How do you make sure you’re the 102nd caller in a radio-station contest? Hack the telephone lines. That’s what Kevin Poulsen did to
Kevin Poulsen, aka Dark Dante, is the man law enforcement referred to as “the Hannibal Lecter of computer crime”.
Specializing in phone hacking, Poulson reactivated old Yellow Page escort telephone numbers to come to the aid of an acquaintance who ran a virtual escort agency.
When he hacked into a federal investigation database, red flags went up for the authorities; pursuit began in earnest after he got access to wiretap information from federal computers. When he was featured on the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, the program’s 800-lines crashed.
In April, 1991, Poulsen was arrested in a supermarket; in June, 1994, he pled guilty to seven counts of mail, wire, and computer fraud, as well as money laundering, obstruction of justice, breaking into computers and obtaining information on undercover businesses run by the FBI. For his indiscretions, he received a 51-month prison sentence and was ordered to pay $56,000 in restitution.
In the time since his release, Kevin Poulsen often wrote for the California-based security research firm SecurityFocus; many of his investigative pieces on security and hacking were picked up by the mainstream press. In June, 2005, he became senior editor for WiredNews, where he maintains his blog, 27BStroke6.
Poulsen has also been successful identifying 744 registered sex offenders; one of those offenders, Andres Lubrano, was arrested as a result of Poulsen’s research.
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