A Conversation with Inti De Ceukelaire

If you regularly watch the Belgian news, you might know Inti, the 1337 hacker who can explain the most difficult of topics to the common person. He might seem all-knowing, but there’s much that remains unseen. Being one of the few whose path didn’t start in academia or the corporate world, we were excited to explore his story, mindset and things that make him interesting beyond just his skill.

At 15, Inti started trying to understand how the real world actually worked by tinkering and experimenting. After earning his first €100 from a bug bounty, he realised that he found what he had wanted to do. And all that comes from just pure curiosity that slowly matured into a powerful skill.

With that powerful skill, he calls himself a tech opportunist. Where technology is just a tool, not your identity.
The focus should be on spotting leverage inside systems and using them to your “advantage”.
With that in mind, hacking becomes a game, a goal-driven problem-solving kind of game where you don’t need to worry about what tools you do or don’t use.

What surprised me is how he viewed vulnerabilities. He said that all vulnerabilities have that human aspect to them, because at some point, a human made a choice that resulted in that vulnerability. Communication and being social matter, not only in a social engineering way but also for sharing info to a fellow human.

Talking with him about the steps Belgium took to be one of the pioneers in “free” ethical hacking was educative. We learned some things that were quite important to us (so we wouldn’t get in trouble 🤐).

And then the dreaded topic arrived: AI.
We talked about what kind of impact it has and will have in the future on security and more broadly, the informatics scene. New attack vectors and some things that you never would imagine.
But fret not, we as IT people always find ways to adapt and overcome.
AI provides us security specialists with some good job security, hehe.

If you’re interested and would like to listen to the whole interview, the link is here: Spotify - Podcast Inti