Chapter Summary Of The Book 'Kingpin' By W. A. K.

Romario Honorat

Kingpin is a story about a godlike Hacker known as Max Butler a.k.a. “Max Vision”. It talks about the illegal actions of this legendary hacker, with help from his hacking associates. In the book kingpin it talks about one of his most famous feats, which was an amazing hacking takeover of four of the criminal underground’s secret credit card forums, all of this which took place in August 2006. It was also said that he is somehow part of the TJX data breach, which was the theft and underground market selling of millions of dollars of credit card information. As great as Max was, sooner or later he would have gotten caught. What got him caught was an FBI sting operation called Operation Firewall. Within this operation an FBI
So no one trusted each other. Max never really knew where the line was for his hacking. One of his early known hacks came about when a security weakness was found in a DNS system. Like any other day, Max thought it was his job as a security researcher to fix the problem. So he created something known as a buffer overflow attack. What this did was control the vulnerability, then scanned the network for other DNS systems that were at risk, and installed his own patch that fixed the security risks. What looked like a good thing to Max was something completely different to the owners of those networks. Max was a researcher, he helped create BRO, which was one of the first experiments for intrusion detection systems. Another accomplishment was known as the Honeynet Project. While helping them he developed a program called Privmsg. This program allowed him to rebuild hacker chat messages by listening to network information. Other times Max would use hacking for bad. He would find vulnerable Wi-Fi sites that he could use to hide his hacking activity, this is called wardriving. Max created a virus to gain entry into other hackers’ networks, in order to see what they were doing and to steal their credit card information