Protecting Ethical Hackers Under Belgian Law – And How Organisations Should Respond To Vulnerabilities Disclosed To Them

This blog article is available in English, French and Dutch.

The security of IT systems and the data they contain is becoming increasingly crucial for businesses and public institutions, to the point of becoming a political priority in the face of what are now global and sometimes state-run IT threats. From a legal point of view, security requirements are increasing exponentially (particularly since the GDPR, the Cybersecurity Act, the NIS2 and CER directives, the CRA and DORA regulations, etc). It is in these circumstances that the Belgian legislator has chosen to confer a special protection regime on ethical hackers.

Ethical hackers are cybersecurity specialists who use their hacking skills to identify vulnerabilities in computer systems and communicate them to the organisation concerned before they can be exploited by malicious hackers ("black hat hackers").