Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground Read Free

exits. A crowd relaxes on pillows in front of a giant screen TV, and there is a fully stocked fridge and a bar
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    Those words welcomed visitors to TinyMUD, an online virtual world contained in a beige computer the size of a minifridge squatting on the floor of a Pittsburgh graduate student’s office. In 1990, hundreds of people from around the globe projected into the world over the Internet. Max, now a freshman at Boise State University, was one of them.
    The Internet was seven years old then, and about three million people had access through a measlythree hundred thousand host computers at defense contractors, military sites, and, increasingly, colleges and universities. In academia, the Net was once seen as too important to expose directly to undergraduates, but that was changing, and now any decent U.S. college allowed students online. MUDs—“multi-user dungeons”—became a favorite hangout.
    Like most everything else on the pre-Web Internet, a MUD was a purely textual experience—a universe defined entirely by prose and navigated by simple commands like “north” and “south.” TinyMUD was distinct as the first online world to shrug off the Dungeons and Dragons–inspired rules that had shackled earlier MUDs. Instead of limiting the power of creation to select administrators and “wizards,” for example, TinyMUD granted allits inhabitants the ability to alter the world around them. Anyone could create a space of his own, define its attributes, mark its borders, and receive visitors. Inhabitants quickly anointed the user-created recreation room the world’s social hub, building off it until its exits and entrances connected directly to TinyMUD spaces like Ghondahrl’s Flat, Majik’s Perversion Palace, and two hundred other locales.
    Also gone from TinyMUD was the D & D–style reward system that emphasized collecting wealth, finishing quests, and slaying monsters. Now, instead of doing battle with orcs and building up their characters’ experience points, users talked, flirted, fought, and had virtual sex. It turned out that freeing the game from the constraints of Tolkienesque roleplay made it more like real life and added to its addictive power. A common joke had it that MUD really stood for “multi-undergraduate destroyer.” For Max, that would prove more than just a joke.
    At Max’s urging, his girlfriend Amy had joined him in one of the TinyMUDs. * The original at Carnegie Mellon University had closed in April, but by then the same free software was powering several successor MUDs scattered around the Net. Max became Lord Max, and Amy took the name Cymoril, after a tragic heroine in Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné series of books and short stories—some of Max’s favorites.
    In the stories, Cymoril is the beloved of Elric, a weak albino transformed into a fearsome wizard emperor by dint of a magic sword called Stormbringer. To Max, the fictional sword was a metaphor for the power of a computer—properly wielded, it might turn an ordinary man into a king. But for Elric, Stormbringer was also a curse: He was bound to the sword, fought to tame it, and was ultimately mastered by it instead.
    Elric’s epic, doomed romance with Cymoril was very much of a piece with the fraught, uncompromising vision of romantic love Max had formed after his parents’ divorce: Cymoril meets her fate during a battle between Elric and his hated cousin Yyrkoon. Cymoril pleads withElric to sheath Stormbringer and stop the fight, but Elric, possessed by rage, presses on, striking Yyrkoon with a mortal blow. With his last breath, Yyrkoon exacts a heartbreaking revenge, pushing Cymoril onto the tip of Stormbringer.
    Then the dark truth dawned on his clearing brain and he moaned in grief, like an animal. He had slain the girl he loved. The runesword fell from his grasp, stained by Cymoril’s lifeblood, and clattered unheeded down the stairs. Sobbing now, Elric dropped beside the dead girl and lifted her in his