2024-07-20 -  When I went to bed on the evening of Friday 19th July, I couldn’t sleep. It was a stuffy summer’s night in London, and the adrenaline was still pumping through my veins after one of the more notable days in recent memory for cyber security. Still, laying awake gave me...

2023-11-26 -  The dictionary definition of “modular” leaves a little to be desired: “Employing or involving a module or modules as the basis of design or construction.” What is implied, but that I would make explicit, is that parts of the whole can be swapped out easily while maintaining the functionality of...

2023-03-26 -  Stick around cyber security Twitter or LinkedIn for long enough and you’ll likely see somebody raise a question about how to get into the industry. You’ll also likely see a reply that describes a kind of rite of passage from sysadmin, to SOC analyst, to just about any other security...

2022-12-14 -  If I was to describe how often malware is downloaded within ZIP archives, “common” would be a huge understatement. A key artefact in these investigations is the temporary directory Windows creates when a user opens an archive in Explorer, but I recently realised I’d never actually run a proper test...

2022-12-03 -  Faced with a day at home recovering from my most recent COVID-19 booster vaccine, I realised I hadn’t written anything more than a few lines of PowerShell in a while and decided to spend some time working on something interesting. The idea occurred to me to try to correlate Windows...

2022-02-22 -  During any incident investigation on a Linux system, one of the most valuable things for responders and forensicators to establish is which commands were run. This is key to finding out what an attacker or malicious user was attempting to do, and what remediation activities are required. The .bash_history file,...

2022-01-08 -  Here’s one more writeup from the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge! The slot machine hack was one of the showpiece challenges this year, so I thought I’d put together a quick blog post to guide you through the process of identifying and exploiting a vulnerability in the game. The challenge Our...

2022-01-08 -  Over the Christmas break I took part in an annual tradition - the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge! For 2021 the team had put together a fresh set of challenges for this festive CTF, and now that the deadline for submissions and subsequent embargo has passed, I thought I’d share a...

2021-05-01 -  Splunk is considered the gold standard for analysis of event logs and other data, but unless you’re lucky enough to work for an organisation that pays for it, it can be difficult to get practical experience in how to run searches, build dashboards, and otherwise dissect data using its query...

2021-04-02 -  Most computer users assume that when they delete a file and empty the Recycle Bin, it’s gone forever. After all, if Windows doesn’t show us a file, it doesn’t exist anymore, right? Wrong. With the right tools and knowledge, forensics experts can find fragments - or even complete versions -...