Dear Visitor! The White Hat software studio closed in February 2023, and I turned to personal development counselling. The rise of AI-assisted development has rekindled my passion for the profession, so I am once again open to software development and engineering leadership roles. Below you can find my earlier work. White Hat
One of our clients wanted to archive years of business data from a legacy application before shutting it down. But there was no export function, no admin access and no access to the server, so they asked me to hack into their own system.
Being a hacker is less mysterious than the films make it look. It is a profession you can learn — in 2016, almost fifteen years after graduating, I went back to school to learn it.
Breaking in on request
If you understand how an attacker thinks, you design safer systems.
Enterprise software handles confidential business and personal data, processes financial transactions and controls machines and equipment. Several systems I built or ran have faced malicious attacks, and more than once I had to restore a database or a hard drive after a failure. I have also worked on control software for a high-reliability surveillance system and on an industrial automation framework, where a security hole can cost more than data.
So in early 2016 I completed the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker course and the advanced Exploit Writer training at Óbuda University. An ethical hacker uses the same methods as an attacker, but on behalf of the system's owner, so that the weak points are found before someone abuses them.
I soon put this into practice. At AvenDATA we had to recover the data of a German energy supplier from a closed legacy web application, with no documentation and no direct database access. Using ethical hacking techniques and targeted HTTP requests, I mapped the application and designed the HDEx data extraction framework, which gave the client back their own data. Of course no client is happy to learn that their system has a hole — but this time it was exactly what helped them.
Ten years later
AI speeds up development — and the making of mistakes, too.
Ethical hacking is now one of the fastest-changing fields in IT. With AI-assisted development, code is written faster than ever, but bugs and security holes can slip in just as fast. When I led the development of a system of ten websites with AI agents in 2026, I saw the same thing I had learned in hacker training: technology serves people when rules, reviews and version control keep it in check. And when someone looks for a way to break in before it goes live. That is what the white hat means to me today.
