Samy Kamkar

About Samy

• When he was a child, his mom bought him a home computer, and he started hanging out in chat rooms.
• One day, someone in a chatroom made his computer crash; after he was done freaking out, he thought, “That was so cool!” and became obsessed with hacking.
• When he was 15, he dropped out of high school and his mom made him get a job; he started writing and selling software from home.
• When that job no longer interested him, he left to co-found his own company, Fonality—he was 17 years old.
• Two years later, he wrote the infamous “Samy worm”; the worm spread to over one million Myspace users in 20 hours, making it the fastest-spreading virus of all time.
• The Secret Service raided his home and confiscated his electronics; a court banned him from technology for three years.
• Says he never wanted to be malicious about hacking; he was more interested in finding and using computer vulnerabilities in new ways.
• He now alerts companies to any vulnerabilities that he finds in their products so that they can fix them and improve consumer safety.