Field notes from the offensive side.

The two terms get used interchangeably all the time, often by vendors who are selling one and calling it the other. If you’re the person signing off on the engagement, the difference matters — in scope, in cost, and in what you actually learn about your environment. [Read More]

Every organization that takes security seriously eventually runs into a framework. SOC 2, CMMC, HIPAA, PCI DSS — the acronyms pile up fast, and for good reason. Compliance gives you structure, a common language, and a checklist that forces conversations most teams would otherwise keep putting off. It is a... [Read More]

When you’re building offensive or defensive security tooling, the temptation is immediate: start from scratch, build exactly what you want, no legacy baggage. It’s seductive. But it’s also where most tool projects die—buried under months of protocol implementation, edge-case handling, and the realization that you’ve built a lower-quality version of... [Read More]

Most small businesses run what I’d politely call a “flat” network. Every device — the receptionist’s PC, the accounting laptop, the security cameras, the server holding your customer data — sits on the same slice of the network and can talk to everything else. It works. It’s cheap. And it’s... [Read More]

I break into computer systems for a living — legally, with permission, so that the results land on a report instead of the news. After enough of this, you notice something: the ways in are boringly consistent. It’s rarely a movie-style genius hack. It’s almost always a handful of small,... [Read More]

This one’s a little more inside-baseball than my usual posts. It’s less “here’s what your business should do” and more “here’s how the person you might hire actually works.” If you want to know whether a security professional understands their craft deeply or just runs other people’s scripts, posts like... [Read More]