Since Publishers Weekly let the cat out of the bag here I wanted to pass along my congratulations to Kevin Poulsen on the sale of his book Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground, which was acquired by editor Julian Pavia over at Crown (a division of Random House).

For anyone not already familiar with Kevin Poulsen, he’s the the editor and lead writer for Wired.com’s “Threat Level” blog, the 24th most popular blog in the world and picked as one of Time magazine’s Top 25 Blogs of 2008. Poulsen is also one of the world’s best known (reformed) hackers himself, having already been the subject of a book about his life called, Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen, published by Little, Brown in 1997.

For the January 09 issue of Wired, Kevin wrote a fantastic feature article about Max Butler, a former $100/hour security consultant and frequent ally of the FBI’s computer crime squad, who had not only turned to crime, but in an almost unbelievably audacious move had completed a hostile takeover of the entire worldwide market in stolen credit cards, leaving him in sole control over a billion dollar criminal underground.

When I first spoke to Kevin about the possibility of digging more even more deeply into Butler’s story and covering it at book length, he said that not only had he already been thinking about it, but also that in all the stories he had seen through the years this was the first one he had ever wanted to write a book about. Forget everything you know about hackers. No longer are they isolated loners cracking websites from their parents’ basements, or misguided geniuses breaking into the Pentagon for kicks. Today they are fully formed criminal enterprises planning and executing cybercrimes on a scale never seen before.

This modern, international world of electronic organized crime has not had a proper treatment in book form and Max Butler’s story provides a perfect vehicle for exploring this culture. Kingpin will detail exactly how Max Butler did it, as well as how the FBI finally caught him, and what in his early life had led him to that point. Kingpin will also will also provide a never before seen exploration into the worldwide market in organized cybercrime and fraud that impacts 1 in 3 Americans and costs companies billions of dollars every year. Kevin’s Wired feature was terrific (check it our here if you haven’t seen it) and I certainly can’t read the book!