As a teenager in suburban Chicago in the 1990s, Jack Koziol and his friends weren’t into sports or pop-up videos on VH1 or watching episodes of “Dawson’s Creek.”
They were heavy into computer hacking.
“Back then it was really about curiosity and about mischief,” says Koziol, 44, who graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in History in 2000. “We all thought we were Matthew Broderick in Wargames, running around, unleashing mayhem. It was really the inspiration for everything.”
Those teenage exploits have led to a hugely successful career for Koziol, the founder and CEO of Infosec Institute, a Madison-based company that teaches employees at some of the most important companies in the world how to protect themselves from hacks and cybersecurity attacks. Infosec’s client list includes 70 percent of the Fortune 500 companies, and more than 10,000 clients in key sectors like banking, higher education and the defense industry.
“When I was a teenager, people assumed that hacking was only something that bad guys did,” says Koziol. “But if there are problems in your networks and systems and software, the good guys can find them just as easily as the bad guys can. There was just a disparity in knowledge.”
Koziol’s first gig out of college was in the security department of a bank. Bored out of his IT-loving gourd, Koziol used the downtime and his experiences as a teen hacker to research and write a pair of how-to books about cybersecurity. One of those books was The Shellcoder’s Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes. The book’s publisher expected modest sales—maybe 200 copies. In its first year, it spent several weeks on Amazon’s Top Ten list and sold more than 80,000 copies.
“It was really the first time anyone had written something like that in a book format,” says Koziol. “It was heavily focused on tech that nobody was really supposed to be interested in.”
turns out, plenty of people were interested. Koziol began using his vacation time at the bank to tour the country, giving talks to a wide variety of groups on how to use hacking as a force for good. When the vacation dried up, he decided to quit and make a business out of it. In 2004, he founded Infosec Institute.
Infosec offers two subscription-based products, one for general employees that runs simulated phishing and security awareness training to help everyone learn how to identify phishing threats, and another aimed at technical staff, teaching them how to securely code, configure and defend their systems and assets. Both products are constantly being updated to incorporate newly identified security threats.
“Right now, the most successful hacking app on the Internet is someone sending you an email pretending to be somebody else and just asking you to do something, like buy gift cards,” says Koziol. “There's no malware, nothing to click on, nothing that asks you to send your password here or call this number. That's the most successful hack and there's no system that can ever block that.”
With new threats emerging almost daily, Koziol says he finds it shocking that there are currently more than three million open jobs in cybersecurity. And diversity remains a real concern for the industry.
“Most of the people in cybersecurity look like me—a white male who went to a four-year university and worked at a bank,” says Koziol. “Without more inclusive technologies and hiring practices, we just shut off too many of the available people.”
Koziol has been working to address the disparity. He and his staff recently launched a program called Infosec Gives, in which the company gives 1 percent of its profit, products and staff time to worthy causes in the community. Koziol estimates InfoSec has given away nearly half a million software licenses to schools and community organizations that wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford them.
Even though he ended up in a technology field, history is still a passion for Koziol and it is an interest he’s managed to pass on to at least one of his three sons. During the pandemic, the Koziol boys listened to history podcasts and noted parallels between other trying times people have lived through, like the English during the Battle of Britain.
“Having a history degree really helped me with critical thinking and written communication skills,” says Koziol. “I mean, that's much of what you do in life.”
Back in his UW-Madison days, Koziol remembers sparring with John Sharpless, a since-retired professor of history who once ran against then-Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin.
“I remember getting into a big heated argument with him about the military techniques of Aztecs, which was pretty wild.”
Like his intellectual skirmish with Sharpless, Koziol has never been one to run from a challenge. Even when, in his chosen field, that challenge is constantly shifting.
“Cybercrime is even more of a concern than I ever thought it would be in my lifetime,” he says. “It has geopolitical implications, affecting governments and election outcomes. it's really something that's just hard to defend against. All you can do take the right risk management steps to reduce the effects.”