Insights.
Field notes from running IT for other people’s businesses. Long-form posts on the boring layer done right. Honest, specific, written by the engineers who carry the pager.
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// the one we’d hand a new client firstThe breach that wasn’t on the laptop
A creative firm reported an email account doing things no one recognised. We were brought in to answer two questions — what actually happened, and is anything still inside. The answer was entirely cloud-side, and proving the endpoint was clean meant imaging a Mac that can’t be imaged the usual way.
read the field note →// latest posts
// most recent first · published natively in SquarespaceThe breach that wasn’t on the laptop
An email account acting on its own — how we proved the laptop was clean and the breach lived entirely in the cloud account.
2023 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report — the AI-generated summary
I asked ChatGPT to summarise the 2023 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report — ransomware, state actors, and AI on both sides.
Old worms on new hooks — XSS as phishing’s hook, line, and sinker
Threat actors stopped scanning for XSS and started mailing you the malicious page as an HTML attachment. What that looks like.
Real life, summed up in 12 post-it note graphs
A re-share from the archive — Chaz Hutton’s deadpan first-world-problem graphs, drawn on sticky notes.
Polymorphic code and ChatGPT (read label before use!)
Language models can detect polymorphic malware by its patterns — and, as one PoC showed, can also synthesise it on the fly.
Phishing kits as a service (attacks for sale!)
Phishing kits now ship as a $300–$1000 / month subscription, sending millions of malicious emails a day. How the model works.
Revert Outlook 2016 autocomplete (replaced with ‘Recent People’)
A one-key registry fix to restore classic Outlook 2016 autocomplete after the ‘Recent People’ change.
Chrome white screen on macOS — solved
Chrome on macOS loading blank white pages and ‘Aw, Snap!’ on every site — the repair steps that fixed it.
Lemelson-MIT ‘Use It!’ undergraduate winners
From the archive — two UW undergrads won the $10,000 Lemelson-MIT ‘Use It!’ prize for sign-language-to-speech gloves.
Researchers aim to store all of human knowledge for eternity — via DNA
ETH Zurich researchers want to encode civilisation’s knowledge into DNA and seal it in glass capsules — storage measured in millennia.