going home. No slipping out for a bite of dinner. No date night at the multiplex. Nothing until he was done.

This was the day he was declaring war.

His long gait took him to the Post Street Towers, from the street a fi ve-by-fourteen grid of identical bay windows, trim painted the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d been coming to this apartment complex for months, doing his best to blend in with the exchange students drawn by short leases and reasonable rents. Nobody knew his name—not his real one anyway. And nobody knew his past.

Here, he wasn’t Max Butler, the small-town troublemaker driven by obsession to a moment of life-changing violence, and he wasn’t Max Vision, the self-named computer security expert paid one hundred dollars an hour to harden the networks of Silicon Valley companies. As he rode up the apartment building elevator, Max became someone else: “Iceman”—a rising leader in a criminal economy responsible for billions of dollars in thefts from American companies and consumers.

And Iceman was fed up.

For months, he’d been popping merchants around the country, prying out piles of credit card numbers that should have been worth hundreds of thousands on the black market. But the market was broken. Two years earlier Secret Service agents had driven a virtual bulldozer through the computer underworld’s largest gathering spot, arresting the ringleaders at gunpoint and sending the rest scurrying into chat rooms and small-time Web forums—all riddled with security holes and crawling with feds and snitches. It was a mess.

Whether they knew it or not, the underworld needed a strong leader to unify them. To bring order.

Off the elevator, Max idled in the hallway to check for a tail, then walked to his apartment door and entered the oppressive warmth of the rented studio. Heat was the biggest problem with the safe house. The servers and laptops crammed into the space produced a swelter that pulsed through the room. He’d brought in fans over the summer, but they provided scant relief and lofted the electric bill so high that the apartment manager suspected him of running a hydroponic dope farm. But it was just the machines, entwined in a web of cables, the most important snaking to a giant parabolic antenna aimed out the window like a sniper rifle.

Shrugging off his discomfort, Max sat at his keyboard and trained a bead on the Web forums where computer criminals gathered—virtual cantinas with names like DarkMarket and TalkCash. For two days, he hacked, his fi ngers flying at preternatural speed as he breached the sites’ defenses, stealing their content, log-ins, passwords, and e-mail addresses. When he tired, he crashed out on the apartment’s foldaway bed for an hour or two, then returned bleary-eyed to his work.

He fi nished with a few keystrokes that wiped out the sites’ databases with the ease of an arsonist fl icking a match. On August 16, 2006, he dispatched an unapologetic mass e-mail to the denizens of the sites he’d destroyed: They were all now members of Iceman’s own Cardersmarket website, suddenly the largest criminal marketplace in the world, six thousand users strong and the only game in town.

With one stroke, Max had undermined years of careful law enforcement work and revitalized a billion-dollar criminal underworld.

In Russia and Ukraine, Turkey and Great Britain, and in apartments, offi ces, and houses across America, criminals would awaken to the announcement of the underground’s fi rst hostile takeover. Some of them kept guns in their nightstands to protect their millions in stolen loot, but they couldn’t protect themselves from this. FBI and Secret Service agents who’d spent months or years infi ltrating the now-destroyed underground forums would read the message with equal dismay, and for a moment, all of them—hacking masterminds, thuggish Russian mobsters, masters of fake identities, and the cops sworn to catch them—would be unifi ed by a single thought.

Who is Iceman?

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