Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground by Kevin Poulsen Read Free Book Online Page A

big digital army,” according to the group’s blustery manifesto. But at root they were just kids playing with the phone, just as Max had done in high school. After the call, Beeson asked Max to stay close to the gang. Max chatted them up on IRC and turned over the logs to his handlers.
    Pleased with Max’s work, the agents summoned him to the federal building in San Francisco a week later to brief him on a new assignment. This time, he’d be going to Vegas.
    Max’s eyes moved over the nest of linen-clad card tables in the gaudy exhibit hall of the Plaza Hotel and Casino. Dozens of young men in T-shirts and shorts or jeans—the hacker’s uniform—were at the tables hunkered over a bank of computer workstations or standing on the sidelines, occasionally pointing at something on a screen.
    To the untrained eye, it was a strange way to spend a weekend in Sin City—banging on keyboards like some anonymous cubical drone, far from the pool, the slots, and the shows. But the hackers were in pitched competition, working in teams to penetrate a clutch of computers hanging off a hastily erected network. The first team to leave their virtual marker in one of the targets would claim a $250 prize and valuable bragging rights—with points also awarded for hacking other competitors. New attacks and ruses were flowing from the hackers’ fingers, and secret, stockpiled exploits were being pulled from virtual armories to be used in public for the first time.
    At Def Con, the world’s largest hacking convention, the Capture the Flag competition was Fischer vs. Spassky every year.
    Kimi wasn’t impressed, butMax was in heaven. Across the floor, more tables were cluttered with vintage computer gear, odd electronics, lock-picking tools, T-shirts, books, and copies of
2600: The Hacker Quarterly
. Max spotted Elias Levy, a famous white-hat hacker, and pointed him out to Kimi. Levy, aka Aleph One, was the moderator of the Bugtraq mailing list—the
New York Times
of computer security—and the author of a seminal tutorial on buffer overflows called “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit” that had appeared in
Phrack
. Max didn’t dare approach the luminary. What would he say?
    Max wasn’t the only law enforcement mole at Def Con, of course. From its humble beginnings in 1992 as a one-off conference pulled together by a former phone phreak, Def Con had grown into a legendary gathering that drew nearly two thousand hackers, computer security professionals, and hangers-on from around the world. They came to party in person with comrades they’d befriended online, present and attend technical talks, buy and sell merchandise, and get very, very drunk in all-night bashes in the hotel rooms.
    Def Con was such an obviously target-rich environment for the government that the organizer, Jeff “the Dark Tangent” Moss, had invented a new convention game called Spot the Fed. A hacker who thought he’didentified a G-man in the crowd could point him out, make a case, and, if the audience concurred, take home a coveted I SPOTTED THE FED AT DEF CON T-shirt. Often the suspected fed would just give up and good-naturedly whip out a badge, giving the hacker an easy win.
    Max’s mission was broad. Trahon and Beeson wanted him to chum up to his fellow hackers and try to get their real names, then lure them into exchanging public PGP encryption keys, which security-minded geeks use like sealing wax to encrypt and sign their e-mail. Max’s heart just wasn’t in it. Writing reports for the bureau was one thing, and he’d had no qualms about getting the goods on the DarkCYDE phreaks, who were too young to get in real trouble. But this assignment smelled like snitching. Personal loyalty was written deep into Max’s firmware, and one look at the Def Con crowd told him these were his people.
    Many of the hackers were reluctantly giving up childish things, migrating into legitimate dot-com jobs or starting security companies. They were becoming white