hacker images
🕶💻 Hacker Images are deliberately stereotypical staged photos of “hackers” with various aspects like darkness, zeroes and ones, one or more people wearing dark hoodies and/or sunglasses, lit only by their screens, and used in at least one article about the IndieWeb.
Hacker images Flickr prank
In the early 2010s, such a deliberately staged photo set https://www.flickr.com/groups/hacker-images/pool/ was placed on Flickr with a permissive Creative Commons license to see if news media would use them in articles, which they subsequently did, not knowing that the images were placed there deliberately for them to find and use.
E.g. this article:
Slate covered the "prank" itself:
IndieWeb Examples
In media
A 2007 professional photograph of eventual IndieWeb community member 
Dr. Matt Lee wearing a black cap with his face and torso mostly occluded by his stickered-up laptop made its way into several online publications, a few of which are still up.
Street hackers
2009-11-19 Example in the wild with community members 
Kevin Marks and 
Blaine Cook pre-IndieWeb: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/4116861374/ 
Staged at IndieWebCamp
From 2016/MIT2#Photos:
Shutterstock hacker images
Subsequently there have been other similar images in the media, e.g. Shutterstock image used in these articles:
- 2014-10-08: http://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/indieweb and
- 2021-06-24: https://www.techradar.com/in/news/is-telegram-the-new-alternative-to-the-dark-web
- 2019-10: Why hackers will always win, and what you can do so they don’t also uses a Shutterstock image:
Other Examples
- 2022-02-27 CNBC: These are the 20 most common passwords leaked on the dark web — make sure none of them are yours
- Whitepaper: Why Hackers Hack: It's Your Business To Care!
- 2022-03-31 KRON4: Apple, Meta turned over user data to hackers pretending to be law enforcement, report says
- 2023-03-01 How to Prevent Callback Phishing Attacks on Your Organization — hacking by phone (or phablet!) yet still in a dark hoodie:
- 2024-03-16 ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots
Some ASCII art of our favorite visual cliche for a hacker.
- 2024-04-26 Black hoodie example "Hacker.jpg" file: Fake job interviews target developers with new Python backdoor
Jesse Eisenberg
Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in the movie "The Social Network"
Articles about hacker images
Articles about the phenomenon of stereotypical hacker images and stock photos:
(each of these also has even more over the top exaggerated photos to make their point)
- 2013-02: Slate covered the "prank" itself: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/hacker_photos_how_hacker_dojo_pranked_wired_with_hilariously_stereotypical.html
- 2017-05-15 Mashable: We need to talk about all these absurd stock photos of hackers / Black hoodie? Hands? Mystery? ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
- 2017-08-02 BBC: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
- 2018-11-26: What lies behind the stereotypical image of a controversial figure: the hacker?
- 2020-07-20 How computer security is depicted in movies and TV
- 2019-07-25 The sorry state of cybersecurity imagery
- 2020-01-10 Security Think Tank: Hooded hackers? More like ruthless competitors
Other hacker image variants
Variants of hacker images other than the figure in a dark hoodie cliché.
Black keyboards
- 2022-09-13 Lorenz Ransomware Goes After SMBs via Mitel VoIP Phone Systems (js;dr) / "The ransomware gang has been seen exploiting a Mitel RCE flaw discovered in VoIP devices in April (and patched in July) to perform double-extortion attacks."
