Philip D. Lapsley (born 1965) is an American electrical engineer, hacker, author and entrepreneur.
Lapsley attended the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1980s, graduating with a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1988 and 1991. While there he became involved in the Berkeley UNIX project and co-founded the eXperimental Computing Facility, where he was involved in defending against the Morris worm in 1988.
Lapsley received an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Lapsley co-authored RFC 977, Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP),[1] an Internet standard for transmission of USENET news articles, and was the primary developer of the NNTP reference implementation, nntpd. After leaving Berkeley he co-founded Berkeley Design Technology, Inc., a digital signal processing technology advisory firm, and is the author of a book on DSP processors.[2] He later co-founded SmartTouch, a biometric financial transaction processing company.
Lapsley worked at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant until 2008.
His book Exploding the Phone, on the history of phone phreaking, was published by Grove/Atlantic in February, 2013.[3]