Cryptography
How Are the Three Digits on the Back of Your Credit Card Computed?
The 2-key Triple DES algorithm behind your card's CVV, and the inputs — PAN, expiry date, service code — that go into computing it.
Posts by Category
- Cryptography 3
- Phishing 2
- Incident Response 2
- Security Operations 2
- Passwords 1
- Breaches 1
- Cybercrime 1
- Zero Trust Architecture 1
Cryptography
Cryptography
Why the 3 Digits on the Back of Your Credit or Debit Card Matter
What your card's CVV actually protects against in card-not-present fraud, and why merchants are legally barred from storing it.
Cryptography
The Relationship Between Cryptography and Cryptocurrencies
How digital signatures and public-key cryptography secure cryptocurrency transactions, and what happens if a signing key is lost or stolen.
Phishing
Phishing
Use of Bespoke Branding in O365 Phishing Campaigns
How phishing kits abuse Microsoft 365's public branding APIs to clone an organisation's real sign-in page convincingly.
Phishing
Defending against Obfuscation and Link-less Phishing
Anatomy of a link-less HTML-attachment phishing campaign — the JavaScript obfuscation used to evade analysis, and how defenders can still catch it.
Incident Response
Incident Response
The Power of Hypothesis Driven Investigations
Why structured hypotheses, not more tooling, are what turns SOC alert-chasing into evidence-based investigation.
Incident Response
The Most Important Question Every SOC Analyst Should Be Asking
The one question — 'so what?' — that separates analysts closing alerts fast from analysts actually reducing risk.
Security Operations
Security Operations
Codification: The Missing Foundation of the AI-Ready SOC
Playbooks pose the questions, queries gather the evidence, detections explain why the alert fired, and skills carry the procedure — codification is how you turn analyst expertise into something AI and analysts can both reason over. Part 2 of a series.
Security Operations
Most SOCs Are Thinking About AI the Wrong Way
The real AI opportunity in the SOC isn't faster triage — it's codifying your best analysts' expertise so it can be applied at scale. Part 1 of a series.
Passwords
Passwords
Simple Steps to Good Password Management
Practical, non-obvious habits for stronger passwords — prompted by World Password Day, still relevant every other day of the year.
Breaches
Breaches
Collection 1 - What should you do?
What the 1.1-billion-record Collection #1 breach actually means for you, how to check if you're in it, and why resetting 'the' password isn't the answer.
Cybercrime
Cybercrime
Is Cybercrime a Global Phenomenon That Is Not Restricted by Geographical Boundaries?
Why cybercrime shrugs off the geographical and jurisdictional boundaries that traditional crime has always been bound by.
Zero Trust Architecture
Zero Trust Architecture
Defending the Edge: How VPNs, Firewalls & Routers Are Now Prime Targets
Why VPNs, firewalls, and edge devices have become the preferred entry point for ransomware and nation-state actors — and what to actually monitor for.