article: Back in 2005, the then 16-year-old was annoyed that his Norfolk secondary school had put strict blocks on its computer network, to prevent the pupils from accessing music and games websites. So, as a keen computer programmer he decided to use his knowledge to hack the system. "I thought it would be fun to bypass the school's filters, says Mr Cator, now 26. To do this he used a website which disguises a computer's digital fingerprint, by rooting it through a remote server, typically located abroad, allowing a user to surf the internet privately and anonymously. Such websites provide users with something called a virtual private network (VPN). Mr Cator got it to work, and soon instead of using a school computer to research his homework, he could watch his favourite music videos. But unhappy with the qualities of the then VPN providers, which he said weren't easy to use and carried too much advertising, Mr Cator decided to build his own. This took him just one afternoon sat on his parents' sofa, and he gave the website a tongue-in-check name - Hide My Ass (HMA). Fast forward 10 years, and Mr Cator has just sold the business - of which he was the boss and sole owner - for £40m. HMA, which Mr Cator turned into one of the world's largest VPN companies without the need for any outside investors, has been bought by global software group AVG. For its money, AVG is getting a company with more than two million customers, an annual turnover of £11m, and yearly profits that exceed £2m. And Mr Cator is to continue at HMA's chief executive. Despite being a 16 year old school boy a decade ago, Mr Cator already knew enough about the dark arts of promoting websites, and making money from the internet, to realise that HMA could be a commercial success. So he started to promote the website on interested internet forums to build up some buzz. HMA would make money from something called "affiliate marketing". In simple terms this means that Hide My Ass gets a commission from a retail website whenever someone clicks through to it via HMA and buys something. Within a month HMA had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and revenues of £15,000 per annum. Mr Cator says: "I was so surprised that it went viral so quickly. I never wrote a business plan or anything. "I just launched the whole site in one afternoon. [But] if people think it's a good cause, they will share it." With the business earning Mr Cator rather a lot of pocket money, he stay on at school and went to college in Norwich to do computer studies. But in 2009 he decided to drop out to run HMA full-time, adding a paid service which now has more than 200,000 subscribers. These are in addition to the two million people who now use its basic free version. To help grow the business Mr Cator realised he needed staff, which he employed on a freelance basis. To begin with
summary: There are not many people who have become multimillionaires as a direct result of misbehaving at school, but Jack Cator is one of them.