Dear all,
I write this piece in English for the benefit of the many people outside of the Netherlands whom will be impacted by this news:
Yesterday the sad news reached me that good friend and Dutch Cyber Warfare Community member of the first hour Cornelis Jan Groeneveld has suddenly and very unexpectedly died in his sleep last saturday night.
As you can imagine, im shocked and immensely saddened by the passing of someone so young. The Dutch infosec community has really lost someone of great impact. Niels was, even if only in my own mind, a genuine Dutch InfoSec OG. A peer, if nothing else, with many qualities beyond my ken. His ability to filter and spread relevant news articles, papers and opinion pieces from that information firehose we call the Internet was what put him on the global radar, and are what led us to meet for the first time -quite ironically- not in the Netherlands but in Tallinn, Estonia at the Cyber Conflict Conference. His contributions to the Dutch OSINT and Threat Intelligence community are legion; I couldnt even begin to make a list. Im hoping someone else will.
Since his stroke, he started using LLM’s to write articles himself. You may expect this to turn into drab, uninteresting and unoriginal pieces, but you’d be wrong. Niels was, quite apparently, a newly minted master at wielding the AI prompt, because those articles always came out thought-provoking and multi-angled. In all honesty: some of them caused a bit of a tiff between us; they were that good. A relatively recent one was about the loss of his mother, which hit him hard. Its a hard-hitting fact that he didn’t outlive her for very long.
He leaves behind his loving wife, Paola, whom he really truly adored, and you could really tell she meant the world to him. I dare not contemplate her feelings right now. He also leaves behind many friends upon whom he left an indelible impression. He could be an odd-ball. I mean that in an affectionate way. Niels was genuine, warm, caring and loving. I will never get the chance to tell him how sorry I am that I didnt spend the time with him that I should have. His friendship, even his continued existence, was something that I just took for granted a bit too much.
Dear Niels…one can only hope the afterlife has some kind of access to our information superhighway. Fair winds and following seas, old friend. You will be missed. Greatly. There was no-one like you.
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