Kevin Poulsen is a highly-sought keynote speaker and expert covering such topics as cybersecurity and technology. He is a best-selling author, consultant, media pundit, and thought-leader who has spoken at many conferences around the world where he gives leaders the skills they need to deal with fast, big changes in society, the workplace, and education.

Kevin Poulsen is hired to speak at events and conferences where he can give expertise on important global business affairs. He was a former hacker who is most known for breaking into the computers of telephone companies in the early 1990s to win radio station phone-in contests using the information he obtained there. He ensured that he would be the correct number caller to win prizes such as $20,000 and a Porsche 944 S2 Cabriolet by seizing control of the phone lines that connected the various radio stations in the Los Angeles area.

Kevin Poulsen eluded capture by the FBI after they began their search for him. It took him 18 months on the run until he was ultimately apprehended in April 1991, and it was all because of the television show Unsolved Mysteries on NBC. After pleading guilty to the charge of computer fraud, he was given a prison sentence of somewhat more than five years.

At the time, it was the maximum penalty for hacking in the US. After Poulsen got out of jail, he was temporarily prohibited from using computers. After he changed his ways, he became a journalist, but he didn’t have the same curiosity that made him hack as a kid. His first story for a magazine came out in 1998 in WIRED. It was about programmers who used survivalist techniques to prepare for the Y2K bug.

When Poulsen’s court-ordered supervision ended, he became the editorial director of the California-based internet startup SecurityFocus and started writing about security and hacking news. Poulsen often broke big national media articles that were covered by the mainstream press, such as a computer intrusion at a US hospital that, for the first time, compromised patient medical records, hackers “war driving” for open Wi-Fi networks, a computer virus that made the safety system at an Ohio nuclear power plant inoperable. And a southern California hacker’s successful penetration of a Secret Service agent’s PDA and the subsequent theft of sensitive information.

In 2005, Kevin Poulsen left SecurityFocus and is now a senior editor for Wired.com. In 2006, Poulsen made computerized reporting software that looked through MySpace for sexual offenders who had signed up and found hundreds of them. Because of the story, a child molester was caught in the act, leading to big changes in MySpace and federal law. According to what Poulsen found in 2007, the FBI put a type of spyware called a CIPAV on the computers of criminal defendants.

In June 2010, Poulsen and a co-author broke the story that the government had secretly locked up a young Army intelligence analyst in Iraq on suspicion of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the secret leak website WikiLeaks. Kevin Poulsen is the original editor of the Threat Level blog for Wired. The blog won the 2010 MIN award for best blog and the 2008 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. In 2010, the SANS Institute named Poulsen a “Top Cyber Security Journalist.” This came after he was inducted into the MIN’s Internet Journalism Digital Hall of Fame in 2009.

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Kevin Poulsen