Kevin Poulsen

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Kevin Poulsen bigraphy, stories - American journalist

Kevin Poulsen : biography

1965 –

Kevin Lee Poulsen (born November 30, 1965) is an American former black hat hacker who is a News Editor at Wired.com.

Biography

He was born in Pasadena, California, on November,30 1965.Kevin Lee Poulsen was born in Passadena, California in 1965. It was claimed that when he was 17 he used his radio shack TRS-80 to attack Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet.

His best-appreciated hack was a takeover of all of the telephone lines for Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller and win the prize of a Porsche 944 S2.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation started pursuing Poulsen, he went underground as a fugitive. When he was featured on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries, the show’s 1-800 telephone lines mysteriously crashed.

Poulsen has reinvented himself as a journalist since his release from prison, and sought to distance himself from his criminal past. Poulsen served in a number of journalistic capacities at California-based security research firm SecurityFocus, where he began writing security and hacking news in early 2000. Despite a late arrival to a market saturated with technology media, SecurityFocus News became a well-known name in the tech news world during Poulsen’s tenure with the company and was acquired by Symantec. His original investigative reporting was frequently picked up by the mainstream press. Poulsen left SecurityFocus in 2005 to freelance and pursue independent writing projects. He became a senior editor for Wired News in June 2005, which hosts his recent () blog, 27BStroke6, which has since been renamed Threat Level.

In October 2006, Poulsen released information detailing his successful search for registered sex offenders using MySpace to solicit sex from children. His work identified 744 registered people with MySpace profiles, and led to the arrest of one, Andrew Lubrano.

Kevin Poulsen broke the initial story of the arrest of U.S. serviceman Bradley Manning, and published the logs of Manning’s supposedly incriminating chats with Adrian Lamo regarding WikiLeaks.

Books

Awards

  • 2011 Webby Award (International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences), Law category, for Threat Level
  • 2011 Webby Award (International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences), People’s Voice award, Law category, for Threat Level
  • 2010 SANS Top Cyber Security Journalists (SANS Institute)
  • 2010, MIN Best of the Web (Magazine Industry Newsletter), Best Blog, for Threat Level
  • 2009, MIN Digital Hall of Fame (Magazine Industry Newsletter) Inductee
  • 2008, Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism (J-Lab) Grand Prize