(3.5) Very interesting topic, not that well written

But at least it's short and he didn't draw it out too much. Lots of goods on cybercriminals, stealing credit card info, identities etc. and big window on the black market in which these good are bought and sold regularly. I have to guess that there's a big bias in the main players covered in the book toward those who were caught and turned on their colleagues, as I got the impression that nearly everyone involved snitched on someone else (except Max of course).

Anyway, very interesting read about the organization behind all of these electronic crimes. Quite eye-opening and it's actually frustrating that banks and cc companies aren't trying to cut down on the crime by increasing security and protecting their customers' data. They'd rather just count the losses and hope law enforcement catches up with these guys eventually.

As for the not that well written part, I didn't think Poulsen was consistent in how much background he gave about characters, their aliases and their methods of attack. At times he's pretty thorough in describing attacks, others, he just refers to by name assuming we know (and I'm pretty ignorant here, so I didn't know what a BIN attack refers to (did he mean BIND?)). Another time I remember he gave the short name, pen test, for penetration test and then later referred to it as a penetration test. Some bad editing or careless cut-n-pasting there I believe. And a couple of times he just randomly referred to someone by their nationality withot revealing it first ("the Canadian", "the Ukranian"). I think in one case he did reveal the Canadian was from Vancouver, but only after he referred to him as such.

Oh, and actually the worst part: no index. If we're referring to people by their 10 different aliases/handles through the book, an index would really help. I guess someone was just lazy? (also wanted to find out more about the BIN attack in case I had missed the explanation--and unfortunately if you google "computer security BIN" or "hack BIN" you get a bunch of jihadis (others pop up if you add "-laden" so I just gave up).

One thing was very convincing: your credit cards are so unsafe. Pretty much assume someone has them and check statements religiously. I'll also get back into the habit of doing the free credit reports from the credit bureaus every 4 months....