Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground
Robert Hauptman · Journal of Information Ethics · 2013
Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground Kevin Poulsen. New York: Crown, 2011. 267 pp. $25Remember Robert T. Morris, Jr.? Kevin Mitnick? Other hackers, crackers, and irresponsible cyberhooligans? They do lots of harm, get caught and punished, and then someone decides to dignify their lives with a lovely (perhaps illustrated) biographical account, as if they had entertained or represented or defended us. So it is with Max Butler, whose exploits were covered by the press as they occurred, but are now codified in an accessible popular account by Kevin Poulsen, a former hacker and writer/editor at Wired and its digital affiliates.Poulsen lays out Butler's early life in some detail, which is naturally a good way to turn a long article into a short monograph; what Butler perpetrates in high school is tangentially related to his later crimes, so I am just being petulant here, perhaps because Kingpin relates the sordid and thus nauseating tale of malevolent or criminal youngsters all over the world dissimulating, stealing, and harming. Those with the remnants of a conscience convince themselves that it is only the evil banks and big corporations that are being bilked (which is no excuse, of course), but this is simply untrue. Every time an individual's credit card or identity is compromised, he or she suffers emotional and financial torment. And when big businesses are harmed, they set in place ever more onerous and distasteful mechanisms that hamper the innocent but do nothing to impede the criminals. Fifty years ago, no one asked for a social security number. Today, everyone does. (Just say no!) It is, additionally, unpleasant to participate in this lying, mendacity, and tergiversation, all of the extraordinary and inventive things one does to earn a digital living dishonestly, which enriches the few at the expense of the many. And what is most disconcerting is that cracker success derives, even in 2011, from corporate irresponsibility: institutions fail to implement the most potent protections and thus leak data as if it were stored in a sieve: In 2004, nearly half of America's banks, SL hundreds of thousands of customers' confidential information was compromised. The Times article concludes by quoting J. Keith Mularski, the FBI operative who is Kingpin's indefatigable hero. Although a solution to credit card theftexists (the replacement of magstripes with chip-and-PIN technology, already in use around the world), it would be very expensive to retrofit and so American banks and corporations refuse to make the change. …