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Articles

Long-form writing on tech, culture, and the edges of the internet.

cybersecuritydata breach

Cisco's Source Code Breach Was Structural, Not Accidental

Cisco's source code breach wasn't a fluke. It was the predictable result of credential drift, third-party trust gaps, and dev infrastructure treated as low-risk.

4 min read
AI agentsClaude Code

Claude Code's System Prompt Is a Production AI Agent Blueprint

Claude Code's system prompt is a working engineering spec for production AI agents. Six concrete patterns for context isolation, tool selection, parallelism, error recovery, memory, and blast radius management.

6 min read
google-ai-searchseo-strategy

Google's AI Search Shift: Run These Experiments Now

Real before/after data from 4 sites showing how Google's AI search changes traffic, CTR, and revenue by query type - with the exact tracking setup.

8 min read
supply chain securitycicd-security

How Trust in Open-Source Updates Becomes a Systemic Failure Mode

A structural analysis of how trust in open-source updates becomes exploitable when systems assume past safety implies future safety, using the Trivy compromise as a case study.

2 min read
supply chain securityCI/CD security

ShinyHunters, Trivy, and the Pipeline Identity Problem

ShinyHunters cloned 300 Cisco repositories through Trivy running in a CI/CD pipeline. This is what failed structurally, why it failed, and what pipeline identity enforcement must look like.

4 min read
supply-chain-securitycontainer-security

The Advisory Told You to Update. It Didn't Tell You What's Already Running.

Patching the advisory isn't enough. If your CI pipeline ran during the compromise window, the compromised code is baked into your container images and still running. Here's how to find it.

6 min read
AI reliabilityLLM engineering

The Real Architecture Behind Reliable AI Systems

Reliability in AI systems comes not from smarter models or autonomy, but from deterministic control, validation, and predictable failure recovery-patterns already proven in real-world production environments.

4 min read
MFA bypassauthentication security

Why MFA Alone Will Not Save You

MFA stops credential stuffing but not AiTM phishing, token theft, or session hijacking. Here's what attackers actually do and how to close the gaps.

4 min read
firewall-managementnetwork-security

Why Your Firewall Rules Are Already Outdated

Most firewall rule sets have 30-60% dead rules. Here's why rule bases decay, what encrypted traffic and cloud migration did to perimeter security, and what to do about it.

4 min read
cybersecuritysupply chain attack

The Real Failure in the axios npm Compromise Wasn't Code - It Was Trust

The axios@1.141 and axios@0.304 npm compromise was not a code flaw - it was a failure in trust validation. Credential theft enabled persistent supply chain poisoning due to lack of enforced MFA and session verification at every publish event.

3 min read
incident-responsebreach-readiness

Why Most Companies Fail at Incident Response

Most incident response plans are untested fantasies. Here's why companies fail at IR and the specific fixes that actually work.

8 min read
securityengineering

Your npm install Just Ran Someone Else's Code

Supply chain security is not a dependency problem. It is a trust delegation problem. And the system was never designed to handle the weight.

8 min