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July 30, 2026
A blind bug never proves itself in the response you can see. The proof shows up somewhere else, and later, on infrastructure you control. So the first thing you actually need is not a payload list, it's a collector. Here is why, and here is one I built from scratch in Go for a lab you can run yourself.
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July 28, 2026
Blind bugs prove themselves on a server the target calls home to, not in the response you can see. So the real question is what you run for that. This kicks off a series about out-of-band hunting, and it introduces beacontrap, a self-hostable collector you can stand up on your own box in an afternoon.
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July 28, 2026
I built a small Go tool that inventories everything installed on my Linux box, ranks it by what I actually use, and lets me annotate the gaps. This is the story of why the obvious approach doesn't work, and why every usage signal I reached for lied to me until I actually measured it.
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March 12, 2026
Two authentication labs from PortSwigger's Web Security Academy: an IP-block bypass via interleaved valid/invalid logins, and username enumeration through account-lockout responses. Full Burp Intruder setups, payload logic, and PoCs.
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August 9, 2025
A hands-on tour of Linux PAM: how the stack works, deliberately locking yourself out with /etc/nologin and sshd config, a safe toggle script to get back in, brute-force protection with pam_faillock, and auditing sudo activity.
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July 25, 2025
A practical guide to Linux account hardening: password quality and aging, controlling root access, per-user resource limits, centralized authentication, and monitoring user activity across the system.
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July 24, 2025
The starting line for the Terminal Tales Linux hardening series: how to actually build real Linux skills from zero (daily-drive a live install, free Professor Messer and TryHackMe paths, and an honest take on certs) before diving into the hands-on hardening posts.
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May 13, 2025
Self-host Passbolt, an open-source password manager, on an AWS EC2 instance — full deployment with SSH key auth, a domain, and SSL, plus a nerdy detour into password [entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy) and a cost-saving auto-shutdown so you only pay when you use it.
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May 6, 2025
A full break-and-fix homelab: deliberately weaken a Windows 10 VM, scan it with Nessus (network then credentialed), plant vulnerable software, exploit Log4Shell against a Dockerized target from Kali, then patch it all back to a clean scan.
