// Comparison

Cult of the Dead Cow 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

4/52019

How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

Joseph Menn

Joseph Menn's history of cDc — the Texas-rooted hacking collective that coined 'hacktivism', shipped Back Orifice, and threaded its way through three decades of the security industry's coming-of-age.

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

Anyone who wants to understand the ideological and personal lineage of the modern security industry. Many of the people the book follows — Mudge, Veracode founders, the L0pht — are still load-bearing figures in 2026 policy and research, and the book explains how they got there.

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 wanting deep technical detail. Menn is a journalist; the book is the social and political history. The Back Orifice, Hong Kong Blondes, and L0pht-Senate-testimony arcs are the technical anchors.

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

The hacker-to-defender arc that the security industry now runs on was largely socialized inside groups like cDc in the 1990s.
The book's policy thread — that disclosure and ethics were debates, not assumptions — is its most underrated half.
Several still-active companies and government roles trace directly to people who first met on cDc message boards; the genealogy chart is the book's quiet thesis.

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 Cult of the Dead Cow). For most readers, that means Kingpin is the primary pick and Cult of the Dead Cow is a useful follow-up.

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

Cult of the Dead Cow and Kingpin both cover History, Narrative, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Cult of the Dead Cow

→ Alternatives to Cult of the Dead Cow → What to read after Cult of the Dead Cow