What the Irish Embassy Got Up to at WHY2025 🇮🇪🛠️

Every four years, hackers, makers, and digital mischief-makers descend upon the Netherlands for a one-of-a-kind outdoor hacker camp. WHY2025 – short for What Hackers Yearn 2025 – is the latest in a legendary line of Dutch hacker camps stretching all the way back to the Galactic Hacker Party in 1989. This was the 10th edition, keeping the quadrennial tradition alive with thousands of attendees camping, soldering, coding, and connecting in Geestmerambacht.

The name WHY sparked plenty of jokes — “Why am I here?”, “Why is everything on fire?”, “Why not?” — but the answer, in the end, was always the same: because hacker camp is magic.

Tog was proud to be part of the Irish Embassy, a village formed by members of Irish hackerspaces and our wider community. We pitched tents in the Milliways Cluster, representing Ireland alongside friends old and new. Two Tog members made the trip over — Isabella (Z80Kitty) and Jeffrey Roe, and each has written a short piece about their time at camp below.


🎮 Isabella aka Z80Kitty here :3

My experience at WHY2025 was… chaotic good.

I spent about 99% of my time at the Arcade tent, getting thoroughly destroyed by rhythm games and later by Jeffrey in air hockey. It was brutal, but fun.

That said, I did manage to escape the arcade long enough to give my talk:
🎤 Sega Saturn Architectural Hell – a deep dive into the 90s console with the weirdest architecture I’ve ever worked with. It was stressful, but so rewarding. Big love to the folks who came along and laughed with me (and not just at me).

As a speaker, I discovered the fact I had unlimited club mate, which meant I was coked up on caffeine 24/7, So idk if that was a good thing. There was also golfing, which I sadly never took advantage of. One of the villages had a Cisco tap, which their mix tasted weirdly like mouthwash. They had other stuff on tap but didn’t get a chance to try. They also had a little window with some neat stuff like a boxed copy of OS2 Warped and a pager

But it wasn’t all talks and arcade games. The best part? The people. I had incredible conversations with some of the most interesting, friendly, and weirdly prepared hackers from around the world.

Also, the fog. At night, the camp looked like Silent Hill. Genuinely surreal. Check the gallery and you’ll see what I mean.

🐘 Find me on Mastodon


🛠️ Jeffrey Roe – Delays, Drills & DIY Satellites

WHY2025 kicked off with the most hacker-appropriate challenge: a 6-hour travel delay. I eventually arrived with about 35kg of camping gear and equipment in tow, ready to run three workshops in the Hardware Hacking Area.

The atmosphere? A wonderful blur of fake fog, LED lights, live bands, wild tents, and absolute hacker camp energy. Between sessions, I hit the on-site supermarket (great vegan options!) and caught the nightly chaos of live music and synth beeps.

Over the course of the event, I ran:

Big thanks to the local fablab, Serendiep, for letting me use their drill press before one of the sessions — absolute lifesavers.

Outside of workshops, I also joined in amateur radio fox hunting at the Back to the 80s village, grabbed a tasty breakfast at Hackers @ Tiffany’s, and watched the fog roll in across the camp like some kind of hacker horror movie.

🐘 Find me on Mastodon


📸 Gallery

Relive the fog, the fun, and the flashing LEDs in our full photo gallery:
👉 View the WHY2025 Photo Gallery


🔭 Looking Ahead: 39C3 in Hamburg

The hacker camp may be over, but the hacker calendar rolls on. The next big international event on our radar is 39C3 – the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg this December.

It’s the largest European hacker conference and a brilliant chance to reconnect with the community, share knowledge, and of course, hack the planet.

Will we see you there?


💚 Slán from the field,
Tog Hackerspace

New Weekly Group Night: Hack and Chill

We’re launching a new regular night at Tog Hackerspace, and if you’re into computer security, hardware hacking, or just the hacker mindset, you’ll want to be there.

Hack and Chill is a space for folks who enjoy exploring systems, poking at protocols, reverse-engineering things, flashing firmware, or just chatting about exploits over a cup of tea.

What’s it all about?

It’s a chill, hacker-friendly night for messing with code, gear, networks, or ideas. No pressure to present or perform — just a place to learn, share, and maybe break a few things (ethically, of course). Think more Hackers (the movie) than hot glue and 3D printing.

Whether you’re a seasoned pentester, a hardware tinkerer with a soldering iron in your backpack, or just curious about the scene, come hang out.


📅 Opening Night: Friday, 22nd August
🕖 Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
📍 Location: Tog Hackerspace, Unit 1B Motor City, Kylemore Road, D12 CF6V, Dublin


Hack and Chill will run every Friday night, except for the first Friday of the month — that’s when we’ll be over at 2600 Dublin.

So grab your laptop, your favourite hack, or just your curiosity — and swing by. We don’t bite (but we might packet-sniff your phone).


The Irish Embassy at 38C3

This Christmas saw the much-anticipated return of the Chaos Communications Congress, 38C3. The event once again brought hackers and makers from across the globe to Hamburg.

One of the Congress’s standout features is Assemblies—self-organized spaces where individuals with shared interests or projects gather to collaborate, learn, and share. Among these was the Irish Embassy, a collective of hackers and makers with ties to Ireland.

This year’s Irish Embassy crew brought together enthusiasts from across the island, including many from Tog Hackerspace. As space was at a primer we shared with our friends from the Scottish Consulate. We formed a haven for Type G power sockets for those in need.

Our own crew put on a couple of workshops on building satellite ground stations and understanding IoT with Arduino Cloud.

For a glimpse into the action, check out our gallery.

Looking ahead, the Irish Embassy will be reuniting at Why2025 this August. You can stay updated on their plans and activities through their Mastodon account: https://chaos.social/@irishembassy.

Hack Challenge Redo (part3)

We had a small break with our hacking challenges Redo. The format of the Meetup required a change, to accommodate for less experienced visitors. And as much as I love the SANS Institute Challenges, they tend to be quite a puzzle, especially later one. So for now, we are going to focus on couple other Hacking Challenges that are available online. And hopefully in December, when new 2022 SANS Hack Challenge starts, we will have a group ready to battle it together 🙂

Let’s start from Over the Wire. There are plenty games there, we will start with the Bandit, as most suitable to get used to the platform. Bandit offers 33 levels to play, it teaches Linux commands and tools. In each level your goal is identical, find a password to the next level, but let’s start from the beginning.

Over the Wire artwork

To play Bandit you will need to establish SSH connection to the Over the Wire lab server, all details of connection are given in Level 0.

So, what is SSH?

Secure Shell, sometimes referred to as Secure Socket Shell, is a protocol which allows you to connect securely to a remote computer or a server by using a text-based interface. When a secure SSH connection is established, a shell session will be started, and you will be able to manipulate the server by typing commands within the client on your local computer. System and network administrators use this protocol the most, as well as anyone who needs to manage a computer remotely in a highly secure manner.

How to use SSH on Windows?

Most common ways of using SSH on Windows is by using one of the clients. Most popular clients are: PuTTY, BitwiseSSH and OpenSSH. Windows 10 users have now the option to use build-in OpenSSH client. Just follow the installation details of your choose client.

How to use SSH on Mac?

Mac’s have build-in Terminal feature, that provides SSH client.

How do we do it on Linux?

That shouldn’t be a problem for any regular Linux users, but in case you are just starting with Linux. Go to your terminal and type:

ssh

This should list all ssh details and commands. If that’s not the case, just use the following command to install OpenSSH:

sudo apt-get install openssh-client

Full list of common SSH flags can be found here.

This should get everyone started and ready for this week challenge 🙂

One more thing, you may need to use Vim and couple Linux commands.

See you @ 5-7pm today @ our dedicated Discord channel.

Holiday Hack Challenge Redo (part 2)

Hello Everyone, we are about to join in ranks to battle the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge tasks again, today on dedicated Discord server. Please use the Meetup page for more details, ongoing announcements.

This post will summaries last Meetup progress and provides clues for further steps.

Let’s start we the recap. We started with:

Followed shortly by:

On the 23rd of January Meetup we have completed following tasks:

  • Objective 1 – Uncover Santa’s Gift List – clues in blog post video above
  • Objective 2a – Kringle Kiosk – clues in blog post video above
  • Objective 2b – S3 bucket – clues give at a Discord were: update the wordlist and add the searched bucket name, use ‘cat’ command to inspect the bucket. Copy and inspect in CyberChef the file. Start unpacking and remember to pipe the output whenever needed.
  • Objective 3a – Linux Primer – no clues were needed 🙂
  • Objective 3b – Point-of-Sale Password Recovery – clues give at a Discord were: download the package, no need to install the shop. Unpack the exe file, and poke around until you find app.asar and use 7zip to open Asar file.

Later today, 5-7pm GMT we will be focusing on following tasks:

  • all unfinished past tasks
  • Objective 4a – Unescape Tmux – no help needed
  • Objective 4b – Santavator operations – no help needed
  • Objective 5a – Speaker UNPrep – first clue: ‘strings door’ with some filters, more clues @Discord
  • Objective 5b – 5b: 33 Gkbps – no help needed
  • Objective 5c – Open the HID lock in the Workshop – no help needed
  • Objective 6a – Regex Toy Sorting – we will battle it together @Discord
  • Objective 6b – Splunk Challenge – clue: look for Bro.

See you later at Discord.

12 years of TOG – Holiday Hack Challenge Redo (part 1)

So, as promised we are going to start SANS Holiday Hack Challenge Redo run by Counter Hack Team. We will start with the latest 2020 challenge . You will need a valid email to create user account, which is instant. You can start straight away on your own or watch a couple helpful videos.

The first video that I would like talk about, it’s Ed Skoudis 2020 Hack Challenge Intro. Video is a great overview of this year challenge.

Second video is aimed at Hack Challenge first timers, it’s walk through the login page and the starting interface.

And don’t forget to join discussion later today at a dedicated Discord Channel https://discord.gg/MqCQkSzG. We start at 5pm today 🙂

This month we are going to focus on 2 objectives.

To help with starting the first objective you can watch this video:

Or read this article with helpful techniques. The online photo editor can be found here.

Watch the video below for the start of the second objective overview:

See you at Discord after 5pm GMT today, we will try to finish Objectives 1 &2 together.