| Tsutomu Shimomura | |
| Birth Date: | 23 October 1964 |
| Birth Place: | Nagoya, Japan |
| Known For: | Catching Kevin Mitnick |
| Occupation: | Computer programmer, physicist |
| Education: | California Institute of Technology |
is a Japanese-born physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick. Takedown, his 1996 book on the subject with journalist John Markoff, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in 2000.
Shimomura was a founder of semiconductor company Neofocal Systems, and was CEO and CTO until 2016.
Born in Japan, Shimomura is the son of Osamu Shimomura, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended Princeton High School.[1]
At Caltech he studied under Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. After Caltech, he went on to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he continued his hands-on education in the position of staff physicist with Brosl Hasslacher and others on subjects such as lattice gas automata.
In 1989, he became a research scientist in computational physics at the University of California, San Diego, and senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Shimomura also became a noted computer security expert, working for the National Security Agency.
In 1992, he testified before Congress on issues regarding the privacy and security (or lack thereof) on cellular telephones. Author Bruce Sterling described his first meeting with Shimomura in the documentary Freedom Downtime: