Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

by Kevin Poulsen

The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network.The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new an audacious crook had staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the US economy.The culprit was a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain’s double identity. Max ‘Vision’ Butler was a white-hat hacker and a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. But there was another side to Max. As the black-hat ‘Iceman’, he’d seen the fraudsters around him squabble, their ranks riddled with infiltrators, their methods inefficient, and in their dysfunction was the ultimate he would stage a coup and steal their ill-gotten gains from right under their noses.Through the story of Max Butler’s remarkable rise, KINGPIN lays bare the workings of a silent crime wave affecting millions worldwide. It exposes vast online-fraud supermarkets stocked with credit card numbers, counterfeit cheques, hacked bank accounts and fake passports. Thanks to Kevin Poulsen’s remarkable access to both cops and criminals, we step inside the quiet,desperate battle that law enforcement fights against these scammers. And learn that the boy next door may not be all he seems.

290 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2011

About the author

Mr. Poulson is a former hacker turned technology journalist, focusing on computer security.

From Wikipedia:

"Poulsen has reinvented himself as a journalist since his release from prison, and sought to distance himself from his criminal past.

Poulsen served in a number of journalistic capacities at California-based security research firm SecurityFocus, where he began writing security and hacking news in early 2000.

Despite a late arrival to a market saturated with technology media, SecurityFocus News became a well-known name in the tech news world during Poulsen's tenure with the company and was acquired by Symantec.

His original investigative reporting was frequently picked up by the mainstream press. Poulsen left SecurityFocus in 2005 to freelance and pursue independent writing projects.

He became a senior editor for Wired News in June 2005, which hosts his recent (as of 2006) blog, 27BStroke6 which has since been renamed Threat Level."