Hacking the Hacker

24Profile: Thomas d’Otreppe de Bouvette

The previous chapter covered wireless hacking, and no one in the wireless hacking computing community is more respected than Belgium‐born Thomas d’Otreppe de Bouvette, the creator of Aircrack‐ng (http://aircrack‐ng.org/). Composed of 16 different programs, Aircrack‐ng is the most popular, free, Wi‐Fi security‐auditing tool suite. D’Otreppe de Bouvette first released Aircrack‐ng in February 2006. Today, every Linux hacking distro includes it by default, and if you want to do wireless hacking or auditing, you probably either use Aircrack‐ng or used it before you paid for some commercial product that does similar things. Aircrack‐ng is so popular that it shows up in TV shows and movies (http://aircrack‐ng.org/movies.html) that are trying to realistically portray their actor as an uber‐cool wireless hacker. D’Otreppe de Bouvette has also created and released a wireless intrusion detection program called OpenWIPS‐ng (http://www.openwips‐ng.org/).

I asked d’Otreppe de Bouvette how he got into computer security. He replied, “I got into computers and programming very early, between six and eight years old. I was immediately interested in programming, and I created a tiny game even back then. As any kid, I first played the games on a computer and then got bored with them. That’s when I decided to look through the books that came with the computer and found out I could program it. My native language being French and manuals being in English, it ...