If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you. If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter. It's a curious practice and I'm not sure where I stand on it.
Kevin Mitnick? Marcus Hutchins? Robert Tappan Morris?
What?
> If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter.
To the best of my understanding, Unit 8200 is filled with military conscripts, i.e. is primarily 18-somethings doing their mandatory service. You get assigned to it based on an aptitude test. The widely held idea that it’s a uniformly elite entity rather than the IDF’s space camp is a triumph of propaganda.
According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
Unit 8200 alumni have founded NSO which provides the Pegasus spyware.
Meanwhile, Lahav, the CEO/founder was in Unit 81, another Israeli military incubator for tech firms, basically.
If you believe the IDF has no involvement in what Irregular is doing then there's very little left anyone could say to convince you.
(The problem with “alumni” is that it means very little in mandatory systems. Unit 8200 is where Israel parks its dorks, and it stands to reason that dorks are the ones who tend to start tech firms.)