Who is Alex Poucher? Terry "Alex"ander Poucher

Who is Alex Poucher?

Terry "Alex"ander Poucher (March 26th, 1985), otherwise known as A-Squared, is a "former" cracker / hacker most known for defacing the webpages of several federal and municipal government websites in the United States, as well as several in private industry at the age of 17. Poucher later became known for his work as a Nerdcore hip hop artist.

CHILD HOOD

Poucher was born in Festus, Missouri - United States.[1]

He has stated in interviews that he was exposed to computers at an extremley young age, learning to program BASIC from age 4. From there, he taught himself how to navigate MSDOS and System V. Before long, he was involved in the local bulletin board systems and learning various other programming languages by reading books and examples.

Poucher attended Farmington High School in Farmington, dropping out of high school at the age of 16 to focus on a career in the information technology field.

HACKING ACTIVITIES

In 1999, Poucher gained notoriety, media coverage, and a restitution bill for defacing the web site of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center with a modified frontend for a commonly used msadc.pl exploit. Other United States government websites that were hacked include the Bureau of Land Management's national training center and the Defense Contract Audit Agency. At least 40 other websites were tampered with by Poucher, including Airspace USA, the bank Altamira, Nissan Motors, Honda, the monitoring station for the United States Geological Survey and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Poucher stated he believed he was "on the good side" as he broke into company websites to alert them of security problems, not to cause harm. In May 2000 Poucher was charged with criminal mischief and computer crime for breaking into the Farmington, Missouri Police website, causing an estimated $25,000 in damages, though all $25,000 are costs of "time lost" to users.

These defacements launched him into the spotlight, making him a resource for the media, commenting on other hacking-related events, such as the denial of service attacks on Yahoo, eBay, Gay.com, and other well-known websites in 2000.

MUSIC

Poucher performs as an MC and a DJ under the name A-Squared. He is best known for his work in the genre of Nerdcore hip-hop, in 2008 producing the album On The Track. The album was created by adding vocals to re-mixed digital music from original Nintendo games, and was described in Newsweek as a "classic of the style."

In Las Vegas, Poucher performed in 2008 at the Consumer Electronics Show and in 2009 performed at the Players Ball, appearing with the rappers Xzibit, Ice Cube and Too Short.

In 2010 an untitled demo by British electronic rock band Proxies was leaked onto the internet containing a feature by Poucher.

Poucher co-owns and runs an independent record label, Nerdy South Records.