“It’s impossible to describe just how well things have turned out,” initiator Rijkman Pilaar begins. In 2023, he was a Computer Science student and came up with an idea. “I found it strange that a university with a strong focus on cybersecurity didn’t have an association for its application. I expected a close-knit community and wanted to be part of that, because in my experience, ethical hackers are tolerant and understanding.” Pilaar did notice that some attempts had been made in the past: “For example, I found Hackhouse.team on Insta, but their last post was from December 8, 2022.”

The decisive moment for Pilaar to set up his own association was when his chairmanship at debating association Chronos came to an end last May. Together with three friends, all of whom were following the Competitive Programming and Problem-solving track at the Honors Academy, he sat down to consider the options. They saw great potential for an association dedicated to ethical hacking.

Capture The Flag

Techna Huynh, Gabrielius Rosinas, Teun Peters and Rijkman Pilaar realize that simply organizing lectures on hacking does not build a community. “But there is already a competition format where you can actively work together in this field, the so-called CTF competition. The letters stand for “Capture The Flag”, because the goal in these competitions is often to retrieve a piece of text. That “flag” then serves as proof that you’ve successfully completed a challenge. An example of a challenge might be to exploit a website misconfiguration to gain access to the server. Or, for example, a steganography challenge, where you’re supposed to extract information from an innocent-looking image. And there are many more types of challenges.”