Mark Abene

Name: Mark Abene, aka Phiber Optik

Born: 1972 in New York City, USA

Computer-related contributions

• Information security expert, programmer, cryptographer.
• Computer phone hacker of the 1980s.
• Former member of the hacker groups LOD (Legion of Doom) and MOD (Masters of Deception).
• Spent 10 months in federal prison for hacking phone companies.
• Founder of founded TraceVector, an intrusion detection firm that uses supercomputing and data analytics.
• Stared as "The Inside Man" in the fiction film Urchin (2009).

Honors and awards

• Character in the non-fiction book Masters of Deception — The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace (1995).
• Appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Esquire, in debates and on television.

Quotes

"I wouldn't do this again now, but only because I was caught, I'm not telling people not to do the things I did. There's always going to be people hacking. All I'm doing is cautioning them they've got to be careful."