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Elite security posse fostered founders of WhatsApp, Napster

07
Mar
2014

By Joseph Menn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A few days after selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, Jan Koum stepped into a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco to celebrate with old friends, including CEOs, reformed hackers and a few people who fell into both those camps. Conducted over snacks and beer, the late-night festivity was a spontaneous reunion of a security super-group that had come to Koums aid in 2000 as he grappled with a denial-of-service attack that knocked Yahoo offline when Koum was responsible for security there. The two most famous exceptions are WhatsApp, the messaging service that Koum co-founded, and Napster, the pioneering file-sharing company that was shut down by the music industry in 2001. Napster Co-founder Shawn Fanning was one of several members still in high school.

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