In the mid-2000s, when most teenagers were busy playing video games, a young boy named Vikash Kumar was busy poking around the digital world with a curiosity that would eventually change his life. What started as harmless sharaarat — little tricks on the internet slowly transformed into a lifelong mission: protecting India from the threats of the cyber age.

“I entered cybersecurity around 2007, not as a career choice but out of fun and the thrill of exploration," .“ .Back then, I didn’t even realize this curiosity would one day shape my profession.” .

In those early days, the internet in India was still young.

USB dongles were the primary way to connect, data was painfully expensive, and speeds were painfully slow. Yet, Vikash Kumar discovered loopholes even in those primitive systems. With some tinkering, he learned that a service provider’s website could still be accessed after data had run out — and by cleverly using proxies, he managed to enjoy unlimited browsing.

His experiments didn’t stop there. In 2008, when e-commerce in India was just beginning to take shape, he stumbled upon a bug in a shopping website’s coupon system. “My friend entered a coupon code, and suddenly there was a power cut. The site gave the discount, but the server never validated it. That moment opened my eyes to how fragile the online world was,” Vikash explains. What seemed like harmless tricks back then were, in fact, powerful lessons in system flaws, session validation, and web security loopholes.

The true turning point, however, came a few years later. As India launched its Digital India initiative, the country rushed into digitization without paying equal attention to security. For Vikash, this was a wake-up call. “I realized cybercrime was not just a prank anymore. It was becoming organized, dangerous, and capable of ruining lives.”

This realization eventually planted the seed for M Cyber Academy — an institution he would go on to found with the vision of making India cyber-aware and cyber-secure.

Today, Vikash Kumar is no longer just the “shararti bachaa” of the internet. He is a mentor, educator, and the CEO of the M Cyber Academy India’s Number one Ethical Hacking Academy that has already trained over 5,000 students in ethical hacking, cyber forensics, and awared over 100000 citizens. His mission is clear: to create warriors, not just witnesses, in the digital battlefield.

As he often tells his students, “The same skills that once made me curious about breaking systems now drive me to protect them. Cybersecurity is not just about technology — it’s about responsibility.”