Former NSA hacker steps into investment space

Washington

WHEN Ron Gula joined the National Security Agency (NSA) in the mid-1990s, the world was still storing information on floppy disks.

The agency hired him as a "penetration tester", a white-hat hacker who looks for holes in computer networks so that they can be patched before the enemy finds them. He spent years breaking into government servers and putting together reports detailing potential weak spots, part of a skill set that would prove critical throughout his career.