Practical guides for modern security
Honest writing on SOC 2 readiness, continuous compliance, vulnerability management, incident response, and the messy realities of keeping a regulated business secure.
Passkeys and Passwordless Authentication: Killing the Password Without Betting the Company on One
Passwords are the root cause behind most breaches a small business will ever suffer, and passkeys are the first replacement that is both more secure and easier to use. But swapping the front door of every account is the kind of change that either quietly hardens your whole company or locks half of it out on a Monday morning. A plain-language walk through what a passkey actually is, why it cannot be phished, the synced-versus-hardware choice that shapes your rollout, the recovery problem that is harder than the login problem, and how to move a lean team off passwords without stranding anyone.
Cyber Threat Intelligence Without a Team: Making Threat Data Actually Change What You Do
Threat intelligence has a reputation as an enterprise luxury — expensive feeds, a dedicated analyst, a wall of dashboards nobody reads. The useful version is almost the opposite: a small, deliberate habit of letting real knowledge about who is attacking businesses like yours change a handful of concrete decisions. A practical guide to the three altitudes of threat intel, the free sources a lean team can actually use, and the one discipline that separates intelligence that sharpens your defenses from a feed that just adds noise.
Prompt Injection and Securing the AI Features You Ship: A Field Guide for Small Teams Building With LLMs
The moment your product calls a large language model, you have shipped a new and genuinely strange class of vulnerability — one where the attacker writes instructions in plain English and the model cannot reliably tell them apart from your own. This is not the risk of employees pasting data into chatbots; it is the risk of the AI features you build. A grounded walk through prompt injection, why the model confuses instructions with data, why giving the model tools turns a clever trick into real damage, and the controls that actually contain it.
Blameless Security Postmortems: Turning an Incident Into the Thing That Prevents the Next One
The most expensive part of a security incident is the one most teams waste: the learning. A postmortem that hunts for a person to blame teaches everyone to hide the next problem; a blameless after-action review that hunts for the systemic conditions that let the incident happen turns a bad day into durable improvement. A practical walk through how to run one, the timeline-and-contributing-factors structure that keeps it honest, and how to make sure the findings become tracked work instead of a document nobody reads twice.
Scoping a Penetration Test: Rules of Engagement That Get You a Useful Report Instead of an Expensive One
A penetration test is only as good as the conversation you have before it starts. Vague scope and missing rules of engagement are how teams end up paying for a report that tests the wrong things, misses what they actually needed, or — worse — takes down production. This is the pre-engagement discipline: defining scope, objectives, rules of engagement, and the authorization that separates a sanctioned test from a crime, so the money buys real assurance.
Quantum-Safe Cryptography: Why a Lean Team Should Start Planning the Migration Now, Not Later
A cryptographically relevant quantum computer does not exist yet — but "harvest now, decrypt later" means the clock on your long-lived secrets is already running, and the standards to fix it landed in 2024. This is a plain-English planning guide to the post-quantum transition: what actually breaks, what NIST finalized, why crypto-agility matters more than any single algorithm, and how a small team turns a decade-long migration into tracked work it can start this quarter.