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Blue Team

Industrial Control System Security Guide

·3688 words·18 mins
How ICS and SCADA environments actually get breached, network segmentation, weak authentication, unpatched legacy software, thin monitoring, and vulnerable remote access, paired with the real incidents (Triton, Mirai, WannaCry, Stuxnet, Oldsmar, the Ukrainian grid attack) that show each failure mode in production.

Network protocol analysis: Wireshark and tcpdump

··1804 words·9 mins
Wireshark and tcpdump are the two packet-analysis tools every network defender, incident responder, and pen tester ends up using. This post covers modern capture workflow (non-root operation, display and BPF filters, TLS decryption via SSLKEYLOGFILE, SSH remote captures) with concrete examples for both tools.

Advanced cloud security: serverless security and misconfiguration

··1578 words·8 mins
Serverless functions shift infrastructure responsibility to the provider but leave application code, IAM policies, and resource configurations in your hands. This post covers the common misconfiguration classes (function-level, resource-level, infrastructure-level), the tooling that catches them (Checkov, Prowler, ScoutSuite, Trivy), and the attack surfaces unique to serverless (event injection, denial-of-wallet).

Cybersecurity Frameworks: NIST, ISO, and CIS

··1434 words·7 mins
A working overview of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (six functions after CSF 2.0), ISO/IEC 27001:2022 (10 clauses plus 93 Annex A controls in 4 themes), and CIS Controls v8/v8.1 (18 controls organized by Implementation Group), including how they fit together and where each earns its keep in real security programs.

Wireless Security: Best Practices and Common Attacks

··3243 words·16 mins
This article provides a comprehensive overview of wireless security, including technical details of wireless networking, best practices for securing wireless networks, common attacks, social engineering tactics, wireless network penetration testing, regulatory compliance, and the future of wireless security.

Application Layer Firewalls: Advanced Network Security

··1594 words·8 mins
How application layer firewalls inspect traffic beyond IP and port, protocol analysis, content filtering, application identification, behavioral analysis, and deep packet inspection, plus the tools for testing whether one actually holds up.

Blue team exercises: threat hunting and incident response

··3269 words·16 mins
A defender’s field guide to threat hunting and incident response: behavioral analysis and UEBA, EDR, network traffic analysis with Zeek, the ELK stack, Sysmon on Windows, and the commercial SIEM/EDR/NSM tooling you actually run. Plus what Target, Equifax, and NotPetya taught defenders about detection.

Advanced Memory Forensics: Analysis Techniques

··4362 words·21 mins
This article explores advanced memory forensics techniques for detecting malicious activity in memory, including process timelining, high-low level analysis, walking the VAD tree, and detecting rogue processes, kernel-level rootkits, DLL hijacking, process hollowing, and sophisticated persistence mechanisms.

Web Application Security: CSRF and XSS Prevention

··7802 words·37 mins
This article explores the prevention techniques for Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks in web applications, providing real-world examples, and includes code samples in various web programming languages.

IoT security: the defender's playbook for devices nobody patches

··2878 words·14 mins
The defender-side companion to the IoT hacking post. What actually works for securing IoT devices in 2026, organized around the controls operators look for during testing (secure boot, signed firmware updates, TLS 1.3 with mutual auth, credential management, IoT-VLAN segmentation, anomaly detection). Includes the canonical IoT vulnerability families (Ripple20, URGENT/11, Name:Wreck, AMNESIA:33), the modern IoT-specific monitoring platforms (Armis, Forescout, Claroty, Nozomi, Microsoft Defender for IoT), and the Matter protocol that’s finally bringing baseline crypto identity to consumer smart-home devices.

Intrusion prevention systems: what they actually do, what they miss, and how to test them

··2751 words·13 mins
A working operator’s tour of IPS and IDS in 2026. The three detection models (signature, anomaly, behavioral), how IPS gets deployed (inline, passive, hybrid), where it sits on the network, the open-source stack (Snort 3, Suricata, Zeek the renamed Bro), the commercial NGFW market (Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet), the testing tradecraft operators use to evaluate IPS deployments, and the shift toward NDR products as IPS evolves.

Cloud security: the shared-responsibility model, the common findings, and the case studies

··3634 words·18 mins
An operator-relevant tour of cloud security in 2026. The shared-responsibility model, the controls that actually matter (IAM, encryption, network isolation, logging), the findings that show up on every engagement (misconfigured S3, IMDS abuse, over-privileged IAM roles, public Kubernetes consoles), the modern tooling stack (Prowler, ScoutSuite, Steampipe, commercial CSPMs), and corrected versions of the canonical case studies (Capital One, Tesla, Marriott, Deep Root, Docker Hub).

Ransomware in 2026: the playbook, the analysis, and the response

··2526 words·12 mins
A working operator’s view of ransomware in 2026. How the RaaS model splits the work between operators and affiliates, the double- and data-only extortion patterns that replaced “just encrypt the files,” the state of the ecosystem after Operation Cronos took down LockBit and ALPHV exit-scammed itself, what reverse engineering a current sample actually looks like, and the incident response sequence when the ransom note lands.