// Comparison

Codebreaking vs Kingpin: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on History, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Beginner

4/52023

A Practical Guide

Elonka Dunin, Klaus Schmeh

Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh teach classical cryptanalysis through real, unsolved ciphers, from 19th-century newspaper personal ads to wartime telegrams, using free tools like CrypTool 2.

Beginner

5/52011

Kingpin

How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground

Kevin Poulsen

Kevin Poulsen's reconstruction of Max Butler's career — from white-hat consultant to running CardersMarket, the carding forum that consolidated the early-2000s underground — and the FBI investigation that finally took him down.

Read this if

Hobbyist codebreakers and security people who want the historical and puzzle-solving side of cryptography, not the mathematical theory. Dunin maintains the web's reference list of unsolved ciphers and Schmeh is the most-published cryptology author alive, so the case studies are the real, still-open ones.

Anyone interested in cybercrime as an economy rather than as a series of incidents. Poulsen, himself a former hacker turned journalist, has both the access and the technical fluency to make the carding-economy mechanics legible.

Skip this if

Readers who want modern applied cryptography, algorithm design, or anything about securing systems; this is classical/historical cipher-breaking (substitution, polyalphabetic, transposition), not AES or TLS. Pair with Serious Cryptography or Cryptography Engineering for that side.

Readers wanting current ransomware-economy detail; the book is 2011 and pre-dates the modern affiliate / RaaS structure. The mechanics generalize, the actors don't.

Key takeaways

Teaches cryptanalysis on real, unsolved historical ciphers rather than textbook exercises, which keeps the puzzle-solving stakes genuine.
CrypTool 2 and other free software get hands-on coverage, so the skills transfer to actually attacking a ciphertext, not just reading about it.
Several of the book's case studies remain unsolved mysteries today; readers are explicitly invited to take a crack at them.

Cybercrime markets are markets — they have liquidity, reputation, dispute resolution, and trust topology, and they fail in market-like ways.
Most underground takedowns are won by HUMINT and OSINT inside the forums, not by exploitation; Butler's downfall was social.
The book's pacing makes the carding economy legible without flattening the moral complexity of its inhabitants.

How they compare

We rate Kingpin higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Codebreaking). For most readers, that means Kingpin is the primary pick and Codebreaking is a useful follow-up.

Both books target beginner-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Codebreaking and Kingpin both cover History, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Codebreaking

→ Alternatives to Codebreaking → What to read after Codebreaking