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Solving the ShadowCitadel Lab Blue team challenge
Today, we dive into a host-based forensics investigation − a curious case of a breach inside the enterprise environment of a company called TechSynergy. They have detected an anomaly after an employee engaged with an unexpected email attachment. This triggered a series of covert operations within the network, including unusual account activity and system alterations.
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How to prevent token misuse in LLM integrations
LLMs are powerful. And expensive. Every token counts, and if you’re building something that uses an LLM API (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or PaLM, Mistral, etc.), malicious users can abuse it to burn through your credits. This is especially true for apps that take user input and feed it to the model. The trick is that
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Solving the XLMRat Blue team challenge
Today we’re looking at the XLMRat malware. It is a remote access trojan (hence the RAT part) built to be small, sneaky, and stupidly persistent. It typically rides in via phishing or social engineering, often disguised as something mundane, like a JPG or TXT file. It targets Windows systems and speaks fluent PowerShell. It’s popular
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Billion-dollar brains: the real cost of AI
AI-assisted coding feels like magic. You type what you want, and out comes working code. (well, maybe after a few hours of setup − but still) Like all magic, though, it has a cost. And right now, that cost is mostly hidden − even as the invoices show up every month. What makes it work
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Solving the BlueSky Ransomware Blue team challenge
Today we’re looking at the BlueSky ransomware, a strain of malicious software that encrypts files on a victim’s system, rendering them inaccessible until a ransom is paid. First detected in June 2022, it shares similarities with other notorious ransomware families like Conti and Babuk. BlueSky spreads through methods such as phishing emails, malicious links, and network
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Solving the DanaBot Blue team challenge
In this blog post, we’ll walk through a Blue Team lab challenge hosted by CyberDefenders, specifically investigating a breach scenario involving DanaBot malware. The challenge is presented by CyberDefenders (https://cyberdefenders.org) and can be found here: https://cyberdefenders.org/blueteam-ctf-challenges/danabot. Note: This post is not sponsored by or affiliated with CyberDefenders. Initially, I knew very little about DanaBot. Turns out