As a kid growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts, Katie Moussouris was “dangerously curious”—her mother would have to hide all the screwdrivers in their house to prevent her from taking everything apart (she made do with a butter knife). When she was eight she taught herself programming using a Commodore 64, and later, as a teenager in the early ’90s, stumbled upon a community of early hackers based in nearby Boston.

Now, as the founder and CEO of Luta Security, Moussouris helps organizations and governments to work collaboratively with hackers through “bug bounty” programs, incentivizing system vulnerabilities to be reported and addressed. It’s hacking for good.

EH: You started hacking young—was it always your intended career path?

KM: I followed in my mom’s footsteps initially, studying biochemistry and molecular biology. That’s how I ended up working at MIT on the Human Genome Project, one of the most data-heavy scientific projects to date at that time. Then we started getting hacked. It reawakened my early passion—I just wanted to get my work done, and protect the MIT center, so I started scanning the systems myself. That basically introduced me to the professional end of hacking, as a “defender”: finding bugs before attackers did.