Pieter Ceelen
Where it all began
I am not sure how old I was, I guess between 8 and 10, I got my hands on an MSX with an old school tape-deck (no floppy drives). After some time, I started reading some books and learned about graphic design and sprites. My first ‘hack’ was adjusting the sprites in Space Invaders and claiming that the aliens now looked like my little sister.
Where it went to from there
While having fun on computers and hacking around with game ROMs, I studied at Eindhoven university, bachelor and master in Computer science, specialized security track on information security technology.
Early 2008 I joined KPMG’s cyber division where I was involved in penetration testing, technical security advisory and incident response. From 2013 to 2016 I worked as an independent consultant, running projects in penetration testing and incident response. Amongst others part-time member of a computer security incident response team for fortune 500 multinational and various roles and projects in threat intelligence and intelligence sharing.
In 2016 combining forces with 3 others to start Outflank. This offers opportunities to run larger and cooler projects. Ranging from ‘hardcore hacking’ where each bit counts to attack simulations where team effort and coordination is needed to execute a proper attack.
My specialisms
Besides a very experienced hacker and pentester I bring years of incident response, forensics and threat intelligence knowledge to the team. This allows us to tune our attacks and use the tools and techniques employed by real attackers in red teaming and attack simulations.
My coolest project ever
Over the years of incident response, I have made quite some ‘gut feeling’ decisions what I would do as an attacker, based on my offensive experience. Using very limited info 1 system caught my eye out of 1000’s, after a couple of hours of hard-core forensics, the exact story was unravelled and it was exactly as I guessed.
Knowing that you have a proper opponent and based on that develop cunning strategies to reduce or mitigate such a threat turned out to be an interesting rollercoaster!