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Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground Paperback – February 7, 2012

by Kevin Poulsen (Author)

1,138

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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Former hacker Kevin Poulsen has, over the past decade, built a reputation as one of the top investigative reporters on the cybercrime beat. In Kingpin, he pours his unmatched access and expertise into book form for the first time, delivering a gripping cat-and-mouse narrative—and an unprecedented view into the twenty-first century’s signature form of organized crime.

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 US 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. As prominent “white-hat” hacker Max “Vision” Butler, he was a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But as the black-hat “Iceman,” he found in the world of data theft an irresistible opportunity to test his outsized abilities. He infiltrated thousands of computers around the country, sucking down millions of credit card numbers at will. He effortlessly hacked his fellow hackers, stealing their ill-gotten gains from under their noses. Together with a smooth-talking con artist, he ran a massive real-world crime ring.

And for years, he did it all with seeming impunity, even as countless rivals ran afoul of police.

Yet as he watched the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, he began to see in their dysfunction the ultimate challenge: He would stage his coup and fix what was broken, run things as they should be run—even if it meant painting a bull’s-eye on his forehead.

Through the story of this criminal’s remarkable rise, and of law enforcement’s quest to track him down, Kingpin lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave still affecting millions of Americans. In these pages, we are ushered into vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit checks, hacked bank accounts, dead drops, and fake passports. We learn the workings of the numerous hacks—browser exploits, phishing attacks, Trojan horses, and much more—these fraudsters use to ply their trade, and trace the complex routes by which they turn stolen data into millions of dollars. And thanks to Poulsen’s remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet, desperate arms race that law enforcement continues to fight with these scammers today.

Ultimately, Kingpin is a journey into an underworld of startling scope and power, one in which ordinary American teenagers work hand in hand with murderous Russian mobsters and where a simple Wi-Fi connection can unleash a torrent of gold worth millions.

Print length

266 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

February 7, 2012
Dimensions

5.19 x 0.65 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0307588696
ISBN-13

978-0307588692
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[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

About the Author

KEVIN POULSEN is a senior editor at Wired.com and a contributor to Wired magazine. He oversees cybercrime, privacy, and political coverage for Wired.com and edits the award-winning Threat Level blog (wired.com/threatlevel), which he founded in 2005.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 fl ying 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?

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; Reprint edition (February 7, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 266 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307588696
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307588692
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 0.65 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #588,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #80 in Computer & Technology Biographies
- #395 in Computer Hacking
- #1,767 in Crime & Criminal Biographies

Customer Reviews:
1,138

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Kevin Poulsen

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An award-winning investigative journalist, Kevin Poulsen oversees news and feature reporting at the technology news site Wired.com. Poulsen joined Wired.com in 2005, and for five years served as editor of the Threat Level blog, which under his tenure won the 2008 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism, the 2010 MIN award for best blog and both Webby and People’s Voice awards in 2011. In 2006, Poulsen conducted a computer-assisted investigation into the presence of registered sex offenders on MySpace, which spawned federal legislation. In June 2010, Poulsen and a co-writer broke the news that the government had secretly arrested a young Army intelligence analyst on suspicion of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. He is the author of Kingpin — How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground (Crown, 2011).

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Andy in Washington

Fast-paced, great read. Not too geeky.

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2011

Verified Purchase

As an engineer with a passing interest in computer security, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book. I ended up being pleasantly surprised, and would easily recommend this title to anyone at all interested in true crime, detective stories, or computer and financial crimes. I ended up reading the book in 3 or 4 sittings, and hated putting it down.

The Good Stuff:

First and foremost, the book is well written. The prose is lively without hysterics, and the characters and narrative fit together well. Poulsen captures not only the actions of the characters, but treats us to a look inside their motivations and conflicts. Fascinating stuff.

The book does not get lost in technical details. For example, while the book talks about encryption of data, it does so in terms of "schemes that are easy to crack" and "schemes that are just about impossible to crack". Good enough detail to keep the narrative on track and avoid bogging the reader down in the arcane science of cryptography.

The plot is intriguing. It very much reminded me of a good spy thriller, or more specifically the history of the WWII intelligence services with agents, double-agents, agents-provocateur.

The Bad Stuff

I personally would have liked to see more technical details. To keep the text moving, Poulsen has ruthlessly removed all but the most simplistic overviews of the technical issues. Even keeping to his goal of a mass-market book, I believe more detail could have been added. At the very least it would have helped show off the skills of the main characters.

The book also ends a little too abruptly. The actual trials and legal proceedings are only brief summaries-and this is probably one of the more important areas of the whole story-since the book details some of the first successful prosecutions of "hackers".

Summary

I liked the book, and would recommend it to any fan of crime, detective or technical thrillers. If you have ever had your identity stolen, the book will shock you with just how easy it was (and probably still is) to land a live credit card number. Or how easy it is to land a couple thousand live credit card numbers.

One area I would have liked Poulsen to have spent a little more time on is the responsibility of the corporate networks. When you hand your credit card to the clerk at TJ Maxx, you are entrusting not only the clerk, but the entire TJ MAXX computer infrastructure to safeguard it. The book dances around the point of the shoddy way in which Fortune 500 companies handle their (and their customer's) data.

2 people found this helpful

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Brett A. Fishwild

Glimpse into the world of "carders"

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2011

Verified Purchase

Well written book about the rise and fall of a central figure in the world of identity theft, ending with a series of arrests in 2010. This book is similar to other current event exposes written by popular journalists (e.g. the housing mortgage crisis, corporate soldiers, Iran's nuclear program), a high level overview of the topic that focuses on the people involved. At 250 some pages it's a moderately quick read, a well authored chronological story about several "carders" that revolve around one central figure. There is a small amount of technical detail on how the computer systems are hacked, but you get a decent summary of how they turn stolen data into cash using fake credit cards. The author wraps up the book with a tone that almost makes you almost sorry for the main character (with some justification), and a warning to us all about how lax security is in the electronic financial world. This book isn't written for computer industry people, very much for the layman. Good book - the only reason I gave it 4 instead of 5 stars is because I would have appreciate a tad more detail here and there. But that's just me.

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Jason Haddix

Stellar and true to real life!

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2013

Verified Purchase

Every once and a while I like to break away from the stress that is pentesting and bunker down with a good fiction book. Normally I stick to sci-fi and fantasy but last week I got to keep my head in the game while still recharging my batteries, with Kevin Paulsen's Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground. Having been a fan of what I thought to be similar titles like the Stealing the Network series and a researcher during the ShadowCrew era, I dove into Kingpin and managed to read it on a round trip plane flight between clients.

Kingping is the story of Max Butler aka Iceman, a hacker and carder that took over the digital carding scene in 2008. When i say took over, i mean, he really did take over. From a small apartment in San Francisco Iceman forcibly and calculatingly popped almost every single carding forum that opposed him all in an effort to ensure the underground scene was free of law enforcement and scammers. The story chronicles Max and the Law enforcement agents that pursue him at every turn.

While most editorial reviews focus on literary prose and plot development, I have less of that expertise and more of the "having lived it" expertise.

Kingpin was a non-stop page turner. Well written, it grabs you right away and never lets go. The great thing about the story is it's based on true events and the author depicts the characters with stark realism, almost scarily so. Being a pentester you find yourself thinking " had i made one or two bad decisions, this could have been me" and if you've been in or around "the scene" in the past this story hits so close to home you might find yourself a bit shaken up.

While not the half fiction half tech split that most hacking books have adopted these days, Kingpin is a pure chronicle. That's not to say that there's no tech, because there certainly is some sploits referenced in Kingpin but, it's more of passerby than books like STN or Dissecting The Hack.

Now onto the verdict:

Kingpin was so good, so shockingly real to true events, that it has entered my top 10 book list. Go read it. Now.

For some people it will be story, for others a warning, and for some a guide. The book will open your eyes to how the real underground works; where hackers deal with carders, the carders work for the Russians, and Law Enforcement uses old school methods with new school tech to chase them down.

Hopefully it will teach you what only the realists among us have realized. Real for-profit hackers do not care about 0-day exploits when larger issues go unpatched. Real hackers will attack weak links like passwords. Real hackers aren't about your informational level findings. Real hackers are about the data. They dont target your firewalls they target your employees. Your compromised network is often a conquest of opportunity from a net cast over the whole internet, and they are more often caught because of the people they confide in than the tech the used to hide.

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Top reviews from other countries

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Rope

Spannendes Buch!

Reviewed in Germany on November 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

Ich habe mir das Buch nach einer Empfehlung auf einer Sicherheits-Vorlesung gekauft. Das ist das erste (Nicht-Fach)Buch, welches ich nach meiner Schulzeit gelesen habe. Die Geschichte um Max Vision hat mich absolut begeistert. Spannend geschrieben, gibt es einen schönen Einblick in die Anfangszeiten des Internet und das Ausnutzen von Sicherheitslücken, die auch heute in einer total vernetzten Welt aktueller denn je sind.
Klare Kaufempfehlung für alle, die mit dieser Technologie aufgewachsen sind oder sich einfach für die Anfänge der Cyberkriminalität interessieren.

One person found this helpful

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Ryan Adams

Good book

Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2017

Verified Purchase

I liked this book as it details a different and more lawless time of e internet when sites that conducted obvious illegal activity still managed to be hosted in the US.

It also talks about one of the most costly financial security blunders of our time... the mass use of insecure mag stripe cards for financial transactions.

Edson Ma

Great book! :)

Reviewed in Brazil on February 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

Very interesting story about white hats and black hats. Great story about Max Vision's double-mind behavior and information security issues.

arnaldo morena

avvincente come un romanzo

Reviewed in Italy on December 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

un "must have" per chiunque sia appassionato di informatica e storia degli hacker, si legge in un pochissimo tempo lasciandoti la voglia di saperne ancora

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Aditya Prasad

Not that great.

Reviewed in India on October 31, 2013

Verified Purchase

I read 100 pages and lost interest. It starts off ok but then it drags with a lot of jargons which you will not understand if you are not from IT background.

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