Kevin Poulsen
More info
- Alias
- Dark Dante
- Affiliation
- SecurityFocus, Wired
- Known for
- The 1990 KIIS-FM stunt, DeadDrop
The hacker who won a Porsche by hijacking a radio station's phone lines, then became one of the security world's best journalists.
In 1990 Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM promised a Porsche 944 to caller number 102. Poulsen, who through phreaking had control of the phone company's switches, blocked every other incoming call and was guaranteed to be 102nd. The FBI chased him for more than a year; in 1994 he was sentenced to 51 months, among the longest terms a US hacker had received at the time.
After his release he became a reporter at SecurityFocus and later Wired, where he covered Kevin Mitnick among others and wrote the book Kingpin. With Aaron Swartz he built DeadDrop, a system for anonymous sources that became SecureDrop after Swartz's death.