Field notes
Traditional VPNs grant a wide network path once a user authenticates—often more path than the task requires. Attackers who phish VPN credentials inherit that width. Zero trust network access (ZTNA) and related secure remote access patterns…
Service meshes promise uniform mTLS, traffic policy, and observability across microservices. They also add control-plane complexity, certificate machinery, and performance cost. For some organizations the security benefits justify the operational load; for others mesh is premature—expensive…
Threat hunting does not require a dedicated research org or a lake full of exotic telemetry. Many high-value hunts are structured questions you can ask weekly with logs you already have: identity, endpoint, cloud audit, email,…
Certificate expirations remain a leading cause of avoidable outages—and a quiet security problem when teams disable validation temporarily to recover. Automation with ACME, complete inventory, and expiry alerting turns certificates from heroics into boredom. Boredom is…
Database credentials remain among the most powerful secrets in any environment. A single leaked application password with DDL rights can empty tables, plant triggers, or exfiltrate years of customer data. Growing organizations often accumulate shared “appuser”…
Continuous integration and delivery pipelines have become privileged control planes. They hold cloud credentials, deploy keys, and the ability to ship code to production. As teams grow from a handful of repositories to dozens of services,…
Why password MFA is no longer enough for privileged paths Phishing kits, adversary-in-the-middle proxies, and helpdesk social engineering routinely defeat one-time passcodes and push approvals. Phishing-resistant authentication—passkeys and other WebAuthn/FIDO2 authenticators—binds the login to the real…
Q1 planning season forces two budgets into the same conversation whether teams like it or not: cloud spend and security controls. Treated separately, they fight—security tooling looks like pure cost, and cost-cutting quietly disables logging or…
A reproducible Linux host baseline beats a binder of one-off hardenings that drift after the next golden image rebuild. This guide outlines a CIS-inspired, automation-friendly baseline for general-purpose Linux servers in 2025: SSH hardening, unattended upgrades,…
In early December 2025, Phoenix Education Partners—the parent of the University of Phoenix—disclosed a cybersecurity incident involving Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). The company’s Form 8-K described unauthorized access detected on November 21, 2025, with data copied…