COREY Thuen, founder and CEO of Gravwell, is profiled as a hacker with a distinctive mindset he calls the “evil bit” — an adversarial streak he believes is innate and essential for finding security weaknesses. The piece presents Thuen as someone who recruits for Gravwell by seeking candidates who possess this mindset, while insisting the “evil bit” can be used for good, such as strengthening security for critical infrastructure.
It traces his path from a curious youngster who tinkered with early Packard Bell systems, through degrees at the University of North Dakota and University of Idaho, and into a career focused on industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT).
The article details Thuen’s professional trajectory: co‑founding Southfork Security after leaving Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in 2013, contributing to an INL ICS tool called Sophia, and then creating an open‑source alternative named Visdom when Southfork failed to win the Sophia bid. BEA (the INL’s private management) sued for copyright and trade secret issues, culminating in a private settlement in which Visdom was surrendered to BEA and Southfork dissolved.
Thuen subsequently worked at Digital Bond and IOActive before launching Gravwell, a data analytics platform for security logs and network data. The piece emphasizes his continued focus on ICS/OT, protocol reverse engineering, and embedded systems, framing Gravwell as a defender‑oriented business built around Thuen’s blend of hacking instinct and entrepreneurial drive.