Andy Greenberg: From a Hacked Jeep to Sandworm

Most reporters cover a hack after it happens. Andy Greenberg volunteered to be the victim: in the summer of 2015 he drove a Jeep Cherokee onto a St. Louis highway and let two researchers take it over from a laptop ten miles away.

That stunt is the most famous story of a career spent on the hacker beat for Forbes and Wired. Greenberg has interviewed a dark web drug lord, reconstructed the most destructive cyberattack in history and followed a bitcoin trail into the worst corners of the internet.

His biggest subject, though, was a crew of Russian hackers nobody would name. It took him years, a book and a federal indictment to put faces to them.

Andy Greenberg at a Glance

• Greenberg started on the hacker beat at Forbes in 2007 and rose to senior reporter there before joining Wired in 2014.
• In August 2013 he published a rare interview with the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous boss of the Silk Road drug market, seven weeks before the site was seized.
• His first book, This Machine Kills Secrets (Dutton, 2012), traced the leakers and cypherpunks behind WikiLeaks and later landed on The Verge's list of the greatest tech books.
• In July 2015 Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hacked a Jeep with Greenberg at the wheel, and Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles within days.
• His 2018 Wired reconstruction of NotPetya, the worm that caused more than $10 billion in damage, won a Gerald Loeb Award.
• Sandworm (Doubleday, 2019) followed that worm and Ukraine's blackouts back to a GRU unit, and in October 2020 the US indicted six of its officers.
• Tracers in the Dark (Doubleday, 2022) told how investigators used the bitcoin blockchain to take down the dark web's biggest markets, and its Wired excerpt won him a second Loeb Award.
• In January 2026 he told the story of a source trapped inside a Laotian scam compound who leaked its secrets and then had to escape.

The Life of Andy Greenberg

Greenberg's Forbes Years

Andy Greenberg joined Forbes in 2007 and took the beat few people at a business magazine wanted: hackers. His own Forbes bio explained the appeal. "My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction," he wrote.

For seven years he covered security researchers, privacy fights and the early internet underground, rising to senior reporter.

The beat paid off in August 2013, when Greenberg landed an interview with the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonymous operator of the Silk Road, the bitcoin-fueled drug market hidden on Tor. "Most black market drug lords don't give interviews," he wrote. "But the Dread Pirate Roberts isn't most drug lords."

Seven weeks later the FBI seized the site and arrested its creator, Ross Ulbricht.

This Machine Kills Secrets

Greenberg's first book arrived in September 2012. This Machine Kills Secrets, published by Dutton, chronicled the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks, and the cypherpunks who built the tools to make leaking anonymous.

It was a book about a movement rather than a single scandal, and it aged well. The Verge later named it one of the ten greatest tech books of all time.

The Jeep on the Highway

In 2014 Greenberg moved to Wired, and the following summer he agreed to serve as what he called a "digital crash-test dummy."

Charlie Miller, then a security researcher at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of vehicle security research at IOActive, had spent a year building an exploit for the Uconnect dashboard computers in Jeep Cherokees. Back in 2013 they'd hacked a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius from the back seat, disabling Greenberg's brakes in an Indiana parking lot. Now they could do it over the cellular network from anywhere in the country.

So in July 2015 Greenberg drove a Cherokee at 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis while Miller sat at his laptop ten miles west. The vents blasted cold air, the radio jumped to a hip-hop station at full volume and wiper fluid smeared the windshield. Then they cut the transmission, and Greenberg watched an 18-wheeler grow in his rearview mirror as the Jeep slowed to a crawl.

His story was an automaker's nightmare in print. Within days Chrysler announced a recall of 1.4 million vehicles, mailing owners USB sticks with a software patch.

Tracing Sandworm

In December 2015 hackers turned off the lights for a quarter million Ukrainians, the first cyberattack ever to cause a blackout. A second attack hit Kyiv the next year. Then, on June 27, 2017, a worm called NotPetya tore out of Ukraine and across the world.

Greenberg's 2018 feature, The Untold Story of NotPetya, opened at the Copenhagen headquarters of the shipping giant Maersk, where screens suddenly demanded $300 in bitcoin and confused staff gathered at a help desk inside the corporate gift shop. The worldwide damage came to more than $10 billion, a White House estimate confirmed to him by former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert.

The piece won the 2019 Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting. The group behind the worm was known as Sandworm, and Greenberg's book of that name, published by Doubleday on November 5, 2019, followed the researchers who tracked its fingerprints from the Ukrainian grid to the 2018 Winter Olympics and finally to Unit 74455 of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, working out of a building known as the Tower in the Moscow suburb of Khimki.

In October 2020 the Justice Department unsealed charges against six of the unit's officers. "No country has weaponized its cyber capabilities as maliciously or irresponsibly as Russia," assistant attorney general John Demers said. The book had already pointed at the unit; now the government had names.

Sandworm went on to win a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Citation.

Following the Money

Greenberg's next book started with an idea most of the internet believed: that bitcoin was anonymous. Tracers in the Dark, published by Doubleday on November 15, 2022, told the story of the investigators who proved it wasn't.

Its centerpiece is a 2017 raid in a suburb of Atlanta, where IRS criminal investigator Chris Janczewski watched agents search the home of a high school assistant principal. Janczewski had reached that house by following payments on the blockchain to a site called Welcome to Video, the largest child abuse market on the dark web, and from there to hundreds of men around the world.

The Wired excerpt won Greenberg a second Loeb Award in 2023, and his four-part series on the hunt for the kingpin of the AlphaBay market ran alongside the book.

Greenberg Today

Greenberg is still a senior writer at Wired, where he also hosts the video series Hacklab, a National Magazine Award finalist. In 2025 and 2026 his stories ranged from a secret war game about China hacking the US water supply to a kids' smartwatch that let hackers stalk him.

The most remarkable arrived by email. A computer engineer being forced to work inside a crypto-scam compound in the Golden Triangle of northern Laos wrote to Greenberg from a Proton Mail address and asked to be called Red Bull.

Over Signal he sent flowcharts and step-by-step guides to the "pig butchering" romance scams run from the compound, and then he had to get out alive. Greenberg published the story in January 2026.

He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.

Andy Greenberg: Crash-Test Dummy for the Digital Age

Greenberg's trick has always been to put a human being, often himself, in the middle of a story that'd otherwise be a pile of malware samples and court filings.

The Jeep made car hacking real for millions of readers. The Maersk help desk made a state-sponsored worm feel like a Tuesday at the office. The raid in Atlanta made a blockchain into a crime scene.

Two decades in, he's still answering emails from strangers in impossible places, and still getting into the car.