Securax
Securax (1998–2002) was considered as one of Belgium's strongest hacking movements in the past twenty years and was founded by Filip Maertens and co-founded by Davy Van De Moere as an online community in order to combine skills and experiences in the domain of vulnerability identification, zero-day exploit creation and penetration testing methods. The movement was known for its critical insights into the information security industry, bold press interviews and its near-daily newsletter (in Dutch).[1]
At its peak, the newsletter was read by over 90,000 Dutch-speaking readers, both professionals and non-professionals. As of September 1999, companies could make use of the knowledge by way of "legal intrusion tests", where Securax assembled high quality and very skilled Tiger Teams to perform the projects.[2] It was as of May 2000 that Securax made the choice to walk the thin line between attaining a community of security experts and hackers, while offering commercial services at enterprise level.[3] In 2002 the community was disbanded.
Accusations of hacking activities
In June 2013, Filip M., Davy v.d.M and a former Securax member Wence V.D.M were accused of hacking into servers owned by companies based in the Port of Antwerp coerced by a Turkish smuggling ring. The three have always maintained their innocence. Both Maertens and Van De Moere have stated that they were victims themselves, and that they had been misled and later had been forced, under threat of violence to themselves and their family members, to provide hacking hardware, but were never involved in hacking activities or malware.[4]. Currently, Wence V.D.M. and Filip M. are appealing the charges for the court of Antwerp.
References
- "Belgische security site". Security.nl.
- Putzeys, Raoul. "Bedrijven kunnen vanaf september hackers huren", Gazet van Antwerpen, 31 August 1999
- Putzeys, Raoul. "Belgische hackersvereniging Securax wil bedrijven wakker schudden", Het Belang van Limburg, 5 May 2000
- Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley. "The Mob's IT Department", Bloomberg Businessweek, 7 July 2015