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Tunnel Techniques Explained: When an AI Agent Needs to Pave a Road into the Internal Network
The hard part begins after an AI agent lands inside a network: firewalls block, the target has no outbound internet, and the attack host cannot reach it directly. This illustrated guide explains how three mainstream tunneling techniques work (SOCKS5 proxy, HTTP-disguised tunnel, TUN virtual adapter), when each applies, and what defenders can observe in traffic.
Agentic Attack Tooling Research Series: A Guide to All Fourteen Parts
When attack tooling becomes AI-agent-driven, both sides of the conflict change. This is a fourteen-part deep research series: starting from a publicly attributed real-world incident, it unpacks architecture design, coordination mechanisms, and technical principles, then returns to a checklist defenders can use immediately plus isolated research practice.
AI Supply Chain Poisoning: When the Risk Hides in Models, Data, and Tools
An AI system's supply chain is far more complex than traditional software: model weights, training data, dependencies, external tools (MCP), and even prompts themselves can be tampered with. This article breaks down five links, why detection is so hard, and five practical defensive principles.
When AI Learns to Pentest: The ARTEX Case and the Rise of Agentic Attack Tooling
In October 2026, an open-source AI pentesting tool called ARTEX was linked to attacks on South Korean financial institutions — and within 48 hours its developer pulled the source and went closed-source. This article reconstructs the timeline, unpacks its technical positioning, and answers the more important question: how should defenders respond when attack tooling is driven by AI agents?
Cloud Identity and Permissions: Where the New Access Cards Live
When workloads move to the cloud, credentials change shape entirely: no longer usernames and passwords but service principals, roles, temporary credentials, and CI/CD secrets. This article explains four concepts, five common blind spots, and a practical order for tightening things up.
Credentials and AD Concepts: The Most Critical Link in the Attack Chain, Explained Plainly
Why do attackers fixate on the step of "obtaining the administrator password"? Kerberos, hashes, pass-the-hash, lateral movement — these terms appear constantly in security reports yet are rarely explained. This article unpacks the conceptual layer with everyday analogies, and why credential isolation is the highest-return defensive investment.
Honeypots and Anti-Agent Traps: When the Prey Starts Setting Traps
Honeypots are a classic defensive tool, but once attackers became AI agents both sides changed: defenders now design traps aimed specifically at AI, and anyone using agents to read external content needs to know how to avoid them. This article unpacks four trap classes and how to defend against them.
Insider Threat and Access Governance: The Hardest Attack Surface Is Inside
Insider threat is not simply "having a bad actor": it covers three distinct types — malicious, negligent, and coerced — each needing different countermeasures. This article breaks down their behavioural signatures and detection logic, and why access governance beats employee surveillance.
Isolated Research Practice: How to Study an Offensive Tool Safely
Studying offensive tooling is a necessary part of security work, but "researching" and "using" must be separated by technical boundaries, not willpower. Using a real isolated deployment as the example, this article covers network isolation, port binding, resource limits, tool verification, and five red lines.
Supply Chain and Third-Party Risk: When Your Attack Surface Is Not in Your Own Building
Much of a modern enterprise's attack surface sits outside its own control: open-source packages, outsourced providers, cloud dependencies, SaaS tools. This article unpacks the risk mechanics of four supply-chain links, shows how attackers borrow a path in, and includes a third-party risk checklist you can use directly.
Zero Trust Architecture: Not a Product Purchase but a Change of Assumption
In vendor decks, "zero trust" often becomes a product name; fundamentally it is only a change of assumption — no longer assuming the inside is safe. This article unpacks three core principles, four implementation layers, five common misconceptions, and why it is the same work as credential governance and insider threat management.
OkHuman Security Review: 12 Defects Across 3 Severity Tiers
How we audited an open-source agent framework and found 12 defects, including a zero-auth HTTP interface driving arbitrary bash. A reusable methodology for reviewing agent frameworks.
Automated Code Review Assistant: From Manual Line-by-Line Checks to an AI-Assisted Quality Gatekeeper
Code review is time-consuming, edge cases slip through, and newcomers struggle to learn the team's conventions. This article wires GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit, SonarQube, and an LLM node into an automated review pipeline: static analysis, security scanning, style checks, semantic understanding, and risk grading, so senior engineers handle only high-risk changes and the machine takes the repetitive work.
Enterprise Data Security Basics: What Data Should Never Be Fed to AI
Employees pasting customer personal data into free AI tools is one of the most common and hardest-to-prevent data leakage paths in enterprises. This article provides a four-tier data classification standard, a 'never upload' red-line checklist, a comparison of enterprise vs. consumer terms, local deployment options, and a question list for IT and legal teams.
Is My Data Safe? What Actually Leaves Your Computer When You Use AI
'Is it safe?' is too blunt a question to ever get a useful answer. This article breaks it apart: the four kinds of things that actually leave your machine when you use cloud tools, why local tools are different, what the sentence 'we don't train on your data' does and does not promise, and three rules you can actually enforce. No legal advice included.
What an AI Agent Can Actually See on Your Computer
Which files an AI Agent can read, whether it can go online, whether it can delete things, and whether what you say gets used for training. This article splits 'what can it do' into four separately verifiable questions, and explains what permission modes, sandboxes, and working directories each block — and don't.
What Hermes Agent Is: An Open-Source Agent Where One Gateway Serves Twenty-Odd Messaging Platforms
Nous Research's open-source multi-channel Agent: one resident gateway process serves WeChat, WeCom, Feishu/Lark, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, email and twenty-odd other platforms at once, sharing one memory, generating skills automatically, and supporting natural-language scheduling plus five sandbox backends. Includes installation methods, common commands and the security defaults.
What Is an API Key: It's Both Your Identity and Your Wallet
An API key is a string that tells a remote service 'this request is yours, and the bill goes to you.' This article explains why it's a secret, where it belongs (environment variables or .env — never a chat window), what to do on leakage, why it's usually wired directly to money, and a distinction most beginners miss: logging into the web version is not the same as having an API key.
YC Open-Sources QM: Source-Level Teardown of the 'Whole-Company Agent Operating System' That Hit 12K Stars in 7 Days, with More Security Code Than Model Loops
On July 31, 2026, Y Combinator open-sourced its internal Agent system QM (Quartermaster). Clone test: 241K lines of TypeScript, 379 test files, 4 interchangeable harnesses (Pi/OpenCode/Codex/Claude Code), egress proxy re-resolves DNS for each request, three-person gate 'a wall, not a hole', npm supply chain 7-day cooldown period: complete source-level dissection
NVIDIA SkillSpector: An AI Agent Skill Security Scanner
GitHub Trending #11 · Open-sourced by NVIDIA · Detects 64 vulnerability patterns × 16 risk categories, scanning Agent Skills for malicious code, prompt injection, data exfiltration, and other security risks. A must-have security check before installation
AI Security and Red Teaming: Prompt Injection, Jailbreak Defense
A full landscape of security threats to AI systems: Prompt Injection, Jailbreak, Data Poisoning, and practical defense strategies and red team testing methods.