Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground [NOOK Book]

From Barnes & Noble

Gone are the days when hackers were pimply-faced nerds hanging out in their parents' basements. Today's hackers are often daring international cyber-thieves, pulling off multi-million rip-offs. Until his conviction in September, Max Butler (a.k.a. Max Ray Vision) was at the top of that ignominious heap, raking in more cash and credit card numbers than even he could process. Kevin Poulsen's Kingpin follows Max in his metamorphoses from a "white hat" software security designer into a stealthy syndicate head who engineered a hostile takeover of the hacker underground. Max's story serves as a total immersion tutorial on what these virtual backdoor bandits are doing to transform crime.

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

“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
 

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.