Book Review: The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll


Book cover - illustration of a person sat in front of a computer.

This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is a fast paced, high-tension, page turner. […]

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What's the most malicious thing you can do with an injected HTML heading element?


The HTML5 Logo.

A bit of a thought experiment - similar to my Minimum Viable XSS and SVG injection investigations. I recently found a popular website which echoed back user input. It correctly sanitised < to &lt; to prevent any HTML injection. Except… It let through <h2> elements unaltered! Why? I suspect because the output was: <h2>Your search […]

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Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 5


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Verdicts Some of the lab tasks were impossible without looking at the cheat sheet. I got stuck on one […]

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Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 4


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! The penultimate day. Try not to worry about the upcoming exam! Today was lots of HTTP, TLS, and other […]

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Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 3


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Day 3 - the day I was dreading most of all… Windows! I've been avoiding M$ WinDoze (LOL!!!) since […]

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Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 2


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Day 1 was all about password cracking and metasploit. Today? Linux Hacking! Sadly, we aren't learning anything to do […]

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Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 1


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

As part of my MSc, I have to take three "Professional Practice" courses. The course provider, QA.com, let me choose anything from their online catalogue. The first I'm doing is Certified in The Art of Hacking. As regular readers will know, I'm pretty reasonable at hacking. I have received bug bounties from Google, Twitter, Samsung, […]

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What playing football taught me about hacking - Part 1


AI generated image of some Lego minifigs playing football.

This is a two-part blog post about rewriting the rules. I hated playing sports as a teenager quelle surprise. In a vain attempt to get me to love the beautiful game, a PE teacher once made me team captain for a kickabout. My rival? Sporty Dave. Head boy, house captain, and conqueror of puberty. The […]

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Creating a public, read-only calendar


A bright and easy to use weekly view of my diary.

Last year, I blogged about why I make my work calendar public. It is useful to have a public website where people can see if I'm free or busy. But the version I created relied on Google Calendar which, sadly, isn't that great. It doesn't look wonderful, especially on small screens, and is limited to […]

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Book Review: Permanent Record


Edward Snowden, a geek in glasses, looks away from the camera.

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.

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