Jim Melnick is co-author with Ken Dunham on a fascinating new book revealing exclusive new details into the botherder cyber criminal underground of the Internet .  Learn amazing details about some of the earliest botherders on the Internet and what is happening within the criminal underground in 2008.

Jim Melnick is the Director of Global Threat Intelligence at iSIGHT Partners, Inc., based in Dallas. He formerly served with iDefense/VeriSign, where he founded and managed the Weekly Threat Report, cited by Business Week in 2005 as providing "some of the most incisive analysis in the business, particularly about Russian hackers." Mr. Melnick is a recognized expert in threat intelligence and cyber crime issues as these relate to computer security, cited in such publications as the New York Times.   He has also done ground-breaking research on numerous Chinese hacker groups.

He has a master’s degree in Russian area studies from Harvard University and a master’s in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College. He served for 16 years as a civilian analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community, first at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and later with the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon in the Soviet political/military analysis division. During the Cold War, he briefed senior Defense Department leaders during many key events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 coup against former Soviet Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev. He also once presented a special briefing at the White House Situation Room during the Reagan presidency.  Prior to leaving government service in 2000, he received a Presidential Commission medal for his work on the Y2K problem on behalf of the National Intelligence Council.

His articles have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, the Naval War College Review, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies and elsewhere. He retired as a Colonel in the US Army Reserves in 2006, where his last assignment was as the Officer-in-Charge of a joint Reserve unit supporting the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration at the Pentagon.