The Hacker Chronicles

In February 2000, a fifteen-year-old in Montreal took down Amazon, Yahoo and eBay from his bedroom. In May, a Manila student released a worm that crashed forty-five million inboxes inside a day. In January 2003, three hundred and seventy-six bytes of code saturated the public internet in under ten minutes.

These were not the era’s biggest cases. They were the early ones — the cases that demonstrated what the next decade would do at scale.

Ten case studies, drawn from indictments, court records, contemporary reporting and the memoirs of the people who lived them. The Montreal teenager. The Manila student. The Sandia analyst whose investigation got him fired. The Secret Service informant running the largest card-theft operation in American history. The PLA campaign that arrived at Google.

This is how the industry was built.