John Gregory Markoff (born October 24, 1949[1][2]) is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016,[3] and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.

In 1984 he became an editor at Byte Magazine and in 1985 he left to become a reporter in the business section of the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote about Silicon Valley.

In December 1993 he wrote an early article about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age.

Markoff also co-wrote, with Tsutomu Shimomura, the book Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw about the chase.

He covered Jim Gillogly's 1999 break of the first three sections of the CIA's Kryptos cipher [1], and writes regularly about semiconductors and supercomputers as well.

He wrote the first two articles describing Admiral John Poindexter's return to government and the creation of the Total Information Awareness project.