Hacker’s Paradise — an Interview with Tobias Groenland
Portrayals of hackers in the media are woefully cliched, dominated by hooded figures wearing V for Vendetta masks, shrouded in shadow and surrounded by monitors displaying Matrix-esque lines of code. But the reality is far more nuanced.
Their reputation is as malicious bogeymen of the Internet, but white hat hackers — individuals who use their hacking skills for good — have become an important force in monitoring and improving cybersecurity standards and practices.
Tobias Groenland is seeking to bring these individuals into the limelight. His groundbreaking Hackers Handshake photography exhibition acts to showcase these white hat hackers, and the importance they hold to governments, businesses, and individuals across the globe who take their digital security for granted.
The exhibition will be shown in Primalbase AMS. We spoke with Tobias on the importance of ethical hackers, and what he hopes to achieve through his photographs highlighting key figures in the ethical hacker community.
Joining the Hacking Community
The inspiration for Hackers Handshake was personal for Tobias. He explains that, “A long time ago, I was painting the floor of an apartment, and I was listening to ‘The Ghost in the Wires’ audiobook from Kevin Mitnick, a famous hacker in the US. He was notorious for hacking the FBI, putting wiretaps on the FBI, and even getting the source code of the newest Nokia models just through social engineering! Listening to this made me think, ‘There must be a hacking community in Holland.’
“I was a hacker in those days — well not really a hacker, but more like a more script kiddy — I used small scripts to infect computers and upload software. I didn’t know that it was not really legit, because you’re young, right? So I was just testing out systems and whatever for fun, and later on I thought ‘Wow if I’m thinking like this, there must be some group of other people out there who I can maybe photograph’. And indeed there were more and more people giving talks about hacking. But they were also talking about the ethical side of it.”
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Winning Official Support
The drive behind Hackers Handshake — to bring ethical hackers to the public’s attention — is shared by the Dutch government. This has enabled Tobias to bring his exhibition, and all the work surrounding it, to a much larger audience than he would’ve been able to without financial support or the avenues of PR now open to him.
“I had taken portraits of four hackers and I thought, ‘Who’s next in the series?’ And it grew with the help of Chris van ‘t Hof. Chris is a sociologist, writes books and hosts his own talk show HackTalk in Rotterdam. The Cybersecurity Centre in Holland helped out with sponsoring and getting the story in the public domain. The government really wants ethical hacking to be out there in the public eye, so it was a momentum where they would say ‘We’re gonna sponsor this, it’s gonna be big.’ The first time it was on show, it was at One Conference in the Hague, in a huge place with 1200 people from the worldwide cybersecurity scene. At that moment the renewed Responsible Disclosure called Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure was also released. Portraits of the ethical hackers were used in the CVD document.
“We did two shows in city hall in the Hague — one of had 50 hackers testing their system for a whole day. They found 70 leaks, and one system was taken down immediately. It was all ethical hacking and you could really feel the community side — people coming together, doing good and winning money for bug bounties. Now they even make money, so you don’t have to hide anymore as a hacker. You can either choose to be really bad and have the black hat on, or choose to be good and have the white hat on.”
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Indeed, many white hat hackers started out as black hat, though there is a great deal of diversity.
“It is a diverse group of people who are from several different backgrounds,” explains Tobias. “One of the hackers had his house raided because he hacked a university in the US. They didn’t notice he was in the systems for half a year! Then someone else hacked that system and they found out he was in first, so the National Cyber Security Centre raided his house with local police while he was still a student. I don’t know if he wants to talk about it anymore, because now he really does a good job in being an ethical hacker working for great companies, but he got off to a rough start!
“Zawadi Done, meanwhile, hacked his school and got root access. They just didn’t know how to deal with it, and now it’s becoming more mainstream to let the system administrator know that their systems are vulnerable to hacking, and to fix it together, and then also get the right amount of credit for it. Today Zawadi works as an ethical hacker and often talks on radio shows and explains current threats or recent hacks to the audience.
“That’s how it works. But every story of the hackers I portrayed it’s always one of a kind and they also have their own speciality.”
Putting Faces to the Figures
Clearly, there is a lot of misinformation, and even prejudice, surrounding the hacking community that needs to be addressed. Bringing art and technology together, provides an opportunity to help people understand on a personal level the reality of something they may fear and distrust, to empathise. People can see the real people, and real stories that make up the hacking community.
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“The hacker was always portrayed as the guy in the hoodie, and in negative terms. Maybe making those portraits, making it more human, trying to explain that it can do good as well, can show that there is an alternative for young people who want to start hacking and still haven’t talked to the right people. If you have the right people say the right things to you, it shows an alternative. They might not become the bad hacker, but rather the good guy. That’s the idea behind the series as well — show people there’s an alternative, that it’s really a job you can learn.”
Interests Outside of Hacking
It’s not just cybersecurity that interests Tobias in the world of tech. He has learnt various coding languages, implementing some of the principles behind hacking in order to create new projects from existing platforms that interest him. The broad nature of Tobias’s interest in tech is something that attracted him to Primalbase.
“I was actually thinking about learning a programming language called Ruby, and then continue to bootstrap projects with Ruby on Rails. AirBnb used it to get their platform up and running. I often have ideas, and I often hack things together. I’m not like a hacker who breaks into systems, but I do something similar to what people do with biohacking — I tend to do things with systems which are available, and try to create new ideas. You need to start somewhere, and maybe Ruby is the right language to build something. And now I found React, and JavaScript-based languages are more in demand now so I’m also looking into that. I’m all over the place with technology, I just find it interesting.
For Tobias, the staying power of a technology lies in the amount of dedication and attention given to it. Changing the perception of hackers in the cybersecurity sphere will take time, but if the representations of whitehat hackers, and their stories, is protected for years to come, then that is an important step in the right direction.
“In a hundred years from now, if the portraits don’t burn or there’s water damage, then the portraits will be still out there. Often, with blockchain or other things which are not maintained, or don’t get their TLC, they become obsolete and die like Abobe Flash. Layer Augmented Reality was a really big thing 10 years ago, where you could scan a photo and then put a content layer over it, and it just worked. After it was bought by the London based BlippAR, it just stopped working because they went bankrupt. Junaio was the open source version, till Apple bought it and integrated it in their iOS software. That’s how it goes, and also what innovation does — it often wants to grow bigger, and then it morphs or explodes and it’s gone. Just like nature.”
For the exhibition Tobias will have an Augmented Reality app available, displaying several layers of content when you scan the hacker portraits. Ofcourse, for this to become reality you have to be at the exhibition opening.
You can see Hackers Handshake at Primalbase Amsterdam from Friday 17 May — Friday 31 May. Join us on the Friday evening for the opening event, where we’ll be laying on drinks and talks from ethical hackers including Ricardo Sanchez Marchand, an ethical hacker at EY, and more. Register for the event online.
