Bill Landreth, The Cracker

IRL Name: 
William "Bill" Landreth
Biography: 

Bill Landreth (born 1964) is a former American teen hacker notable for his cracking activities during the early 1980s within an exclusive cracking club called "The Inner Circle", and subsequent 1986 disappearance (from which he re-appeared a year later). He was convicted in federal court in 1984 of breaking into some computer systems in the United States, including GTE Telemail's electronic mail network where he peeped at NASA and Defense Department computer correspondence. He is the author of the book "Out of the Inner Circle: A Hacker's Guide to Computer Security" which was published in 1986.

Facts

During his time as a hacker, he was friends with the (then-teenage) Tom Anderson, who, twenty years later, went on to found MySpace.

According to writer Matt Novak, Landreth had been homeless for 30 years as of the mid 2010s.

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References