Brian Krebs

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Brian Krebs is an American journalist, born in 1972, in Alabama. His father worked in the intelligence industry, and his mother was a homemaker.

Krebs attended Fairfax High School, in Fairfax, Virginia, and then George Mason University, where he received a degree in political science in 1994.

In 1996, Krebs went to work for the circulation department of The Washington Post. This was primarily a department charged with fielding calls from subscribers who either wanted to stop or start delivery of their paper or who wanted to lodge a complaint about the failed delivery of a paper (as a youth, Krebs spent nearly four years regularly delivering The Washington Post to dozens of customers in the Springfield area.)

After 6 months of working in the circulation department, Krebs obtained a position in the Post mailroom as a copy aide who split his time as a dictationist transcribing stories from sports games to files from reports in Bosnia.

From there, Krebs was hired as an editorial assistant on The Washington Post's Editorial page, primarily responsible for processing Letters to the Editor and occasionally laying out the Letters to the Editor pages, including the Saturday political cartoons page and the Monday Letters to the Editor page. In 1998, Krebs was hired on as an Editorial Aide to the Washington Post Financial Desk. In both positions, Krebs was a contributing writer on a number of stories at different sections of the paper, including the Style, Fast Forward, Metro and Financial sections.

In late 1999, Krebs accepted a staff writer position at Newsbytes.com, a technology newswire service owned by The Washington Post.

He worked for NewsBytes.com (owned by the Washington Post) until it was dissolved in 2002, at which point he was hired as a regular reporter. He is best known for writing about security issues for the Washington Post SecurityFix blog, which he founded in March 2005. Dozens of the articles that Krebs has written for the website have also been printed in the hardcopy Washington Post newspaper itself.

In May 2005, Krebs interviewed the intruders responsible for hacking Paris Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick. It was discovered that the intruders were also responsible for an incident at Lexis-Nexis, which netted them personal information on over 300,000 individuals.

In August 2006, Krebs had an exclusive interview with the SecureWorks reseachers who demonstrated a wireless exploit on the MacBook( "Hijack a MacBook in 60 Seconds or Less" story). In his intial story, Krebs reported that he saw security researchers David Mayor hijiack a MacBook through a flaw in the native Airport wireless drivers. However, in the video demonstration of the exploit shown to the public, Maynor stated that the hack was being done through a third party wireless 802.11g adaptor. SecureWorks also issued a statement saying that the exploit was run through the third party wireless card after Kreb's inital version caused a major controversy. Apple later released a wireless update to the Airport drivers, but denied that it was related to SecureWork's investigation.

This story has generated a great deal of commentary and controversy, and many people have criticized Krebs's story for being sensationalistic. Other people have also noted he has not updated the story.

[edit] Selected articles from the Washington Post

[edit] Awards

  • 2004 Carnegie Mellon CyLab Cybersecurity Journalism Award of Merit[1]
  • In 2005, CNET News.com listed Security Fix as one of the top 100 blogs, saying, "Good roundup of significant security issues. The Washington Post's Brian Krebs offers a userful, first-person perspective."[2]

[edit] References


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