Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
95% positive over last 12 months
& FREE Shipping
96% positive over last 12 months
100% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground Hardcover – February 22, 2011
| Kevin Poulsen (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
MP3 CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $29.99 | — |
Enhance your purchase
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 length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateFebruary 22, 2011
- Dimensions6.42 x 1.14 x 9.56 inches
- ISBN-100307588688
- ISBN-13978-0307588685
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together

- +
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
"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
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown (February 22, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307588688
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307588685
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.42 x 1.14 x 9.56 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,383,212 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,157 in Hoaxes & Deceptions
- #1,206 in Computer Hacking
- #1,374 in History of Engineering & Technology
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

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).
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonTop reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
As someone in the profession, this book yields valuable clues into those that made headlines over the years and how they were able to steal credit card and other info. Often when we first learn about an incident there are precious few details that are revealed.
For those generally interested in one aspect of the hacker world this book should be an interesting read without being full of too much technical detail. You get a look at the personalities and backgrounds of those involved on the criminal side and ultimately the lesson is clear, these folks do not lead a glamorous life and eventually many get caught.
After a thorough introduction to the Max Vision, the book goes on to describe the Cyber Crime world over the course of the early 2000's. The vulnerabilities in newly networked systems enabled a large number of cyber criminals to make a good living on credit card fraud that the banking industry was loathe to bring to the light to the victims of these crimes. The creativity of the FBI after a few bumbling mistakes is also described in detail. In the end, this is an interesting book about cops and robbers in the emerging Internet age.
This is the best book written in a decade about the subject. It describes the life of the most notorious American hacker named Max Butler. He is the guy responsible for stealing more than 1 billion US dollars from credit cards. If your credit card ever got abused (I know such people who suddenly found 20 pillows charged to their credit card) then blame this guy.
The book is written with an intimate knowledge of hacker’s daily routine. It also sheds light on his early days, the time when he was growing up, his relationships with other people, etc. This is only possible because the author – Kevin Poulsen is a former black hat hacker himself. The book makes it very clear that hackers are neither good nor bad. Of course, if your credit card suffers then they are obviously bad from your point of view. More generally, however, hackers are responsible for many security tools that help protect networks from some other bad guys. Hackers give specific warning signs to governments and corporate world: protect your networks or big trouble will happen.
This book makes it clear that hackers are not just those evil teenagers. It is more of philosophy and lifestyle, the way of making this world better... Of course, hackers do harm to individual people, but they are rather useful to society in general.
The author covers a bit of historical context from the early days of phone phreaking and individuals dumpster diving behind restaurants and retail establishments to recover the carbon copies of credit card transactions as a reference point for the modern-day international cybercrime environment run over the Internet. The level of sophistication of today's identity and credit card theft enterprise is astounding in its scope.
Mr. Poulsen covers the sophisticated attack methods of the individuals involved in this massive criminal enterprise, the security holes in both hardware and software systems that serve as an open door to those with the computing skills to exploit them, and the methods these crooks use to hide themselves from the law enforcement community and financial institutions working to lock them out of the systems they so readily exploit.
Identity theft and cybercrime are international in scope, and Mr. Poulsen details the centers for these activities in Eastern Europe, the UK, Canada, America and locations throughout Asia and Australia. On the law enforcement side of this battle the author covers the methods and successes of the FBI, the Secret Service, police agencies in foreign nations, and the collaborative efforts between these agencies, the banking institutions that are losing billions of dollars annually to the criminal element, and informants who help to unravel the networks and methods used to defraud individuals and financial institutions around the world.
A very thorough and comprehensive primer that places this modern-day criminal enterprise under a microscope, and provides us with the needed insight into how vulnerable we all are to this threat.
[KINGPIN: HOW ONE HACKER TOOK OVER THE BILLION-DOLLAR CYBERCRIME UNDERGROUND] BY Poulsen, Kevin (Author) Crown Publishing Group (NY) (publisher) Hardcover
Top reviews from other countries
But it doesn't matter. Poulson writes so engagingly and clearly that, even if some of it is arcane, he can get across the thrill of the chase and into the minds of these amazingly strange and clever people. I had just finished the Millennium trilogy and really didn't believe that the heroine, Salander, could carry out the hacking that she did. Now I know that she could, and how.
The detailed accounts of how the security of banks, national security and retailers were penetrated and data and card details stolen make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. These are organisations that we deal with and give our cards to, such as restaurants and clothes shops. Poulson explains how a combination of software faults, and human laziness and carelessness, make data theft possible. He describes how, to start with, these thefts were covered up and customers told that they were to blame.
I finished up with a mix of feelings. I could not help admire the hackers as they attacked institutions and each other. At times the story had the complexity of a mix of John le Carre and CSI. But then I reminded myself that when my bank calls me to cancel a card, it is people like these who caused it.
As I put the book down I thought that some of the software described is running on my own computers. So guess what? I put an order in for the most advanced version of the free internet security software that I use. No, they probably aren't interested in me, but who knows? I now have a lot of respect for the hackers' skills.
All-in-all a well-written and fascinating book.
This book makes hacking thrilling. What I liked was that the author doesn't skip over the technical details of how the hacks work. You zoom right in, and discover how the attacks are accomplished.
For example, reading Kingpin was the first time I actually understood what a SQL injection attack is. If you're interested in technology, or hacking, I highly recommend you read this book - I loved it.








