Product Description: [Foreword by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Inc.] Kevin Mitnick, the world's most wanted computer hacker, managed to hack into some of the country's most powerful--and seemingly impenetrable--agencies and companies. By conning employees into giving him private information and maneuvering through layers of security, he gained access to data that no one else could...read more

Presents the personal story of a young ghetto kid from Brooklyn who became one of the world's foremost computer hackers and then a security specialist for one of the world's top financial firms.

Presents the personal story of a young ghetto kid from Brooklyn who became one of the world's foremost computer hackers and then a security specialist for one of the world's top financial firms.

Like other kids in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Ejovi Nuwere grew up among thugs and drug dealers. When he was eleven, he helped form a gang; at twelve, he attempted suicide. In his large, extended family, one uncle was a career criminal, one a graduate student with his own computer. By the time Ejovi was fourteen, he was spending as much time on the computer as his uncle was. Within a year he was well on his way to a hacking career that would lead him to one of the most audacious and potentially dangerous computer break-ins of all time, secret until now.Before he finished high school he had created a hidden life in the hacker underground and an increasingly prominent career as a computer security consultant. At the age of twenty-two, he was a top security specialist for one of the world's largest financial houses.Hacker Cracker is at once the most candid revelation to date of the dark secrets of cyberspace and the simple, unaffected story of an inner-city child's triumph over shattering odds to achieve unparalleled success.

Drawing on interviews with Poulsen, convicted of computer piracy and espionage, the author traces Poulsen's long career, from his arrest at seventeen to his descent underground in Hollywood, where he used computers to stalk movie stars. (view table of contents)