From the field
Practical cybersecurity guidance drawn from real-world engagements. No theory. No marketing fluff. Just the things we wish someone had told us 20 years ago.
How Claude Code + SIFT Workstation Cuts Incident Response from Hours to Minutes
Rob T. Lee demonstrated at [un]prompted 2026 how Protocol SIFT reduces full forensic investigations from a full day to 14 minutes. Your adversary has an AI. You have tab-completion. Here is what to do about it.
AI Agents in the SOC: Automating Repetitive Security Operations Without Losing Control
Your SOC analysts spend 70% of their time on repetitive tasks that an AI agent could handle. Here is how to deploy LLM-powered automation for alert triage, IOC enrichment, and playbook execution — with the guardrails that keep humans in control.
Building an Autonomous AI Agent for Compliance Control Testing: A Practical Guide
Manual control testing is expensive, slow, and error-prone. Here is how to build an LLM-powered agent that queries your cloud APIs, validates security controls, and generates audit-ready findings — with architecture, code, and guardrails.
Building a High-Fidelity Detection Library in Splunk: From Noisy Alerts to Actionable Intelligence
Risk-Based Alerting, detection-as-code, and correlation searches that actually catch threats. A deep guide to building a Splunk detection library that your SOC can trust.
Splunk on a Budget: How to Cut Log Volume by 60% Without Losing Visibility
Splunk licensing costs are killing your budget. Here is how to use transforms.conf, props.conf, and smart data architecture to slash ingestion volume while keeping the data that actually matters for detection.
Hybrid Identity Under Attack: Securing the Bridge Between On-Prem AD and Entra ID
Entra Connect is the most privileged service account in your environment and the most overlooked. Here is how attackers exploit hybrid identity infrastructure and how to harden it.
Hunting for Threats in Entra ID: Sign-In Logs, Audit Logs, and What They Actually Tell You
Seven ready-to-use KQL queries for hunting token theft, AiTM phishing, privilege escalation, and OAuth abuse in your Entra ID environment using Microsoft Sentinel.
Entra ID Security Hardening: 15 Settings Every Tenant Should Lock Down Today
PIM, app registrations, consent permissions, cross-tenant access, and 11 more tenant-level settings that most organizations leave at their insecure defaults. Portal paths and PowerShell for each.
Securing Active Directory Certificate Services: The Attack Surface Nobody Audits
AD CS is deployed in nearly every enterprise and almost never audited. ESC1 through ESC8, Golden Certificates, and the hardening steps that actually matter.
How to Attack-Test Your Own Domain Controllers Before an Adversary Does
PingCastle, Purple Knight, BloodHound CE, and Testimo — a purple team self-assessment toolkit for validating your AD security posture before the next pen test or real attacker finds the gaps.
Hardening Domain Controllers: The 10-Point Checklist Most Companies Skip
Tiered admin model, LSA Protection, Credential Guard, LDAP signing, KRBTGT rotation, and 5 more DC-specific hardening steps with the PowerShell commands to implement each one.
Your Company Just Got Hit with Ransomware: A 48-Hour Survival Playbook for SMBs
Recovery costs average $1.53 million. Downtime averages 24 days. 60% of small businesses that suffer a ransomware attack close within 6 months. Here is the hour-by-hour incident response playbook that determines whether your company survives.
MFA Is Not Enough: How Attackers Bypass Multi-Factor Authentication and What to Do About It
AiTM phishing attacks surged 146% in one year. Traditional MFA protects the login moment but not the session that follows. Here are the five bypass techniques we see in real engagements and a phased deployment roadmap for phishing-resistant authentication.
5 Active Directory Misconfigurations We See in Every Engagement
After hundreds of assessments, the same identity-based attack vectors keep showing up. Here are the five AD misconfigurations that put your entire organization at risk — and how to fix them before an attacker does.
What Fortune 500 Security Teams Actually Look for in Vendor Products
We've been on the buyer side for 20+ years. Here's what actually gets your product through enterprise security review — and what gets it rejected before anyone even reads your pitch deck.
How to Reduce SIEM Alert Noise by 80%
Your SOC doesn't have a staffing problem — it has a signal-to-noise problem. Here's our framework for auditing detection rules, eliminating false positives, and restructuring your alert pipeline.
Why Your Penetration Test Report Is Useless (And What to Ask For Instead)
Most pen test reports are 100-page PDFs that nobody reads. We break down what a useful offensive security engagement actually delivers — and the questions you should be asking before you sign the SOW.
Azure AD Conditional Access Policies Most Companies Get Wrong
Conditional Access is one of the most powerful security controls in the Microsoft ecosystem — and one of the most misconfigured. Here are the policy gaps we find in nearly every Entra ID environment we assess.
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