Eight hexadecimal digits that point nowhere: what 0xDEADBEEF really is, where it is used as a sentinel value, where it came from and why people still write it. With the difference between remembering it as an address and remembering it as a trap for the debugger.
Read the article →The IT department cannot protect an organisation that does not know its own processes. Why collaboration between security, business and users is the control that makes all the other controls effective, and how to build it without turning it into an annual memo.
Read the article →Not a list of courses, but the order in which things are learned: the technical foundations, reading other people’s code, the first laboratory, and the three things almost everyone gets wrong at first. With what really matters, and what is only noise.
Read the article →From cables to applications, in four layers and without shortcuts. Why the stack is layered and what that really means, how a packet crosses ten routers, what sets TCP apart from UDP, and the MTU and port numbers that explain half of all network problems.
Read the article →Nmap, Metasploit Framework, sqlmap, ZAP, hashcat: what they really cover and where they do not. Why the free version is preferable in at least six cases out of seven, and the three cases where it is not. Including the mistake to avoid, which is to stop treating them as a black box.
Read the article →The word hacker never means what the press wants it to mean. The definition in the Jargon File and in RFC 1392, why cracker is a pathology semantically before it is legally, what a lamer is, and the three philosophies competing for the scene. With the rule that actually tells them apart.
Read the article →An operational vademecum for anyone working in security: the order in which you look at a system, the things you always check, the ethical rules that are not negotiable, and the story of the greatest hackers with an explanation of why they were.
Read the article →Why most security tools are written in Python, what makes it suited to offensive work, and the story of the language from 1991 to today. With the ethical boundary put where it belongs, and Python’s limits stated plainly.
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