Banking Technology & Cybersecurity: Real-World Engineering
Fraud systems, payments engineering, banking malware, and what building secure financial technology looks like inside one of Africas largest retail banks.
NMAP + Claude MCP: 20 Vulnerability Scans on macOS
Introduction NMAP (Network Mapper) is one of the most powerful and versatile network scanning tools available for security professionals, system administrators, and ethical hackers. When combined with Claude through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), it becomes an even more powerful tool, allowing you to leverage AI to intelligently analyze scan results, suggest scanning strategies, and […]
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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Why Core Banking Was a Bad Idea From the Start
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
Read more →host Command DNS Queries on macOS: 9 Examples
1. Find a list of IP addresses linked to a domain To find the IP address for a particular domain, simply pass the target domain name as an argument after the host command. For a comprehensive lookup using the verbose mode, use -a or -v flag option. The -a option is used to find all Domain records and Zone […]
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Finally, an AI That Understands Money, Part Two: The Lending Market Hiding in Your Embeddings
Conventional lending has confused regularity with durability. An AI reading the transaction history directly measures what a payslip cannot, and in a market like South Africa that changes who is lendable at all. This is the second of three parts. Part one explains what Revolut’s PRAGMA is and how it works. Part three covers fraud, […]
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 […]
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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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From Zero to Exploit Detection: A Practical Guide to Nuclei Templates for Pen Testing
Vulnerability scanning used to mean choosing between a handful of expensive commercial scanners or writing your own scripts for every check you cared about. Nuclei changed that calculation. It is an open source scanning engine built by ProjectDiscovery that runs YAML defined templates against targets, and the template library has grown into one of the […]
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