To hear Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Byron Acohido explain it, the bad guys are lurking right below your fingertips, coldly recording everything you type in the hope you will reveal sensitive identification information whenever you surf the Web.

But the Seattle-based investigative reporter has the facts to back up that assertion.

Acohido, a Damien Memorial School grad who grew up in Wahiawa, has spent the past four years tracking computer fraud while covering technology for USA Today. He and colleague Jon Swartz have written "Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks and Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity."

The book, which will be released April 1 by Sterling Publishing, can be ordered online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but after you read it, you may decide to stop shopping on the Internet.

"The risk of you getting your computer compromised and/or getting sensitive data stolen online is part of a rising curve and it is rising faster and faster," Acohido said. "Organized crime is a fully matured, $100 billion a year business for data theft and anything surrounding turning data into cash."

"Zero Day Threat" explores lending policies that actually enable cyber crooks to steal your identity right from your personal computer, Acohido said. More disturbing, perhaps, is the book's expose on how giant corporations and technology giants — Bank of America, Microsoft, Google — have failed to address this danger to their customers.

At a time when millions of Americans make online purchases, the idea is terrifying.

"Zero Day Threat" is Acohido's first book.

"I'm a late starter," he said. "I hope it's not the last."

He's toiled for 30 years in journalism, mostly in the Pacific Northwest.

But you can't take the local boy out of Acohido. He still answers his cell phone with "howzit," paddles for a Hawaiian outrigger canoe club in Seattle and surfs the 50-degree waters in the Strait of Juan de Fuca — he's a shortboarder.

Acohido even learned to play the 'ukulele when the last of his four sons went off to college. Now he joins his wife's hula halau when they visit seniors' homes to perform. He and Robin have been married 30 years.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Acohido first became interested in the subject a few years after taking a job at USA Today in 2000. He had joined the national paper after working at the Seattle Times for 13 years and earning a Pulitzer in 1997 for linking a deadly defect in Boeing 737 jetliners to a string of crashes.

Acohido, now 52, took the USA Today job to cover Microsoft. He soon found himself surrounded by revelations about the hidden dangers of the online world. Acohido and fellow USA Today reporter Swartz have been writing about the problem ever since, building an expertise that filled their book.

"I am an investigative reporter and I am always looking to connect the dots and find the second and third layers of the onion," Acohido said.

Acohido and Swartz discovered that the shadowy world of computer virus programmers — people whose motivation was simply to show what they could do — had transformed into a criminal underworld that exploited gaps and weaknesses all over the Internet, Acohido said. They found data harvesters, middle men, vertical markets, specialists, financial scammers, meth addicts and unemployed Eastern European technology experts tapping into crime.

"The point of the book is to show you that the crooks will do what crooks will do when the opportunities are there," he said. "The opportunities are there because the financial services industry — the credit card companies and the credit bureaus — have taken this card-based payment system and this easy credit-issuing system and decided to import it onto the Internet. The Internet was never built for that."

Gaps in online security make it possible for cyber crooks to secretly install keystroke logging programs that collect information you type — your Social Security number, your mother's maiden name, your birth date, PINs. It can happen in the blink of an eye when you visit a corrupted Web site, Acohido said.

"Nobody is doing anything and the bad guys are having a field day," he said. "Consumers are going to have to demand that the payment system be tightened."

The book's title is an ominous "tech term," Acohido explained.

"Zero day is when they know there is a new virus or security hole but they don't know how to fix it, and the bad guys are already using it," he said. "It's when you know there is a new hazard for which there is nothing you can do."

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com.