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technology
Newnan's Scott Lunsford admits he's always been one to push the envelope. As an ethical hacker, he gets paid to break into computer systems and explore the boundaries of cyberspace.
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these computers,” says Lunsford, an environmentalist at heart who credits his parents and his grandmother, Ida Lee Lunsford, for his strong sense of ethics. “I wasn’t a bad kid or ill-willed,” he says. “I’ve always been one to break the rules, not because I wanted to do things I wasn’t supposed to, but ever since I was really young I was the kid that was trying to get past anything that had a security measure on it. I figured out at a really young age how to get free Cokes out of a Coke machine, and I only did that once.” At Newnan High School, Lunsford met his first mentor — Gary Waters, a computer science teacher and head of the district’s technology department until 2000, when he retired. Waters gave Lunsford, a kid who was academically advanced but a handful behaviorally, access to computers other kids didn’t have. Because of his aptitude and passion, Lunsford became one of the leaders of the computer science club. “One of the things I remember about Scott was the year the Comdex Computer
Show came to Atlanta,” Waters says. “The computer science club had raised some money and they wanted to go to the show and buy a computer with a speech synthesizer. You could type a word into the computer and the computer would say the word out loud.” “We picked up the computer and brought it back to the school,” continues Waters. “I let Scott and some of the kids set it up. Next thing you know, the kids were putting in curse words and the computer was saying them.” Years later, Waters hired Lunsford to set up security on the school system’s computer network. “His skills were way beyond anything I could do or imagine,” Waters recalls. In between Lunsford’s high school graduation in 1988 and his job with Coweta County Schools, his dad encouraged him to pursue a degree in the business world or in environmental design at UGA — anything other than computer science because, according to his dad, “computers were for secretaries.”