Kevin Poulsen is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at WIRED magazine. He began writing in 1997, and later served as editor of SecurityFocus before joining WIRED in 2005.

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. In 2006 Poulsen conducted a computer-assisted investigation into the presence of sex offenders on social networking sites, which spawned federal legislation. In 2010, Poulsen broke the news that an Army intelligence analyst named Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning had been quietly arrested for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

More recently, Poulsen worked with the late Aaron Swartz to design and develop SecureDrop, an open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources, now used at over a dozen news organizations including the Washington Post and the Associated Press.

He is the author of Kingpin — How One Hacker Took Over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground (Crown, 2011).