Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground
usually illegal exploration of the forbidden back roads of the telephone network. But hacking was above all a creative effort, one that would lead to countless watershed moments in computer history.
    The word “hacker” took on darker connotations in the early 1980s, when the first home computers—the Commodore 64s, the TRS-80s, the Apples—came to teenagers’ bedrooms in suburbs and cities around the United States. The machines themselves were a product of hacker culture; the Apple II, and with it the entire home computer concept, was born of two Berkeley phone phreaks named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. But not all teenagers were content with the machines, and in the impatience of youth, they weren’t inclined to wait for grad school to dip into real processing power or to explore the global networks that could be reached with a phone call and the squeal of a modem. So they began illicit foraysinto corporate, government, and academic systems and took their first tentative steps into the ARPANET, the Internet’s forerunner.
    When those first young intruders began getting busted in 1983, the national press cast about for a word to describe them and settled on the one the kids had given themselves: “hackers.” Like the previous generation of hackers, they were pushing the limits of technology, outwitting the establishment, and doing things that were supposed to be impossible. But for them, that involved breaching corporate computers, taking over telephone switches, and slipping into government systems, universities, and defense contractor networks. The older generation winced at the comparison, but from that point on, the word “hacker” would have two meanings: a talented programmer who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, and a recreational computer intruder. Adding to the confusion, many hackers were both.
    Now, in the mid-1990s, the hacking community was dividing again. The FBI and the Secret Service had staged arrests of high-profile intruders like Kevin Mitnick and Mark “Phiber Optik” Abene, a New York phone phreak, and the prospect of prison stigmatized recreational intrusion while raising the risk far beyond the rewards of ego and adventure. The impetus for cracking computers was fading as well: The Internet was open to anyone now, and personal computers had grown powerful enough to run the same operating systems and programming languages that fueled the big machines denied to amateurs. Most of all, there was real money to be made defending computers and none attacking them.
    Cracking systems was becoming uncool. Those possessed of a hacker’s mind-set were increasingly rejecting intrusion and going right into legitimate security work. And the intruders started hanging up their black hats to join them. They became the “white-hat hackers”—referencing the square-jawed heroes in old cowboy films—applying their computer skills on the side of truth and justice.
    Max thought of himself as one of the white hats. Watching for new types of attacks and emerging vulnerabilities was now in his job description,and as Max Vision, he was beginning to contribute to some of the computer-security mailing lists where the latest developments were discussed. But he couldn’t completely exorcise Ghost23 from his personality. It was an open secret among Max’s friends that he was still cracking systems. When he saw something novel or interesting, he saw no harm in trying it out for himself.
    Tim was at work one day when he got a call from a flummoxed system administrator at another company who’d traced an intrusion back to Hungry.com—the online home of the Hungry Programmers, where they hosted their projects, hung their résumés, and maintained e-mail addresses that would remain steady through job changes and other upheavals. There were dozens of geeks on the shared system, but Tim knew at once who was responsible. He put the sysadmin on hold and phoned up Max.
    “Stop. Hacking. Now,” he said.
    Max
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