Chapter 5. Stolen Data
Christmas Day, 1999. A teenage Russian hacker who went by the pseudonym “Maxus” sat in his dimly lit bedroom, hunched over a keyboard. Outside, wind whirled across the frozen nighttime wasteland. He checked his email one more time and shook his head. Nothing. He was bored.
No more waiting! It was time.
Weeks before, Maxus had stumbled across a security flaw in the website of CD Universe, a popular online music store. Exploring, he found he was able to download customer usernames, passwords, and even credit card numbers from the site: nearly 300,000 records in total. Normally, he would have sold the credit card numbers to criminals on Internet chat rooms, but this time, he had felt a little more creative. Instead, he faxed ...
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