From Publishers Weekly
By age 21, Nuwere had grown from a precocious child in Brooklyn's embattled Bed-Stuy neighborhood to a well-established Internet security specialist for a major investment bank. In between, he served a long stint as a renegade though ultimately benign hacker, an experience that gave him much-needed background for his professional career. Written with Chanoff, his memoir is an appealing primer to hacker culture matched with the personal story of being raised by an extended family (due to Nuwere's mother's death from AIDS) in an impoverished environment. Nuwere's adventures in the computing underworld primarily include phishing, or conning Internet users into divulging credit card information; making free phone calls using stolen 800 numbers; and exploring the computer systems of major corporations in order to better understand their intricacies. Unfortunately, much of the drama is mitigated by the blacking out of the name of the company most seriously hacked by Nuwere, as well as the name of the project in development that he was busted for entering ("We kept going deeper and deeper into [blacked out] until we reached the computers that actually controlled the [blacked out] that was all over the news"). This continues for some pages, making it difficult for readers to maintain interest in this pivotal episode. Superfluous details about Nuwere's high school experiences and martial arts tournaments are not well integrated with the more compelling hacker narrative. Nonetheless, this is an empathetic, revealing account of a new breed of insurgents.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
One of the most gripping yet improbable stories spawned by the computer revolution,
Hacker Crocker is a classic American-dream success story set on the razor edge of high technology. Ejovi Nuwere takes the reader on the roller-coaster ride of his extraordinary life, from the bullet-riddled, drugged-out streets of one of America's most notorious ghettos to a virtual world where identities shift and paranoia rules, where black-hat hackers and white-hat sleuths confront each other by day and switch roles at night in the ongoing war to control America's most sensitive computer systems. It is a story of an African American boy coming of age in the new millennium, a story that vibrates with the themes of American life, those we know and those we are just beginning to glimpse.
Like other neighborhood kids in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Ejovi Nuwere grew up among thugs and drug dealers. When he was eleven, he helped form a gang; when he was twelve, oppressed by the violence around him, he attempted suicide. In his large, extended family, one uncle was a career criminal, one a graduate student with his own computer. By the time Ejovi was fourteen, he was spending as much time on the computer as his uncle in college was. Within a year he was well on his way to a hacking career that would lead him to one of the most audacious and potentially dangerous computer break-ins of all time, secret until now.
Along the way, Ejovi found time to become a kickboxing champion and an aspiring actor. Before he finished high school he was combining these pursuits with his hidden life in the hacker underground and an increasingly prominent career as a computer security consultant. At the age of twenty-two he was a top security specialist for one of the world's largest financial houses when his life was forever altered in the cataclysm of September 11, 2001.
Hacker Cracker is at once the most candid revelation to date of the dark secrets of cyberspace and the simple, unaffected story of an inner-city child's triumph over shattering odds to achieve unparalleled success. This riveting autobiography is a Horatio Alger tale for our times: a thrilling, frightening, and ultimately uplifting story of survival and accomplishment.
