Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground (37 page)

The story of Max Vision would have listed heavily to his criminal side were it not for Tim Spencer and Marty Roesch, who shared their experience of Max as white-hat hacker, and Kimi Mack, who spoke candidly about her marriage to Max. My thanks also to security wunderkind Marc Maiffret, who helped isolate some of Max’s exploits.

The underworld that
Kingpin
delves into has been illuminated by a number of first-rate journalists, including Bob Sullivan, Brian Krebs, Joseph Menn, Byron Acohido, Jon Swartz, and my
Wired
colleague Kim Zetter.

Finally, my thanks to my wife, Lauren Gelman, without whose loving support and sacrifice this book would not have been possible, and to Sadelle and Asher, who will find their computer use closely supervised until they’re eighteen.

KEVIN POULSEN is a senior editor at Wired.com and a contributor to
Wired
magazine. He oversees cybercrime, privacy, and political coverage for Wired.com and edits the award-winning Threat Level blog (
wired.com/threatlevel
), which he founded in 2005. He’s broken numerous national stories, including the FBI’s use of spyware in criminal and national security investigations; a hacker’s penetration of a Secret Service agent’s confidential files; and the secret arrest of an Army intelligence officer accused of leaking documents to whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. In 2009 he was inducted into MIN’s Digital Hall of Fame for online journalism and in 2010 was voted one of the “Top Cyber Security Journalists” by his peers.