Joseph Menn: Reporting From Inside Hacker Culture

In March 2019, the day after Beto O'Rourke launched his presidential campaign, a Reuters special report revealed that the Texas congressman had been a teenage member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, the oldest hacking group in America. The reporter was Joseph Menn, who'd learned the secret while researching a book.

It was the kind of scoop Menn has been landing for nearly three decades, from the police beat in Charlotte to the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Reuters and now the Washington Post, where he covers hacking, surveillance and disinformation.

His books have argued, in turn, that a teenager's file-sharing app could upend an industry, that organized crime might break the internet, and that a band of Texas pranksters might just save it.

Joseph Menn at a Glance

• Originally from New England, Menn majored in English at Harvard, where he spent most of his time at the Crimson.
• He started on the police, city hall and courts beats at the Charlotte Observer, then covered the tobacco industry and legal matters at Bloomberg News in its early days.
• Joining the Los Angeles Times in 1999, he handled nearly every tech beat and wrote All the Rave (2003), the inside story of Shawn Fanning's Napster.
• At the Financial Times he covered Silicon Valley and wrote Fatal System Error (2010), which followed a young cybercrime fighter into the world of Russian hacking gangs and tied them to Russian intelligence.
• Over a decade at Reuters he revealed that Yahoo scanned every email for US intelligence, that Apple dropped plans to fully encrypt iCloud backups after the FBI objected, and that Russia helped drive the early success of QAnon.
• Cult of the Dead Cow (PublicAffairs, June 2019) told the story of America's oldest hacking group, and his Reuters report on it revealed Beto O'Rourke's teenage membership.
• In February 2022 he joined the Washington Post as its digital threats reporter in San Francisco; his publisher notes he was a co-finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
• In 2025 and 2026 he was still breaking stories at the Post, from AI-boosted attacks on a thinned-out US cyber defense to the doxing wars around ICE.

The Life of Joseph Menn

Menn's Early Beats

Joseph Menn grew up in New England and went to Harvard, where he majored in English and, by the Post's account, spent most of his time at the Harvard Crimson.

His first newspaper job was about as far from Silicon Valley as American journalism gets: police, city hall and courts at the Charlotte Observer. From there he went to Bloomberg News in its early days, writing about the tobacco industry and legal matters.

Those beats taught him to read indictments and depositions, a skill that'd matter more than any amount of code.

The Napster Years

In 1999 Menn joined the Los Angeles Times, where he'd cover virtually every technology beat the paper had, along with Disney and News Corp. His 2008 staff bio summed up the era with a wink: he'd written "that book about Napster you've been meaning to read."

That book was All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster, published by Crown Business in 2003. It told how a teenager's file-sharing program terrified the music industry and burned out in a storm of lawsuits.

Fatal System Error

Menn moved to the Financial Times to cover Silicon Valley, and in 2010 published the book that made him a cybercrime specialist. Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet followed Barrett Lyon, a California surfer and college dropout who founded an internet security company, as he fought the gangs extorting online businesses with denial-of-service attacks.

The trail ran from San Francisco to Costa Rica, London and Russia, and it uncovered alliances between the Russian mafia and the Russian state. Menn and Lyon told Terry Gross on Fresh Air that cybercrime was far worse than the public understood, and that the internet might not survive it.

A Decade at Reuters

At Reuters, Menn spent a decade on deep cybersecurity coverage while mentoring a team that chased major hacks and cyberwar. The scoops piled up.

In December 2013 he reported that the security pioneer RSA had taken a secret $10 million contract from the NSA to make an agency-designed random number generator the default in its software, a story that landed months after Snowden had exposed the generator as a likely backdoor.

He revealed that Microsoft had failed to warn email users that they'd been hacked by the Chinese army. He reported that Yahoo was scanning every incoming email for specific information supplied by US intelligence officials. He showed that Apple had dropped plans to fully encrypt iCloud backups after the FBI complained it'd hamper investigations.

And he established that Russia had helped drive the early success of the QAnon conspiracy movement, a story that put him at the intersection of hacking and disinformation where he still works.

Cult of the Dead Cow

Menn's third book was a love letter to hacker culture. Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, published by PublicAffairs on June 4, 2019, traced a group founded in 1984 in Lubbock, Texas, whose members went on to release the Back Orifice tool at DEF CON in 1998, coin the word "hacktivism" and seed the security industry with talent, including Peiter "Mudge" Zatko.

The book's biggest revelation ran ahead of it. On March 15, 2019, Menn's Reuters report disclosed that O'Rourke, then a freshly declared presidential candidate, had belonged to the group as a teenager under the handle Psychedelic Warlord. The story went around the world in a day.

That July the Electronic Frontier Foundation threw a party for the book, promising original members who'd keep it "wacky, weird, and wild." In August four key figures from the group's history joined Menn on stage at DEF CON 27 to tell "their greatest hits and screw-ups" from 35 years of mischief.

The Post's Digital Threats Reporter

On January 31, 2022, the Washington Post announced that Menn was joining its tech team as digital threats reporter, covering hacking, surveillance, privacy and disinformation from its San Francisco bureau. He started that February.

According to his publisher, he was part of the Post team named a co-finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The Post's finalist entry that year was a sweeping investigation of how Narendra Modi's government had undermined Indian democracy, including through social media and pressure on American tech giants.

The beat has only grown. In late 2025 he reported that the United States had been cutting its cyber defenses just as AI was boosting attacks, and in early 2026 he covered the doxing fights between ICE and activists and a lawsuit claiming a gaping hole in WhatsApp's security that experts doubted.

He lives in San Francisco with his family, which includes a Lab mix, and surfs when he can.

Joseph Menn: The Reporter the Hackers Talk To

Menn's career tracks the internet's own arc, from a teenager's music app to organized crime to the question of whether hackers can be the good guys.

He's kept the receipts at every stage, and hackers keep talking to him because he gets the details right and the history straight.

Thirty years in, the man who wrote that Napster book you've been meaning to read is still filing. You should probably read the others too.