Underground

A compelling insight into a shadowy and intriguing world

Suelette Dreyfus, and co-author, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, tell the compelling true story of the computer underground and the bizarre lives and crimes of an elite group of young Australian hackers who, in the 1980s and 1990s, took on the forces of the establishment.

They conquered and created chaos amongst some of the world’s biggest and most powerful organisations, including NASA and the US military.

Brilliant and obsessed, many of them found themselves addicted to hacking and phreaking. Some descended into drug addiction and madness. Others have been convicted and jailed for their acts of infiltration and disruption.

Dreyfus and Assange reveal in detail this shadowy and shocking world.

About the Authors

Dr Suelette Dreyfus is an award - winning writer and journalist. In addition to writing the first major book about computer hacking in Australia, Underground, she was the Associate Producer of a documentary about hackers. Her articles have appeared in magazines and news papers such as The Independent (London), The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. She began work on Underground while completing her PhD. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she runs several major research projects in information systems.

Julian Assange is an internet activist, journalist and publisher. Born and raised in Australia, Julian is the founder, spokesperson and editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that started in 2006. In 2010 WikiLeaks began to publish hundreds of thousands of classified details about American involvement in the wares in Afghanistan and Iraq, which created a media storm. At the end of 2010, the site published a series of classified US diplomatic cables, now known as Cablegate.