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The World's Most Dangerous Geek: And More True Hacking Stories
Every day, it seems, we hear stories about hackers. Hackers breaking into the computers of banks, governments, and corporations. Some are criminals, coding to exploit and destroy. Others are activists, using their tools to challenge institutions and fight for freedom. But often these characters linger in the shadows. Who are they? What makes them tick? Are they our allies, or our enemies?
For the past 20 years, author David Kushner has been exploring these questions, interviewing key players, and providing much-needed answers. The World's Most Dangerous Geek is a riveting collection of his exclusive reports from the online underworld. We meet a fugitive hacktivist from the notorious collective, Anonymous; a lonely Floridian who hacked the emails of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood; and two artificial intelligence researchers who were both found dead in the same mysterious way.
You will come away from these stories with an appreciation for the awesome power of the Internet both to make fortunes and erase them, to build lives and destroy them.
For the past 20 years, author David Kushner has been exploring these questions, interviewing key players, and providing much-needed answers. The World's Most Dangerous Geek is a riveting collection of his exclusive reports from the online underworld. We meet a fugitive hacktivist from the notorious collective, Anonymous; a lonely Floridian who hacked the emails of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood; and two artificial intelligence researchers who were both found dead in the same mysterious way.
You will come away from these stories with an appreciation for the awesome power of the Internet both to make fortunes and erase them, to build lives and destroy them.
14 pages, Audiobook
Published September 22, 2016
About the author
David Kushner
31 books234 followersDavid Kushner is an award-winning journalist and author. He is a contributing editor of Wired, Rolling Stone, and Spectrum and is an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
October 19, 2018
I got this book in the form of an audiobook from Humble Bundle a while ago. It's a collection of essays by David Kushner about tech issues. A lot of it revolves around people who have some sort of connection to Anonymous. Some of these articles - like the one about Anonymous and Steubenbille and the wheelchair riding guy who was turning on webcams - I read back when they were first published. The essays are roughly in chronological order and I thought it was interesting to see how the intersection of technology, crime, and life changed throughout the years. There were also a few stories that had overlap with each other and that was also interesting to see. There was one essay - the one about the Caucasian guy who ended up in the Triads - that I'd love to see made into a a "based on a true story" movie.
Overall, it was an enjoyable collection of essays and I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in "hacking" in the more colloquial sense of breaking into computing devices.
Overall, it was an enjoyable collection of essays and I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in "hacking" in the more colloquial sense of breaking into computing devices.
August 24, 2017
This is a collection of mostly unrelated articles. Several of them are just stories about criminals that don't appear to have anything to do with hacking or even computers. The articles have not been updated from the original versions, so several seemed out-of-date to me.
Aimed at a general audience and at times sensationalized, e.g. "Information on coding is just a few clicks from sites on criminal hacking."
The articles on geohot and Justin Frankel were interesting, though surely Frankel doesn't qualify as "most dangerous geek."
Aimed at a general audience and at times sensationalized, e.g. "Information on coding is just a few clicks from sites on criminal hacking."
The articles on geohot and Justin Frankel were interesting, though surely Frankel doesn't qualify as "most dangerous geek."
January 17, 2021
Pretty dull and boring stories, and for me personally, very annoying writing style as if the author was paid by number of words, and not by the quality of storytelling.
January 31, 2020
This audiobook is basically McNamara reading a bunch of Kushner's early (2004-15) magazine articles about tech bros, criminals and victims. They are arranged chronologically.
Kushner's journalistic instincts are finely honed. I found several of these pieces fascinating (see below). The rest are at least somewhat interesting, but some are covered with hype that hasn't aged well, and at times I felt the effect was to humanize some rather despicable people. Nevertheless, I still enjoy his writing.
The audio production values are terrible, however. Some pronunciations are off, attempts to redub other pronunciation corrections are sloppy, some articles are truncated, divisions in the text get no narrative separation. I recommend just reading the articles, which have all been scraped onto Kushner's website, but are better read at their original publication site to avoid OCR and formatting errors, and for accompanying graphics/photographs.
Articles with an asterisk were better than the rest. The double asterisk was the best of the bunch:
Chapter 1: On Justin Frankel, creator of WinAmp (then-popular MP3 player), Gnutella (the "Napster killer"), and Waste (local file sharing). (2004, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 2: On Eric Bauman, creator of eBaum's World, the 1998 viral video humor site that actually made money---on stolen work. (2006, Wired)
* Chapter 3: Fascinating account of a cyber stalker at Sandia National Labs whose target was Chester Charlie Bennington, frontman of Linkin Park. (2007, Wired) Mispronounced "Sandia".
* Chapter 4: The striking parallel stories of two controversial, rival AI researchers who ended up dead: Chris McKinstry (MindPixel) and Push Singh (Open Mind). (2008, Wired)
** Chapter 5: The amazing, inspiring story of cancer and id theft survivor, Eric Drew. (2008, Discover)
Chapter 6: Anonymous vs. Scientology. (2008, Maxim)
* Chapter 7: The sad tale of Matthew Weigman, blind uber-phreaker with superhuman hearing. (2009, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 8: The "great" T.J.Maxx customer identity theft. (2010, Boston Magazine)
Chapter 9: On pre-Snowden WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. (2010, Mother Jones)
Chapter 10: On Gary "Solo" McKinnon, the Scottish hacker of U.S. government websites in 2000, and UFO conspiracy theorist, whose Asperger's diagnosis became his legal defense. (2011, IEEE Spectrum) Followup: In 2012, McKinnon's extradition to the USA was blocked for humanitarian reasons, and plans for a UK trial were dropped on evidential scarcity.
* Chapter 11: [TW!] On the horrific rape and murder of Kim Proctor in a small Canadian town by two monstrous high school classmates, who were convicted by their considerable online trails. (2011, Vanity Fair)
Chapter 12: On Luis Mijangos, convicted, creepy wheelchair-bound webcam hacker/stalker/extortionist, who had a vendetta against happy people. This is why you tape over your webcam. (2012, GQ)
Chapter 13: On Chris Chaney, the "Man Who Hacked Hollywood". Like the previous article, Kushner presents Chaney as a pitiable loner who gets in over his head with hacking, but cannot stop. (2012, GQ)
Chapter 14: On George "geohot" Hotz, 17-year old uber-hacker who was first to jailbreak the iPhone and PS3, got sued by Sony, and was defended by Anonymous (2012, New Yorker)
Chapter 15: On the government's race to employ white hat hackers. (2013, Rolling Stone (fancy animation))
Chapter 16: [TW!] Anonymous v. Steubenville. How Deric Lostutter incited fellow Anonymous hackers to expose the coverup of the rape of a 16 year old girl by two high school football players, and in the process opened up a Pandora's box that called attention to a gross disparity of justice. (2013, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 17: On the betrayal of Julian Assange by his young Wikileaks protégé and confidant Siggi Thordarson. (2014, Rolling Stone)
* Chapter 18: Portrait of Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, notorious founder of Silk Road. (2014, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 19: On Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, self-styled shit-talker. Another unnecessary profile normalizing an odious human. (2014, Matter). The audio jumps off the rails at the overdub of the (presumably) correct pronunciation of "Völundarkvitha", followed by a stanza of the Norse poem with nary an aural clue to the transition from reporting to poetry.
* Chapter 20: On Christopher "Commander X" Doyon, the brazen, homeless, amateur hacker who led the People's Liberation Front, a faction of Anonymous. (2014, The New Yorker). Mispronounced "Adama" from Battlestar Galactica. Jarring redub of pronunciation of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Narration totally mis-grokked the go button label for Low Orbit Ion Cannon: "IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER" (sigh).
Chapter 21: On James McGibney, abused foster kid, ex-marine and creator of BullyVille, a barely legal social network where one can harass one's harassers publicly and anonymously. (2014, Al Jazeera America)
* Chapter 22: On Cicada, a real life version of Ready Player One's gunter contest. Also, an interesting short history of corporate recruitment puzzles. (2015, Rolling Stone). Ugh, narration plows thru inline summary blurbs from the article like they are part of the text. Vigenère redubbed, still incorrectly pronounced.
* Chapter 23: On John Willis aka Bac Guai John, the homeless kid who eventually became kingpin of Boston's Chinatown. (2015, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 24: On Matt DeHart, Anonymous hacktivist who was possibly framed by the FBI. (2015, BuzzFeed)
Kushner's journalistic instincts are finely honed. I found several of these pieces fascinating (see below). The rest are at least somewhat interesting, but some are covered with hype that hasn't aged well, and at times I felt the effect was to humanize some rather despicable people. Nevertheless, I still enjoy his writing.
The audio production values are terrible, however. Some pronunciations are off, attempts to redub other pronunciation corrections are sloppy, some articles are truncated, divisions in the text get no narrative separation. I recommend just reading the articles, which have all been scraped onto Kushner's website, but are better read at their original publication site to avoid OCR and formatting errors, and for accompanying graphics/photographs.
Articles with an asterisk were better than the rest. The double asterisk was the best of the bunch:
Chapter 1: On Justin Frankel, creator of WinAmp (then-popular MP3 player), Gnutella (the "Napster killer"), and Waste (local file sharing). (2004, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 2: On Eric Bauman, creator of eBaum's World, the 1998 viral video humor site that actually made money---on stolen work. (2006, Wired)
* Chapter 3: Fascinating account of a cyber stalker at Sandia National Labs whose target was Chester Charlie Bennington, frontman of Linkin Park. (2007, Wired) Mispronounced "Sandia".
* Chapter 4: The striking parallel stories of two controversial, rival AI researchers who ended up dead: Chris McKinstry (MindPixel) and Push Singh (Open Mind). (2008, Wired)
** Chapter 5: The amazing, inspiring story of cancer and id theft survivor, Eric Drew. (2008, Discover)
Chapter 6: Anonymous vs. Scientology. (2008, Maxim)
* Chapter 7: The sad tale of Matthew Weigman, blind uber-phreaker with superhuman hearing. (2009, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 8: The "great" T.J.Maxx customer identity theft. (2010, Boston Magazine)
Chapter 9: On pre-Snowden WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. (2010, Mother Jones)
Chapter 10: On Gary "Solo" McKinnon, the Scottish hacker of U.S. government websites in 2000, and UFO conspiracy theorist, whose Asperger's diagnosis became his legal defense. (2011, IEEE Spectrum) Followup: In 2012, McKinnon's extradition to the USA was blocked for humanitarian reasons, and plans for a UK trial were dropped on evidential scarcity.
* Chapter 11: [TW!] On the horrific rape and murder of Kim Proctor in a small Canadian town by two monstrous high school classmates, who were convicted by their considerable online trails. (2011, Vanity Fair)
Chapter 12: On Luis Mijangos, convicted, creepy wheelchair-bound webcam hacker/stalker/extortionist, who had a vendetta against happy people. This is why you tape over your webcam. (2012, GQ)
Chapter 13: On Chris Chaney, the "Man Who Hacked Hollywood". Like the previous article, Kushner presents Chaney as a pitiable loner who gets in over his head with hacking, but cannot stop. (2012, GQ)
Chapter 14: On George "geohot" Hotz, 17-year old uber-hacker who was first to jailbreak the iPhone and PS3, got sued by Sony, and was defended by Anonymous (2012, New Yorker)
Chapter 15: On the government's race to employ white hat hackers. (2013, Rolling Stone (fancy animation))
Chapter 16: [TW!] Anonymous v. Steubenville. How Deric Lostutter incited fellow Anonymous hackers to expose the coverup of the rape of a 16 year old girl by two high school football players, and in the process opened up a Pandora's box that called attention to a gross disparity of justice. (2013, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 17: On the betrayal of Julian Assange by his young Wikileaks protégé and confidant Siggi Thordarson. (2014, Rolling Stone)
* Chapter 18: Portrait of Ross Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, notorious founder of Silk Road. (2014, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 19: On Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, self-styled shit-talker. Another unnecessary profile normalizing an odious human. (2014, Matter). The audio jumps off the rails at the overdub of the (presumably) correct pronunciation of "Völundarkvitha", followed by a stanza of the Norse poem with nary an aural clue to the transition from reporting to poetry.
* Chapter 20: On Christopher "Commander X" Doyon, the brazen, homeless, amateur hacker who led the People's Liberation Front, a faction of Anonymous. (2014, The New Yorker). Mispronounced "Adama" from Battlestar Galactica. Jarring redub of pronunciation of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Narration totally mis-grokked the go button label for Low Orbit Ion Cannon: "IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER" (sigh).
Chapter 21: On James McGibney, abused foster kid, ex-marine and creator of BullyVille, a barely legal social network where one can harass one's harassers publicly and anonymously. (2014, Al Jazeera America)
* Chapter 22: On Cicada, a real life version of Ready Player One's gunter contest. Also, an interesting short history of corporate recruitment puzzles. (2015, Rolling Stone). Ugh, narration plows thru inline summary blurbs from the article like they are part of the text. Vigenère redubbed, still incorrectly pronounced.
* Chapter 23: On John Willis aka Bac Guai John, the homeless kid who eventually became kingpin of Boston's Chinatown. (2015, Rolling Stone)
Chapter 24: On Matt DeHart, Anonymous hacktivist who was possibly framed by the FBI. (2015, BuzzFeed)
December 27, 2017
I thought this book was ok. I picked it up from a Humble Bundle sale, so I mostly went in to it cold, without any real idea what it was about.
What it was about was a compilation of stories about "true hacking stories"; many of which were interesting, some of which were boring (and only tangentially related to "hacking" due to the subjects using a computer at some point in the story, it seemed), one of which was completely gristly and horrifying and another completely insane.
Owing to listening to the audiobook and not having a physical copy to refer back to, I found myself often wondering when any of the stories took place. Likely, I just missed the mention of the years... but many of the stories would refer to "later this year" or "last December".
My one real critique here is that a lot of the stories seemed to be from further in the past than they are/were, which I suppose comes with the territory when you are talking about things on the internet. One story focusing on the ebaumsworld web page, for example, isn't really that old, but you just kind of feel like that web page was originally written on punch cards or something.
What it was about was a compilation of stories about "true hacking stories"; many of which were interesting, some of which were boring (and only tangentially related to "hacking" due to the subjects using a computer at some point in the story, it seemed), one of which was completely gristly and horrifying and another completely insane.
Owing to listening to the audiobook and not having a physical copy to refer back to, I found myself often wondering when any of the stories took place. Likely, I just missed the mention of the years... but many of the stories would refer to "later this year" or "last December".
My one real critique here is that a lot of the stories seemed to be from further in the past than they are/were, which I suppose comes with the territory when you are talking about things on the internet. One story focusing on the ebaumsworld web page, for example, isn't really that old, but you just kind of feel like that web page was originally written on punch cards or something.
January 24, 2020
This book was enjoyable, but it had its faults. One thing that confused me and kind of upset the flow of the book was that one article with no relation to geeks or hacking was included. It was about a gangster. It didn't fit the book's theme. One other thing that got kind of annoying was that there was a fair amount of repetition regarding the stories about Anonymous. Because the book is a compilation of articles, there were many minor details about Anonymous repeated among articles. I felt like the book would have been better if it somehow blended the articles together into a more cohesive thing and also followed a timeline. I also noticed some bias in a few articles. The author of the article on Ebaum's World seemed to either think the site's creator was misrepresented and not a bad person or just let the site's creator present his views and then not have any countering views presented. I felt that whoever put this book together could have done more research on stuff from the articles and added to them. Just shoving some articles together is kind of lazy. Still, I enjoyed the book somewhat.
November 8, 2017
This is kind of a tough book to rate/review. It's a collection of reports of hacker cases in the recent few years. Some I'd heard of, some I hadn't. The reports themselves are usually pretty well formulated and are interesting to hear, but of course being real life, they don't really wrap up or anything. Some of the hacks are just kind of dumb. Some are terrifying to consider being on the receiving end of. I'm a tech guy but this really reinforces how pieced together our modern tech world is, and how fragile and unprotected the underlying framework is. Like most innovations, the first thought is "Can we do it?" and then "Can we protect the people using it?". And as such, the protection is usually kind of tacked on after the fact. If you like being terrified of real world hacks and want to feel depressed that there's all these intelligent people out there making really poor decisions in their youth, this is definitely the book for you.
August 15, 2023
A collection of articles written by the author over a period of time from 2004 to 2015. The stories break down into basically two categories, tech true crime, or at the time current events.
A lot of the true crime stories still hold pretty well and don’t feel as dated like the LINKIN PARK cyberstalker story or the celebrity phone hack from 2013.
The stories about the silk road or WikiLeaks are written in a certain time and so they can feel a bit dated. It was funny hearing Glenn Greenwald as an authoritative voice. Oh, how things have changed. Overall I enjoyed the narrator and the collection of stories. Just know going in that was done at a certain time, and that certain stories are going to feel very musty.
A lot of the true crime stories still hold pretty well and don’t feel as dated like the LINKIN PARK cyberstalker story or the celebrity phone hack from 2013.
The stories about the silk road or WikiLeaks are written in a certain time and so they can feel a bit dated. It was funny hearing Glenn Greenwald as an authoritative voice. Oh, how things have changed. Overall I enjoyed the narrator and the collection of stories. Just know going in that was done at a certain time, and that certain stories are going to feel very musty.
February 5, 2021
The book is a couple of nice well narrated stories minus the story about the girl that gets raped and killed. Aaaaand that's it.
The word "hacking" in the title might be a bit misleading as multiple stories are not related to Cyber security and one (the one about the white Asian gangster) is not even related to "hacking" in its widest interpretation.
It's an easy, a bit entertaining read, but it does not add a lot of value to your knowledge base, except for some anecdotes that can guarantee making you seem weird and uninteresting.
The word "hacking" in the title might be a bit misleading as multiple stories are not related to Cyber security and one (the one about the white Asian gangster) is not even related to "hacking" in its widest interpretation.
It's an easy, a bit entertaining read, but it does not add a lot of value to your knowledge base, except for some anecdotes that can guarantee making you seem weird and uninteresting.
October 18, 2017
Aside from many of the stories and information being repetitive, I was surprised at how linked everyone is in the world of hacking and tech. I was interested from start to finish and found out more than I wanted to about the dark web, and some of the shady things that go on online. I consider myself a geek, but I had no idea about many of these things. Great story. I only gave it a four because some of the information was repetitive. We listened to this on a road trip.
December 10, 2017
I never finished listening to this work and here is why.
This work is a collection of unrelated articles, having been written in the past and gathered for this collection. Each article is not updated and increasingly out of date. Being unaltered in an audiobook, you are repeatedly subjected to foul language. And finally, these articles have little technical detail, which is frustrating for a computer scientist.
This work is a collection of unrelated articles, having been written in the past and gathered for this collection. Each article is not updated and increasingly out of date. Being unaltered in an audiobook, you are repeatedly subjected to foul language. And finally, these articles have little technical detail, which is frustrating for a computer scientist.
March 18, 2019
Endnu en samling af artikler af David Kushner. Den indeholder artikler, han har skrevet for forskellige online outlets, samlet i bogen her for første gang på tryk. Den er sådan set meget fin; der er nogle sjove historier om hackere og andet skidtfolk, som David Kushner har interviewet gennem tiden.
Han er glad for at skrive om Hacktivisme, og mange af hans historier er skrevet i en ikke-fordømmende eller prisende tone (altså, neutralt -red), og det synes jeg er en god ting.
Han er glad for at skrive om Hacktivisme, og mange af hans historier er skrevet i en ikke-fordømmende eller prisende tone (altså, neutralt -red), og det synes jeg er en god ting.
March 24, 2018
The reason I didn't give this a higher rating was because the foul language was almost unbearable. It's a shame since most of the stories are very interesting and informative; some are disturbing and gruesome; but some articles don't belong in the book because they had nothing to do with hacking.
October 16, 2016
Definitely one of my favorite reads.
January 4, 2018
Another audio book done. A decent collection of stories over the years, a bit thin and I would wish it was more technically deep. Usable for all audience.
August 2, 2017
Some stories were really good, some just okay. And I think some of then weren't about hacking, really, but I didn't mind.
November 8, 2017
sensationalist garbage
July 29, 2018
Sensationalized, with astoundingly bad narration.
January 13, 2020
Some great stories, some just okay. Solid as an audio book not sure it'd be as good in print.
July 15, 2021
Some good stories but definitely not the collection I was expecting.
August 23, 2021
Pretty good but was expecting some content I didn't already know, not a fault of the author but just my own misconceptions of the level this book is aimed at.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews