Before I start my review, let me comment on some of the other reviewers (the 1 and 2 star ones). Some of them comment that the author was too involved in the famous capture of Kevin Mitnick. While that is true, they seem to forget that this capture was in 1996 while the book was published in 1991. It seems they have not read the book before writing the review.
Back to the book. Cyberpunk contains three different hacker stories. The first one of Kevin Mitnick ending up with his first capture (not the 1996 one). The second is of Pengo, the German hacker who leaked information to Russia. The third is of Robert Morris who created the famous internet worm that caused "the internet to go down" (well...)
The first part is a story called "Kevin Mitnick: The Dark-side Hacker" which describes the early hacking of perhaps the best know hacker Kevin Mitnick. The authors of this book are not technical experts at hacking and that is readable in the book. The technical details are missing or often not incredibly correct (or something uninteresting is presented as if its a big thing). The book mainly focuses on the social relationships between people.
The second part if "Pengo and Project Equalizer" which describes Pengo, the German hacker who had sold some of its information (and the VMS source code) to East Germany. This story is the other side of "The Cuckoos nest" by Cliff Stoll. The Cuckoos nest describes how Cliff tracked the hacker in Germany whereas Cyberpunk describes what was going on between the hackers and how they ended up selling information to Germany. Its an interesting story again, though... the hackers didn't seem to use much (if any) technical hacks, so if you are looking for technical hacking info, this is not the book.
The third story surprised me. It was the story of Robert Morris who wrote the internet worm in 1988. It surprised me because the history behind the story was interesting, how Robert grew up and how his interest in computer security grew over time. It was amusing to me how a well-constructed piece of software can cause so much trouble because it was badly written :)
To get back to the criticism from other reviewers about the author being involved. Partly these comments are invalid (see above) and partly the are valid. John Markoff was deeply involved during all of the stories. He was in contact with the law enforcement during the Mitnick story, he was a friend of Cliff Stoll during the second story. During the third story, he was called by Cliff Stoll and was a friend of Bob Morris, the father of Robert Morris, and was one of the earliest people to discover who created the internet worm. From that perspective, the book is not a neutral journalist perspective as you might expect.
I was thinking of rating this book between 3 and 4 stars. 4 because I enjoyed reading it. 3 because of the non-neutrality and the lack of correct technical details. I chose 4 because of the epilogue (written by the other author, Katie Hafner) which described the follow-up of the three stories and asks really valid questions related to whether Mitnick was really the famous bad hacker he is depicted as.
Worth reading, but there are probably better books on the subject (as other reviewers also suggest)
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Pat Keane
Hackers in the early days of computers.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2018
