Kingpin Quotes

“Like people who smoke a joint with someone to make sure that person isn’t a cop. Or a hooker who asks her john, “Are you a cop? You know you have to tell me if you are.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“As he looked around the computer, he realized the PC was acting as the back-end system for the point-of-sale terminals at the restaurant—it collected the day’s credit card transactions and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit card processor. Max found that day’s batch stored as a plain text file, with the full magstripe of every customer card recorded inside. Even better, the system was still storing all the previous batch files, dating back to when the pizza parlor had installed the system about three years earlier.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“Behind them, the long wooden pews were mostly empty: no friends, no family, no Charity; she’d already told Max she wasn’t going to wait for him.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“The key to cracking a full-disk encryption program is to get at it while it’s still running on the computer. At that point, the disk is still fully encrypted, but the decryption key is stored in RAM, to allow the software to decrypt and encrypt the data from the hard drive on the fly.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“DarkMarket turned out to be an unguarded spot. A British carder called JiLsi ran the site, and he’d made the mistake of choosing the same password—“MSR206”—everywhere, including Carders Market, where Max knew everyone’s passwords. Max could just walk in and take over.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“But the swindler had one more trick up his sleeve. Two weeks later he managed to get his bond reinstated, bailed from the detention center, and promptly vanished. Anglerphish was a debacle. After 1,500 hours of work, the government was left with a fugitive informant and tens of thousands of dollars in new fraud.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“On another occasion, he claimed, he walked into a bank and wrote a note on the back of a deposit slip: “This is a robbery. I have a bomb. Give me money or I’ll blow the bank.” Then he put the slip back on the pile as a surprise for the next customer.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“Business exploded overnight. Cesar built his own website, began vending on Shadowcrew, got an 800 number, and started accepting e-gold, an anonymous online currency favored by carders.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“Charity had learned to accept the bitterness Max brought back from prison: Living with him meant never again watching a crime drama on TV, because any depiction of the police as good guys set Max fuming.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“A few months before Max went to jail, a white-hat hacker had invented a sport called “war driving” to highlight the prevalence of leaky networks in San Francisco. After slapping a magnetically mounted antenna to the roof of his Saturn, the white hat cruised the city’s downtown streets while his laptop scanned for beaconing Wi-Fi access points.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“The Honeynet Project would secretly wire a packet sniffer to the system and place it unprotected on the Internet, like an undercover vice cop decked out in pumps and a short skirt on a street corner.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network

“When his birthday came soon after the party, she sent a decorated box of balloons to his office at MPath, and Max was moved nearly to tears by the gesture.”
― Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: The true story of Max Butler, the master hacker who ran a billion dollar cyber crime network