2020-02-15 -  A restless mind, a new feature, and a concerning news story had me worried about privacy over Christmas. Here’s how I installed Pi-hole on my home network to try to block requests from my Samsung Smart TV – and what the data it collected revealed… It was the night before...

2020-02-02 -  Web browsing privacy is of increasing concern as people’s business and personal lives become ever more entwined with the internet. This essay examines various connection scenarios to establish how secure your data really is. Introduction After years of industry concern, web browsing privacy is finally becoming a matter of interest...

2019-12-20 -  My Christmas break has officially begun! With an excess of leave to use after all this year’s hard work, I kicked off the festive season with a trip to Edinburgh, where I hit the usual tourist traps, found some geeky gems, and tried to avoid freezing. The usual suspects There...

2019-11-30 -  It’s been a while… again. Time for another update about what I’ve been up to both professionally and personally and an outline of my plans for 2020, when I’ll be taking a step up in terms of personal projects in my free time. Getting to work My refreshed post-Las Vegas...

2019-08-26 -  Hi – it’s been a while! When I checked my blog I was surprised to see I hadn’t posted in a whole four months, since April. The good news is that I’m back, and I’m more inspired than I have been in a long time to get learning, designing, and...

2019-04-27 -  It took me a while – the game was released in late 2016 – but I’ve finally finished Watch Dogs 2. After playing the first game, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the sequel adapts hacking for entertaining gameplay while giving a nod to the real-life scene. The original...

2019-04-21 -  Tech support scams – which attempt to extort money from vulerable people by exploiting their lack of technical knowledge – are difficult to stop, but I recently discovered a Twitch streamer working to raise awareness of the threat. A few years ago, one of my family members fell victim to...

2019-04-14 -  After extracting data from Google Chrome last month, next on our journey into the eye-opening world of Windows forensics it’s time to retrieve the user’s Firefox history to see which websites they’ve been visiting in Mozilla’s browser. What is the Firefox history and how does it help our investigation? I’m...

2019-04-07 -  When investigating a potentially compromised Windows computer, as well as looking at logs, files, and processes, it’s important to check its current network connections. Here’s how to retrieve that data with netstat and make sense of it. Gathering data with netstat First, open a Command Prompt window and use netstat...

2019-03-29 -  I’ve been sticking to several new year’s resolutions in 2019, including learning languages, staying fit, and working on geeky projects – and leaving Facebook has helped to give me the time and focus I’ve needed to stay on track. Normally my last post of each month goes off-topic and covers...