Free Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground by Kevin Poulsen

Web-design business. Despite his swaggering hacker machismo at Invita, Gorshkov had been a late addition to Ivanov’s gang, and he’d paid his own way to America in the hope of improving his fortunes. In a way, he did: After his arrest in Seattle, he was earning more in prison doing janitorial and kitchen work at eleven cents an hour than his fiancée was drawing on public assistance back home.
    After his arrest, Ivanov began cooperating with the FBI, rattling off alist of friends and accomplices still hacking back home. The bureau realized there were dozens of profit-oriented intruders and fraud artists from Eastern Europe already reaching their tentacles into Western computers.
    In the years to come, the number would grow to thousands. Ivanov and Gorshkov were Magellan and Columbus: Their arrival in America instantly redrew the global cybercrime map for the FBI and placed Eastern Europe indisputably at its center.

Opportunities
     
    ax wore a blazer and rumpled cargo pants to his sentencing hearing and watched silently as the lawyers sparred over his fate.
    Jennifer Granick, the defense attorney, told Judge James Ware that Max deserved a lowered sentence for his service as the Equalizer. The prosecutor took the opposite position. Max, he argued, had
pretended
to be an FBI informant while secretly committing crimes against the U.S. government. It was worse than if he had never cooperated at all.
    It was a strange sentencing hearing for a computer criminal. A dozen of Max’s colleagues in the security world—people devoted to thwarting hackers—had written to Judge Ware on Max’s behalf. Dragos Ruiu, a prominent security evangelist in Canada, called Max “a brilliant innovator in this field.” French programmer Renaud Deraison credited Max’s early support with making possible Nessus, Deraison’s vulnerability scanner and one of the most important free security tools then available. “Given Max’s potential and his clear vision of Internet security … it would be more useful for society as a whole that he stays among us as a computer security specialist … rather than spend time in a cell and see his computing talent go through a slow but sure decay.”
    From a technology worker in New Zealand: “Without the work that Max has done … it would be so much harder for my company and countless others to protect themselves from hackers.” From a fan in Silicon Valley:“Taking Max out of the security community would greatly hurt our ability to protect ourselves.” A former Defense Department worker wrote, “To imprison this individual would be a travesty.”
    Several of the Hungries wrote letters as well, as did Max’s mother and sister. In her note, Kimi pleaded eloquently for Max’s freedom. “He saved my life by helping me out of an abusive relationship and teaching me the meaning of self-respect,” she wrote. “He gave me shelter when I had no place to live. He took very good care of me when I was seriously ill, saving my life again by taking me to the emergency room when I protested that I was ‘fine’ even as I was dying.”
    When the lawyers finished their arguments, Max spoke for himself, with the earnest politeness he always exhibited away from his computer. His attack, he explained, had been born of good intentions. He’d just wanted to close the BIND hole and had lost his head.
    “I got swept up,” he said softly. “It’s hard to explain the feelings of someone who’s gotten caught up in the computer security field.… I felt at the time that I was in a race. That if I went in and closed the holes quickly, I could do it before people with more malicious intentions could use them.
    “What I did was reprehensible,” Max continued. “I’ve hurt my reputation in the computer security field. I’ve hurt my family and friends.”
    Judge Ware listened attentively but had already made up his mind. Letting Max off without a prison term would send the wrong message to other hackers.