Poulsen left SecurityFocus in 2005 and joined WIRED.

hospital that, for the first time, breached patient medical records hackers “war driving” for open Wi-Fi networks a computer virus crippling a safety system at a nuclear power plant in Ohio a southern California hacker’s successful penetration of a Secret Service agent’s PDA, and the attendant theft of confidential agency files. Poulsen repeatedly broke stories of national importance that were picked up by the mainstream press: a computer intrusion at a U.S.

When Poulsen’s court supervision expired, he joined a California-based web start-up called SecurityFocus as editorial director in 2000, and began reporting security and hacking news. His first magazine feature ran in WIRED in 1998, and covered computer programmers who were driven to survivalist tactics by fear of the looming Y2K bug. Reformed, but still possessed of the curiosity that contributed to his hacking when he was younger, he became a journalist. sentence ever given for hacking.įollowing his release from prison Poulsen was briefly barred from using computers. He pleaded guilty to computer fraud and served a little over 5 years in prison. He was featured on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries, and was finally arrested in April 1991 after 18 months on the run. When the FBI started pursuing Poulsen, he went underground as a fugitive. By taking over all the phone lines leading to Los Angeles radio stations, he was able to guarantee that he would be the proper-numbered caller to win, for example, $20,000 in cash, and a Porsche 944 S2 Cabriolet. Kevin Poulsen is a former computer hacker, whose best known hack involved penetrating telephone company computers in the early 1990s to win radio station phone-in contests.

Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen