When a massive cyberattack took out everything from Swedish supermarkets to New Zealand kindergartens this month, a group of Dutch ethical hackers breathed a collective sigh of frustration. They had been so close to stopping …
July 16,2021 When a massive cyberattack took out everything from Swedish supermarkets to New Zealand kindergartens this month, a group of Dutch ethical hackers breathed a collective sigh of frustration. They had been so close to stopping it. If the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) sounds obscure, that’s in keeping with its discreet presence on the internet. This volunteer army of unpaid tech geeks have quietly prevented hundreds of cyberattacks since 2019 by finding holes in websites and software that could be exploited by hackers. «You can see us as a volunteer fire brigade,» said DIVD chairman Victor Gevers in an interview from his home in The Hague, a dog yapping at his ankles. «Your house is on fire, there’s flames coming out of it, and then random people with a Dutch accent show up and start putting out the fire.» The bearded hacker declined to give his age, but he has been carrying out these «responsible disclosures» for the best part of two decades. Most famously, he successfully accessed Donald Trump’s Twitter account—not once, but twice. ‘Oh God, why him?’ Just before the 2016 US election swept Trump to power, Gevers and two friends decided to make sure the then-candidate wasn’t using a password that had previously been leaked online. A huge hack of LinkedIn revealed that the password «yourefired»—Trump’s catchphrase from his days on TV show The Apprentice—had been used for an account in his name on the business networking site. And after trying the same password on Twitter alongside several different email addresses, the Dutch hackers were horrified to see Trump’s personal page load up before their eyes.
