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

him, a fatal flaw.
    Kimi transferred from De Anza, a community college, to UC Berkeley, and the couple moved across the bay to live just off campus. The move proved fortuitous for Max. In the spring of 2000, a Berkeley company named Hiverworld offered him a long-awaited shot at the dot-com success that had already graced other Hungry Programmers. The company’s plan was to create a new antihacking system that would detect intrusions, like Snort, but also actively scan the user’s network for vulnerabilities, allowing it to ignore malicious volleys that had no chance of success. Snort author Marty Roesch was employee number 11. Now the company wanted Max Vision as number 21.
    Max’s first day was set for March 21. It was an early position at a promising technology start-up. The American dream, circa 2000.
    On the morning of March 21, 2000, the FBI knocked on Max’s door.
    At first he thought it was a Hiverworld hazing, a practical joke. It wasn’t. “Just don’t answer it!” he said to Kimi. He grabbed a phone and found a hiding place, in case the agents peered through the windows. He dialed Granick and told her what was happening. The indictment must have finally come down. The FBI was there to take him to jail. What should he do?
    The agents left—their arrest warrant didn’t authorize them to crash into Max’s home, so he’d temporarily thwarted them by the simple act of not answering the door. On her end, Granick called the prosecutor to try to arrange for a civilized self-surrender at the FBI field office in Oakland. Max contacted Hiverworld’s CTO, his new boss, to report that he wouldn’t be showing up for his first day at work. He’d be in touch in a day or two to explain everything, he said.
    The evening news beat him to the punch: Alleged computer hacker Max Butler had just turned himself in on a fifteen-count indictment charging illegal interception of communications, computer intrusion, and possession of stolen passwords.
    After two nights in jail, Max was brought in front of a federal magistrate in San Jose for arraignment. Kimi, Tim Spencer, and a dozen Hungry Programmers filled the gallery. Max was released on a $100,000 bond—Tim signed for half, and a fellow Hungry who’d struck it rich at a dot-com put down the remainder in cash.
    The arrest sent shock waves through the computer security world. Hiverworld canceled its job offer on the spot—no security start-up could hire a man facing current computer intrusion charges. The community fretted over what would happen to the arachNIDS database without Max’s curatorship. “It’s his stuff,” Roesch ruled in a post on a security mailing list. “So barring him explicitly ceding it to someone, it’s still his to maintain.”
    Max responded personally in a long message sweeping through his early love of computers and the future direction of intrusion detection. Whitehats.com and arachNIDS would continue no matter what, he predicted. “My family and friends have been incredibly supportive and there are offers to maintain the sites to a certain degree should tragedy occur.”
    Casting himself as a victim, he railed against the “frenzy of the hacker witch-hunt” and slammed Hiverworld for disloyalty. “After the smoke cleared and I was in the press, Hiverworld decided not to continue our relationship,” he wrote. “The corporation expressed cowardice that is deplorable. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to feel the complete lack of support from the Hive.
    “I am innocent until proven guilty,” he wrote. “And would appreciate the recognition of this by our community.”
    Six months later, Max pleaded guilty. The news was nearly lost amid a flurry of federal hacker prosecutions. The same month,Patrick “MostHateD” Gregory, the leader of a hacker gang called globalHell, was sentenced to twenty-six months in prison and ordered to pay $154,529.86 in restitution for a string of website defacements. At the same time, prosecutors