Banking Technology & Cybersecurity: Real-World Engineering
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Fraud systems, payments engineering, banking malware, and what building secure financial technology looks like inside one of Africas largest retail banks.
The Ever Rising Bar: What the NatWest Thurrock Lawsuit Tells Us About the Limits of Bank Fraud Prevention
1. The claim in outline Liquidators of Rockfire Capital and Rockfire Investment Finance are pursuing NatWest subsidiary RBS for roughly £250m, alleging the bank processed payments that let businessman Liam Kavanagh siphon money out of the Rockfire group for personal use, including a yacht, an aircraft and luxury cars. The money originated with Thurrock Council, […]
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Stablecoins Explained: Types, Uses & How They Move Money
1. What Are Stablecoins? Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging themselves to a reserve asset, typically a fiat currency like the US dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which can experience dramatic price swings, stablecoins aim to provide the benefits of digital currency without […]
Read more →Mac Terminal: Scan TLS Certificates with NMAP and SSLScan
The below script will give you basic information on a websites certificate: NMAP is provides a simple way to get a list of available ciphers from a host website / server. Additionally, nmap provides a strength rating of strong, weak, or unknown for each available cipher. First, download the ssl-enum-ciphers.nse nmap script (explanation here). Then from the same […]
Read more →SYN Flood Testing with hping3: A Practical Guide
Getting an application knocked out with a simple SYN flood is both embarrassing and avoidable. Its also very easy to create a SYN flood and so its something you should design against. Below is the hping3 command line that I use to test my services against SYN floods. I have used quite a few mods, […]
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Security Vibing: Why Teams Keep Sacrificing to the Risk Gods Instead of Managing Real Risk
Something interesting happens inside large organisations when a new technology appears and nobody is quite sure how dangerous it is: people start sacrificing things. A feature gets disabled, a setting gets locked down, and a capability gets removed. Another approval step gets inserted into the process, or someone quietly updates a policy. Everyone feels slightly […]
Read more →SYN Flood Testing With hping3: Parallel Processes Guide
A SYN flood test using hping3 that allows you to specify the number of SYN packets to send and scales horizontally with a specific number of processes can be created using a Bash script with the xargs command. This approach allows you to distribute the workload across multiple processes for better performance. The Script This […]
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Why Bank Architecture Determines Resilience More Than Size
1. Size Was Once Mistaken for Stability For most of modern banking history, stability was assumed to increase with size. The thinking was the bigger you are, the more you should care, the more resources you can apply to problems. Larger banks had more capital, more infrastructure, and more people. In a pre-cloud world, this […]
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CVE-2024-3094: Detecting the XZ Utils SSH Backdoor
Executive Summary CVE-2024-3094 represents one of the most sophisticated supply chain attacks in recent history. Discovered in March 2024, this vulnerability embedded a backdoor into XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, allowing attackers to compromise SSH authentication on Linux systems. With a CVSS score of 10.0 (Critical), this attack demonstrates the extreme risks inherent in […]
Read more →Memgraph & Claude Desktop: Detect Mule Accounts on macOS
1. Introduction This guide walks you through setting up Memgraph with Claude Desktop on your laptop to analyze relationships between mule accounts in banking systems. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a working setup where Claude can query and visualize banking transaction patterns to identify potential mule account networks. Why Graph Databases for […]
Read more →nmap Vulners Script: Quick Vulnerability Scanning on macOS
This is a very short post to help anyone quickly setup vulnerability checking for a site they own (and have permission to scan). I like the vulners scripts as they cover a lot of basic ground quickly with one script.
Read more →Scan Your Local Network With Nikto and Nmap on macOS
Nikto is becoming one of my favourite tools. I like it because of its wide ranging use cases and its simplicity. So whats an example use case for Nikto? When I am bored right now and so I am going to hunt around my local network and see what I can find… Now lets pop […]
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Quantum Computing Threat to Encryption: What You Must Know
Published on andrewbaker.ninja | Enterprise Architecture & Banking Technology There is a quiet revolution happening in physics laboratories around the world, and most of the people who should be worried about it are not paying attention yet. That is about to change. Quantum computing is advancing faster than anyone predicted five years ago, and when […]
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