Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Cops and Carders (p. ix)
• Prologue (p. xi)
• 1 The Key (p. 1)
• 2 Deadly Weapons (p. 6)
• 3 The Hungry Programmers (p. 14)
• 4 The White Hat (p. 19)
• 5 Cyberwar! (p. 25)
• 6 I Miss Crime (p. 33)
• 7 Max Vision (p. 42)
• 8 Welcome to America (p. 49)
• 9 Opportunities (p. 54)
• 10 Chris Aragon (p. 64)
• 11 Script's Twenty-Dollar Dumps (p. 73)
• 12 Free Amex! (p. 80)
• 13 Villa Siena (p. 85)
• 14 The Raid (p. 91)
• 15 UBuy WeRush (p. 98)
• 16 Operation Firewall (p. 105)
• 17 Pizza and Plastic (p. 115)
• 18 The Briefing (p. 120)
• 19 Carders Market (p. 124)
• 20 The Starlight Room (p. 130)
• 21 Master Splyntr (p. 134)
• 22 Enemies (p. 139)
• 23 Anglerphish (p. 144)
• 24 Exposure (p. 150)
• 25 Hostile Takeover (p. 159)
• 26 What's in Your Wallet? (p. 170)
• 27 Web War One (p. 176)
• 28 Carder Court (p. 183)
• 29 One Plat and Six Classics (p. 189)
• 30 Maksik (p. 194)
• 31 The Trial (p. 201)
• 32 The Mall (p. 208)
• 33 Exit Strategy (p. 213)
• 34 DarkMarket (p. 224)
• 35 Sentencing (p. 229)
• 36 Aftermath (p. 234)
• Epilogue (p. 241)
• Notes (p. 243)
• Acknowledgments (p. 265)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

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? Excerpted from Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In a previous life, Poulsen served five years in prison for hacking. So the Wired senior editor and "Threat Level" blogger knows intimately the terrain he explores in this page-turning tale of the criminal exploits of a hacker of breathtaking ambition, Max Butler, who stole access to 1.8 million credit card accounts. Poulsen understands both the hows of hacking, which he explains clearly, as well as the whys, which include, but also can transcend, mere profit. Accordingly, his understanding of the hacking culture, and his extensive interviews with Butler, translates into a fascinating depiction of a cybercriminal underworld frightening in its complexity and its potential for harm, and a society shockingly vulnerable to cybercrime. The personalities, feuds, double dealing, and scams of the hackers are just one half of this lively story. The other half, told with equal verve, is law enforcement's efforts to find and convict Butler and his accomplices. (Butler is now serving a 13-year sentence and owes $27.5 million in restitution.) Poulsen renders the hacker world with such virtual reality that readers will have difficulty logging off until the very end. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Book Review

Max "Vision" Butlercurrently in a federal penitentiaryonce 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 waveand 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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.