For Kunal Agarwal, being a hacker is less about breaking into systems than about wanting to understand how they work—and questioning whether they work as they should. In a SecurityWeek interview published November 4, 2025, the dope.security founder and CEO calls that instinct part of his “DNA.” He also describes how consequences, mentors, and professional ethics helped direct it toward defensive cybersecurity.
What Agarwal means by “the DNA of a hacker”
“It’s in my DNA,” Agarwal told Kevin Townsend of SecurityWeek. He also said, “Being a hacker is a mindset.” In his account, that mindset means persistent curiosity: looking beneath a system’s surface, asking how it works, and noticing what might be exposed or vulnerable.
“DNA” is Agarwal’s metaphor for a lasting disposition, not a scientific claim about genetics. The profile’s point is that curiosity and rule-questioning do not by themselves decide whether someone uses technical skill to cause harm or to protect people. The boundaries a person learns and the people who influence them matter in his story, too.
How curiosity led to trouble—and a second chance
Agarwal says he grew up in California and became interested in technology as a child while looking for ways to access movies and games. He learned how emulators and ROMs worked so he could play Nintendo games on a PC. Later, as a student, he says he accessed his school’s grading system out of curiosity, even though he already had good grades.
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According to Agarwal’s account in the interview, he was caught and spoke with the San Jose district attorney. He says he persuaded the prosecutor to give him probation and a productive alternative to juvenile detention. These are events as Agarwal recounts them; the profile does not present them as independently corroborated findings. The episode is not simply a story of clever technical exploration: accessing a school grading system crossed a boundary and brought serious consequences.
How mentors shaped his ethical boundaries
Agarwal describes rule-breaking and questioning as part of his nature, but says he learned what was acceptable from the people around him. He credits older colleagues at Symantec with teaching him to be honest with customers and not to push them toward decisions that were wrong for them.
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He recalled a principle that stayed with him: “Every time I have a customer conversation, it is drilled into my mind that you never lie to a customer, and that you never force customers to do something they really shouldn’t do.” In the profile, that lesson gives his hacker identity a practical ethical counterweight: curiosity can help identify a weakness, but responsibility guides what to do with that knowledge.
From UC Berkeley to cybersecurity leadership
SecurityWeek reports that Agarwal studied and worked as a researcher at UC Berkeley before joining Symantec as a software engineer in 2013. The profile says he moved into product management in 2014 and became general manager for the Internet of Things in 2017. It reports that he left Symantec for Forcepoint in 2020, then founded dope.security in 2021 after leaving Forcepoint.
The profile describes dope.security as a provider of a cloud-native secure web gateway. It connects Agarwal’s instinct to think about how systems might be exploited with defensive work to find and reduce vulnerabilities. That is career context, not evidence of the product’s performance or an independent comparison with other security services.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What his story does—and does not—show
Agarwal says he still finds himself wondering how a website works “under the hood” and what risks or information it might disclose. His account illustrates how the same habit of probing systems can be put to different ends: finding weaknesses to exploit or finding them so they can be addressed.
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His experience suggests that a technical disposition is not destiny. In this profile, consequences and guidance—from the district attorney’s intervention to colleagues’ customer-ethics lessons—help explain how he came to use his curiosity in a defensive professional setting. It is one person’s account, not a universal explanation of hacker motivations or a measured finding about nature and nurture.
Read Kevin Townsend’s interview with Kunal Agarwal at SecurityWeek. dope.security also lists the interview in its newsroom.
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