I finished reading, Kingpin, an account of how a teenager grew up to become the second biggest “carder” hacker in the world. The book is written by a Wired.com journalist, based on the true story of Max “Ray Vision” Butler. His story is an interesting one, covering nearly 20 years of Internet history and Butler’s role in it.
The books is not a page turning thriller book. But so much of it was familiar and that’s what kept me reading. I’d heard of whitehat.com, I remember the huge warnings about a VNC vulnerability about 5 years ago, and I recall MSFT screaming to us about patching an IE graphics processing vulnerability. This book tells us how 1 man made use of unpatched machines to commit cyber crime in the multi-million dollar range. So even though this one won’t have you distracted in the office, it does bring home the reality of crime on the Internet, and how old school hacking for ego has been replaced by hacking for profit. Instead of being the usual fiction, it is based on real history, most of it from the last 10 years.
I haven’t found anything similar to read, so I’ve moved on to reading the “A Song of Ice and Fire” box set which kicks of with A Game of Thrones, the book behind the HBO TV show.