Joseph Menn
More info
- Occupation
- Journalist
- Known for
- Cult of the Dead Cow (2019), the RSA–NSA story (2013)
Security reporter who revealed that the NSA paid RSA $10 million for a backdoored default.
Menn has covered security for the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters and the Washington Post. In December 2013 he reported for Reuters that RSA Security had received $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default in its BSAFE library — the random number generator cryptographers had distrusted for years and that the Snowden documents singled out. RSA denied knowing about the backdoor.
His books cover the trade end to end: Fatal System Error (2010) on Russian extortion gangs and DDoS, and Cult of the Dead Cow (2019) on the hacker group cDc. The latter revealed, almost in passing, that presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke had been a teenage member — which was, naturally, the detail every other paper ran with.