I recently read American Kingping by Nick Bilton and I thought it was really good. It’s about the founder of the Silk Road and how the FBI tracked him down.
Can you recommend any similiar novels?
Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
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Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#2The Defcon book list ("peek behind the curtain" and "underground culture") is a good starting place, https://www.defcon.org/html/links/book-list.html
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#3The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#4I think you will enjoy Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#5"Fatal System Error" by Joseph Menn
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#6Reamde, by Neal Stephenson.
Yeah, the big daddy of cyberpunk ("Snowcrash") also wrote a contemporary technothriller set in organized cybercrime organizations.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#7Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter.
It talks about the Stuxnet and the story behind it, and I got the chance to learn some fairly interesting stuff in the meantime (like the complexity of building a nuclear bomb).
I found it much more useful than the American Kingpin, which just mentions that Tor and Bitcoin offer anonymity online, but doesn't get anywhere even close to explaining either of the technologies that are crucial for the storyline.
We Are Anonymous by Parmy Olson also made me feel kind of the same, but the writing wasn't quite as engaging as the Countdown to Zero Day was.
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#8The Defcon book list ("peek behind the curtain" and "underground culture") is a good starting place, https://www.defcon.org/html/links/book-list.html
All my recommendations happen to be mentioned on this list, so I'll mention them here:
- Stealing the Network, a collection of short stories. One of those stories was written by Fyodor of nmap and is available online: http://insecure.org/stc/ -- this sort of works like a tutorial for nmap and networking security. :-D
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#9On the topic of Non-fiction cybercrime books, one that provides very good insight imho on the history of spam albeit a little hard to follow is "Spam Nation", by Brian Krebs
Re: Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?
#10You said "novels", so I'm assuming you're looking for fiction. If that's the case I enjoyed Jon Evans' "Swarm": http://m.feedbooks.com/userbook/24466/swarm