// Alternatives
Alternatives to Kingpin
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to Kingpin. If Kingpin is the wrong fit at beginner level, start here.
01 · 2014
Spam Nation
Brian Krebs's investigative deep-dive into the Russian-speaking pharma-spam economy of the late 2000s — the affiliate networks, the rivalries, and the people who ran them.
Beginner4/5Brian Krebs02 · 1989
The Cuckoo's Egg
Clifford Stoll's first-person account of investigating a 75-cent accounting discrepancy at LBNL that turned into a year-long pursuit of a KGB-paid intruder across early-internet networks.
Beginner5/5Clifford Stoll03 · 2019
Cult of the Dead Cow
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.
Beginner4/5Joseph Menn04 · 2016
Dark Territory
Fred Kaplan's policy-side history of US cyber capability, from Reagan-era panic about WarGames to the institutional buildup of NSA's offensive arm and the political fights over its use.
Beginner4/5Fred Kaplan05 · 2014
@War
Shane Harris on the entanglement of US military doctrine, the intelligence community, and private contractors after cyberspace was declared the fifth warfighting domain.
Beginner4/5Shane Harris06 · 2012
We Are Anonymous
Parmy Olson's reconstruction of LulzSec, AntiSec, and the early-2010s Anonymous moment — the chat logs, the infighting, the Sabu turn, and the FBI takedown that ended the era.
Beginner4/5Parmy Olson07 · 2011
Ghost in the Wires
Kevin Mitnick's first-person account of his 1990s social-engineering and phone-system intrusions, foreword by Steve Wozniak. Self-promotional in tone but a primary source on a defining era.
Beginner4/5Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon08 · 2005
The Art of Intrusion
Mitnick and Simon's follow-up to The Art of Deception: third-party stories from working hackers — casino slot exploits, prison-network breaches, post-9/11 intelligence ops — reconstructed and annotated by Mitnick.
Beginner4/5Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon09 · 2022
Tracers in the Dark
Andy Greenberg's investigative narrative of how Bitcoin's allegedly-anonymous public ledger became, in the hands of researchers and federal investigators, the most powerful OSINT tool of the last decade.
Beginner5/5Andy Greenberg10 · 2020
The Hacker and the State
Ben Buchanan's argument that state-on-state cyber operations are not deterrence-shaped (like nuclear) but signaling-shaped: countries use cyber to shape the environment, not to threaten escalation. Builds the case from declassified incidents.
Beginner5/5Ben Buchanan