Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground Read Online Free PDF

stammered out an apology—it was the burning lawn all over again. Tim switched back to the other line, where the system administrator happily reported that the attack had stopped in its tracks.
    The complaint surprised and confused Max—if his targets knew what a good guy he was, they wouldn’t take issue with some harmless intrusions. “Max, you gotta get permission,” Tim explained. He offered some life advice. “Look, just sort of imagine that everyone’s looking at you. That’s a good way to ensure that what you’re doing is correct. If I was standing there, or your dad was standing there, would you still feel the same about doing it? What would we say?”
    If there was one thing Max was missing in his new life, it was a partner to share it with. He met twenty-year-old Kimi Winters at a rave called Warmth, held on an empty warehouse floor in the city—Max had become a fixture in the rave scene, dancing with a surprising, fluid grace, whirling his arms like a Brazilian flame dancer. Kimi was a community college student and part-time barista. A foot shorter than Max, she sportedan androgynous appearance in the shapeless black hoodie she liked to wear when she went out. But on a second look, she was decidedly cute, with apple cheeks and her Korean mother’s copper-tinted skin. Max invited Kimi to a party at his place.
    The parties at Hungry Manor were legendary, and when Kimi arrived the living room was already packed with dozens of party guests from Silicon Valley’s keyboard class—programmers, system administrators, and Web designers—mingling under the glass chandelier. Max lit up when he spotted her. He led her on a tour of the house, pointing out the geeky accoutrements the Hungry Programmers had added.
    The tour ended in Max’s bedroom in Hungry Manor’s east wing. For all of the grandeur of the house, Max’s room had the charm of a monk’s cell—no furniture but a futon on the floor, no comforts except a computer. For the party, Max had trained blue and red spotlights on a bottle of peppermint schnapps—his only vice. Kimi returned for dinner the next night, and there was a single item on his vegetarian menu: raw cookie dough. Max shaved the sugary sludge off in slices and served it to his date with the schnapps. Why, after all, would anyone
not
eat raw cookie dough for dinner, given the option?
    Kimi was intrigued. Max needed so little to be happy. He was like a child. When his birthday came soon after the party, she sent a decorated box of balloons to his office at MPath, and Max was moved nearly to tears by the gesture.
    She was his “dream girl,” he told her later. They began to talk about committing to a life together.
    In September, Hungry Manor’s landlord, unhappy with the programmers’ upkeep of the estate, reclaimed the house, and after a final bash to bid farewell to their communal mansion, the Hungries scattered to rentals throughout the Bay Area. Max and Kimi landed in their own place in Mountain View, a cramped studio in a barracks-like apartment complex alongside the 101 freeway, Silicon Valley’s congested main artery.
    Max resumed his work for the FBI, and his haunting of IRC led himto a new opportunity—his chance to break out as a white-hat hacker. He’d made a friend in the chat rooms who was starting a real consulting business in San Francisco and was interested in bringing Max on board.Max went up to the city to visit Matt Harrigan, aka, “Digital Jesus.”
    Harrigan, just twenty-two, was one of four white hats who’d been profiled in a
Forbes
cover story the previous year, and he’d cannily used his fifteen minutes of fame to win some seed money for a business: a professional hacking shop in San Francisco’s financial district.
    The idea was simple: Corporations would pay his company, Microcosm Computer Resources, to put their networks through a real hack attack, culminating in a detailed report on the client’s security strengths and weaknesses. The business of