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

arms
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“Cymoril,” he moaned, his whole body throbbing. “Cymoril—I have slain you.”
     
    When she first met Max, Amy thought he was cool, rebellious, and kind of punky—different from the usual Boise crowd. But as they spent every free moment together, she began to see a darker, obsessive side to his personality, particularly after he introduced her to the Internet and TinyMUD.
    At first Max was thrilled that his girlfriend shared his passion for the online world. But as Amy started making friends of her own in the MUD, including guys, he became jealous and combative. To Max it made no difference if Amy was cheating on him in the virtual world or the real one: It was cheating either way. He tried to get her to stop logging on, but she refused, and the couple began arguing online and off.
    Eventually, Amy’d had enough; they were arguing about a stupid computer game? On a Wednesday night in early October 1990, the couple were in another user’s room in TinyMUD when Cymoril finally told Lord Max that she wasn’t sure they really belonged together after all.
    It was Max’s first serious relationship, and his reaction was powerful. They had sworn to spend their lives united. Now they should both die, rather than be parted, he wrote in the MUD. Then he got explicit, telling her how he’d kill her. Other users watched with growing concern as his raging took on the tone of a serious threat. What should they do?
    One of the in-world wizards got Max’s Internet IP address from the server—a unique identifier that was easily traced to Boise State University. The MUDers looked up the phone number for the Ada County Sheriff’s Department in Boise and called in a warning that a potential murder-suicide was unfolding.
    The year had begun hopefully for Max. He excelled at the part-time job his dad gave him at his computer store, HiTech Systems, performing clerical work, making deliveries in the company van, and assembling PC-compatible computers in the shop. And he managed to stay clean of probation violations—though he’d stopped taking his bipolar medication; his father didn’t want him drugged, and, anyway, Max didn’t agree with the diagnosis.
    He began dating Amy in February of 1990, four months after meeting her at the Zoo, a dance club in Boise that catered to an underage crowd. A year younger than Max, she was blond, blue-eyed, and, when he first saw her, on the arm of Max’s friend Luke Sheneman, one of the former Meridian key bearers. As Max finished up his last year in high school, they began getting serious.
    Max did nothing in half measures, and his devotion to Amy was absolute. She planned on attending Boise State University, so Max applied there, postponing his dream of attending CMU or MIT. He brought her home to meet his computer, and the couple played Tetris together. Their relationship was everything his parents’ hadn’t been. They both thought it would never end.
    His old friends barely saw him over summer break. Then the fall term began at Boise State. Max declared a major in computer science and enrolled in a battery of courses: calculus, chemistry, and a computer class on data structures. Like all students, he was given an account on the school’s shared UNIX system.Like a few of them, he started hacking the computer right away. Max’s path was eased by another student, David, who’d alreadyworried his way into a bunch of the faculty accounts. They spent hours in the BSU terminal room, staring at the luminous green text of the terminals and banging on the clacky keyboards. They’d skim through faculty e-mail boxes while holding long, silent conversations, shooting messages back and forth across the room through the computer. David struggled to keep up with Max’s overclocked mind and typing speed, and Max would often get impatient. “What are you waiting for?” Max would type when David fell behind in the conversation. “Respond.”
    A little local hacking was generally tolerated by