Cybersecurity Executive Chaim Mazal Was a Preteen Hacker
Cybersecurity Executive Chaim Mazal Was a Preteen Hacker
https://www.businessinsider.com/cybersecurity-executive-chaim-mazal-was-a-preteen-hacker-2026-3
Publish Date: 2026-03-07 05:14:00
Source Domain: www.businessinsider.com
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 41-year-old Chaim Mazal, chief security officer of Gigamon, a cloud security company based in Santa Clara, California. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I got my first computer in the early ’90s when I was 8 years old and living in Florida. A few years later, I started hanging out in hacker chat rooms on a service called Internet Relay Chat. My parents had no idea.
I was very taken by the hacker community. The people in these chat rooms talked about making programs to perform various tasks. It was a large community, and we would all share information. Some people in it helped me learn how to create internet utility tools, and not all of them were so great.
For example, when I was 12, I wrote a program that could generate credit card numbers. I then used those cards to purchase commercial software and distribute it for free. It was the coolest thing that I could think of doing at the time.
I didn’t get arrested, but some of my friends did. That encouraged me to change my trajectory.
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How my hacking background helped me
After high school, I enrolled in a local community college to study computer science. However, I didn’t finish my degree until later in life because…
