Together with a smooth-talking con artist, he ran a massive real-world crime ring.Īnd for years, he did it all with seeming impunity, even as countless rivals ran afoul of police.

He effortlessly hacked his fellow hackers, stealing their ill-gotten gains from under their noses. He infiltrated thousands of computers around the country, sucking down millions of credit card numbers at will. But as the black-hat “Iceman,” he found in the world of data theft an irresistible opportunity to test his outsized abilities. As prominent “white-hat” hacker Max “Vision” Butler, he was a celebrity throughout the programming world, even serving as a consultant to the FBI. The culprit they sought was the most unlikely of criminals: a brilliant programmer with a hippie ethic and a supervillain’s double identity. Yet at every turn, their main quarry displayed an uncanny ability to sniff out their snitches and see through their plots.

Together, the cybercops lured numerous unsuspecting hackers into their clutches. 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. 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. 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. Former hacker Kevin Poulsen has, over the past decade, built a reputation as one of the top investigative reporters on the cybercrime beat.

Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen