Over the years I've published tens of thousands of words on "hackers." I wrote "Hacking Bhabha," a story about the "hack" of an Indian atomic research station, when gangs of computer miscreants went wilding through its servers, and the 1998 takedown of the New York Times website, which, for me, resulted in the threat of a justice department subpoena. I interviewedKevin Mitnick while he was still in prison and sat at my computer one night as someone who called himself MagicFX replaced eBay's home page with his own that said: "Proof by MagicFX that you can't always trust people... not even huge companies." I profiled an IT consultant selling exploits to compromise software products as varied as Microsoft Office, Mozilla Firefox, SAP, and HP while working for HP in France. In my first book, Spooked, I dedicated a chapter to a hacker who was threatened by terrorists. I outed a guy who made up a whole magazine story about hackers extorting the corporations they penetrated, and fell for a hoax about a self-proclaimed online kiddie porn vigilante. And I've also been called a "talentless hack" by enraged readers, usually in invective-filled emails.
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