Kevin Poulsen

Kevin Poulsen is an award-winning journalist who has worked at WIRED magazine, The Daily Beast and The Wall Street Journal. A one-time hacker, Poulsen was prosecuted in 1991 for using his illicit access to telephone company systems to cheat at radio station phone-in contests. He began writing in 1997, and later served as editor of SecurityFocus before joining WIRED in 2005.

While at WIRED, Poulsen conducted a computer-assisted investigation into the presence of sex offenders on social networking sites that spawned federal legislation, broke the news of an Army intelligence analyst’s leaking of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, and conceived and led the development of SecureDrop, an open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources that is today used at over a dozen news organizations, including the New York Times and the Associated Press. At the Wall Street Journal, Poulsen’s front page stories revealed TikTok’s circumvention of privacy restrictions on Android phones, and the first ransomware attack to be directly implicated in the death of a victim.

Poulsen worked as a technical consultant for the 2015 film Blackhat, and he is the author of “Kingpin – How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground” (Crown).