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