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KINGPIN

But instead of gratitude, Max's final report was greeted with outrage. Using a client-side attack in a penetration test was almost unseemly; if you were hired to test physical security at a company's corporate headquarters, you wouldn't necessarily feel free to burglarize an employee's home to steal the keys. The client gave him a tongue-lashing; they'd paid Max to attack their servers, not their employees.

Max began to wonder if he had a future in computer security at all. His former friends in the community had all moved on. Hiverworld, where Max had nearly been employee 21, revamped its executive team and won $11 million in venture capital, changing its name to nCircle Network Security. Marty Roesch left the company to build on the success of Snort—to which Max had contributed—starting a firm of his own called Sourcefire in Maryland. Both companies were on a path to success, nCircle kicking off an expansion that would take it to 160 employees in the years to come and Sourcefire heading to an IPO on the NASDAQ.

In some alternate universe in which Max had never hacked the Pentagon, or never used that Verio dialup, or had simply kept his mouth shut and worn a wire on Matt Harrigan, the hacker would have been riding one of those companies to financial success and rewarding, challenging work. Instead, he could only watch from the sidelines.

He was itinerant, grasping for cash, and flailing for something to do with his freedom. That was when he checked his Whitehats.com e-mail in-box and found an anonymous note from “an old friend from Shaft.” It was the code phrase Max had worked out with Jeff Norminton.

Max met Jeff Norminton in a room at the St. Francis Hotel, and they caught up. Norminton hadn't taken well to supervised release: His sentencing judge required him to submit monthly urine samples, so his probation officer could make sure he hadn't started drinking again. That was a problem, since he was drinking again. After he'd refused two piss tests, the court had ordered him to check into Impact House, a drug and alcohol