Daniël Verlaan – I Know Your Password
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Daniël Verlaan – I Know Your Password 347 pages, 70.000 words. Published in October 2020 by Das Mag Publishers. 30.000 copies sold. Translation subsidy provided by the Dutch Foundation for Literature. English sample translation available. You buy something online and all of a sudden your bank account is being emptied out; your smart thermostat has been hacked and set to 37 degrees, unless you pay up; your brand new security camera suddenly shouts “suck my dick” at you. The internet is a world full of possibilities – also for criminals. These are scary yet mesmerising stories, full of dangers against which you can protect yourself. How? Tech journalist Daniël Verlaan will tell you how. He went undercover in shady networks, spoke to the teenagers who hacked the Dutch banks and found out how a small arthouse cinema took our computers hostage in a large-scale operation. I Know Your Password is not trying to make you paranoid, just less naive. Read Daniël Verlaan’s stories and be prepared. Daniël Verlaan (1989) is one of today’s leading Dutch tech journalists. He works for RTL, a Dutch news broadcasting channel. Last year he received the Loep, the prize for leading research journalism, as well as the Tegel, the most prestigious journalistic prize in the Netherlands. For more information, please contact Stella Rieck: [email protected] or visit www.cossee.com/foreignrights. | translation grants can be obtained through The Dutch Foundation For Literature: www.letterenfonds.nl/en/grants Press – I Know Your Password “I Know Your Password reads like a journalistic thriller. Verlaan initially wanted to put that in the subtitle, if it weren’t for the fact that the word ‘thriller’ insinuates fiction, and the stories he tells are by no means fictitious. In a compelling manner, Verlaan takes the reader on his descent into the dark web, looking over the shoulders of hackers, cyber criminals and victims. The casually accompanies his stories with tips on how to defend oneself against digital vulnerability, useful for everyone who uses the internet.” – de Volkskrant “The best thing about I Know Your Password is that it makes these stories serious enough without overdramatising them. It plays poker with your trust, but always returns a few of the chips at the end of each chapter, and in doing so teaches you how to call the bluff of the elusive world of cybercrime.” – Demo Magazine “I Know Your Password by technology journalist Daniël Verlaan provides a practical and convincing handbook in a time of information deprivation … Verlaan deserves compliments for the way in which he illustrates a theme that is complicated to a lot of people. As Verlaan himself says: “Step one is knowing what to defend yourself against.” After reading I Know Your Password, you will have taken that first step.” – Athenaeum Booksellers Endorsement by the Dutch minister of Justice and Security The Dutch Minister of Justice and Security, Ferdinand Grapperhaus, recently recommended I Know Your Password and gifted it to the entire Committee of Justice and Security: “Chairman, I’ve brought something along for you and I’d like to suggest – it’s less than fifty euro’s, I’ve left the price tag on – that you might possibly share it with the committee members, because this book really got to me on a number of fronts, also because of the personal aspects in Daniël Verlaan’s story. It’s the book I Know Your Password, chairman, and this is such an important subject, which on a micro level symbolises cyber security. I think cyber security starts with all of us, at our kitchen tables, and I’ll admit, I’m just going to say it, during the first years of the internet, my favourite passwords were ferd1959 or 1959ferd. Yes, my year of birth and first name, which is not very smart, and one realises this soon enough. But there is much more to this, and that is why I wanted to offer this to you just before the holidays. This book, I’ll do it this way from now on, that’s how to do it these days.” Click here for the full video in Dutch. Sample – I Know Your Password Translation by Isadora Goudsblom. So now I am older Than my mother and father When they had their daughter Now what does that say aBout me? These are the first lines Fleet Foxes-singer Robin Pecknold wrote for ‘Montezuma’. Not only was it one of my favourite songs of 2011, it was also my most important password. What I didn’t know then was that this password could be cracked within seconds. It isn’t the only weak password I’ve had. As a teenager I used the password ‘google’ and in 2006 I changed it to ‘thefeeling’, after the British pop group that was behind the infectious song ‘Sewn’. Those passwords can also easily be cracked within seconds. Pleased to meet you. I’m Daniël Verlaan and for years I used lousy passwords. For a book carrying a title like this, I thought it’d be more than fair to share some of my passwords with you. For my job, I craft stories about the dark side of the internet, ranging from hackers and ransomware to phishing and the dark web. Every year more and more Dutch people fall victim to cyber criminality, and that amount – in the order of millions of people – won’t be going down in the coming years. On the one hand this is due to the fact that traditional crimes, such as burglaries and theft, are increasingly making way for internet criminality. It is now more lucrative for criminals to hack people than to steal a phone or watch. On the other hand we’ve become more vulnerable as a society because our lives are digitalising at a high pace; and this whilst most people have only little knowledge of technology, online safety and privacy. When we leave our homes we lock the door and close the windows, but we often leave our digital doors wide open. We use bad passwords, click on weird links and download and open all sorts of files blindly. To put it simply: most people – and you might just be one of them – are pretty easy to hack. This may sound slightly frightening. My aim is not to scare you, but rather to ensure you become a little less scared of everything that’s happening on the internet. That fear often stems from ignorance. If you know little about technology, the first reaction is often: I’ve been hacked. Even if there’s nothing going on. At the same time people are often hacked because they have limited knowledge of technology. The one reinforces the other. On the other side, I actually want some people to become slightly more scared of the internet. For them to stop thinking: well, that won’t happen to me anyway. Ten years ago I also knew very little about hackers and that criminal online world. I’d just started the School of Journalism, where I quickly turned into the school’s enfant terrible. I cut classes, got into fights with teachers and was expelled. Both the school and my parents were worried about my future. My dream was to become a music journalist, but despite a minor programme in Musicology, in which I learned everything about Schönberg’s pantonality, it turned out I wasn’t all too good at that. Then I decided to change my course and write about my other passion: technology. The first few years my stories mostly revolved around gadgets, apps and games. I was always interested in those: as a nerd I used to put computers together from scratch, build websites and spend quite some hours behind the Playstation. But I knew nothing about cyber criminality and online safety. It wasn’t until I started to work for RTL Nieuws in 2015, and dove into a very delicate and dangerous data leak during my first workweek, that I found out that this is what interests me. I started to understand what journalism was all about: following your intuition, diving into the things that are fishy, biting your teeth in and not letting go. 9 Internet of Things What to do when your security camera suddenly says ‘Suck my dick’ Internet of Things • The internet of things is the collective name for smart devices connected to the internet – ranging from security cameras and robot vacuum cleaners to fridges that send you a notification as soon as your beer is cold. • Because more and more machines are becoming ‘smart’, there’s more to hack – including places that were once impossible to get into for hackers, like cars, smoke alarms and pacemakers. • Due to the explosive rise in smart devices, it’s become a sort of Wild West where everyone can get their piece, whether they’re a seasoned criminal or a bored teenager. It’s just another typical day for Rilana, a blonde woman from Brummen, Gelderland. October 1st 2017, the sun is shining and she’s doing her daily shopping at the local supermarket. At home, she’s busy taking the items out of her shopping bags when she hears something in the living room. It’s a sort of crackling sound, as though someone is panting into a very big megaphone. She walks into the living room and sees her camera turning in all sorts of directions. How is this possible? Her phone is on the bed, so she’s not controlling the camera. Might it be updating? She turns around and continues unpacking the groceries.