From bad game hacker to an elite good red team hacker.
Chris Thompson is a hacker. His journey took him from hacking game controls as a teenager to become the founder of IBM’s first dedicated red team and then global head of X-Force Red. In 2024 he founded and remains the organizer of Offensive AI Con, and in 2025 moved from IBM to be co-founder and CEO at RemoteThreat.
He had a non-standard entrée into and progress within this profession. “Back in high school I got interested in a girl who was into hacking,” he explains. Before then, he owns to have been a bit of a rebel: “Always trying to circumvent or break the rules, whether that was with parents or teachers, the school computer lab or whatever.”
But it was meeting his girlfriend that “got me interested in hacking – in developing malware and cracking computer games and software. I wanted access to Photoshop to create art, or I wanted access to DJ or sound mixing programs. And so, it was looking at how to bypass the activation gates for that software that quickly turned into game hacking and trying to target game servers, multiplayer servers.”
Then he digressed from the usual hacking route. By the time he was seventeen, “I realized I really wanted to help these game server companies lock down their servers and make them more able to withstand my attacks.”
