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.
Why Least Privilege Security Is a Lie: 3 Root Causes
In technology, there is a tendency to solve a problem badly by using gross simplification, then come up with a catchy one liner and then broadcast this as doctrine or a principle. Nothing ticks more boxes in this regard, than the principle of least privileges. The ensuing enterprise scale deadlocks created by a crippling implementation […]
Read more →Fix SSH WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED
If the fingerprint of your remote host changes you will see the following error message appear: There are many ways to fix this. The easiest of which is simply to delete your “known_hosts” file. This will mean you just need to accept new finger prints on all your SSH hosts. Yes, this is very lazy…
Read more →Check SPF, DKIM and DMARC Email Security DNS Records
There are three basic ways to secure email, these are: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) definitions. Lets quickly discuss these before we talk about how to check if they have been setup: SPF helps prevent spoofing by verifying the sender’s IP address SPF (Sender […]
Read more →HTTP/2 Rapid Reset CVE-2023-44487: Test Your Server on macOS
Introduction In August 2023, a critical zero day vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol was disclosed that affected virtually every HTTP/2 capable web server and proxy. Known as HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE 2023 44487), this vulnerability enabled attackers to launch devastating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks with minimal resources. Google reported mitigating the largest DDoS […]
Read more →The DAO Ethereum Recursion Bug: How the Hack Worked
If you found my article, I would consider it a reasonable assumption that you already understand the importance of this
Read more →NMAP Vulnerability Scan Script With Formatted Report on macOS
If you want to quickly health check your website, then the following script is a simple NMAP script that scans your site for common issues and formats the results in a nice report style. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to fix each type of directory permission issue that the above script might find (for […]
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Banking Complexity: Leadership Failure or Inevitable Growth?
If you look back over time at all once great companies, you will see that eventually simplicity gave way to scale. What are some of the risks that drive this? This is where many great banks lose their edge. But is this really a shared destiny for all banks, or did the leadership simply fail […]
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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 […]
Read more →macOS Passive Domain Vulnerability Scanner: Full Guide
Below is a fairly comprehensive passive penetration testing script with vulnerability scanning, API testing, and detailed reporting. Features Installation Required Dependencies Optional Dependencies Usage Basic Syntax Options Examples: Network Configuration Default Interface: en0 (bypasses Zscaler) To change the interface, edit line 24: The script automatically falls back to default routing if the interface is unavailable. Debug Mode […]
Read more →Protected: Neo by Capitec: AI Client Support That Resolves Issues Proactively
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Read more →SCP Files to EC2: Mac & Linux Command Guide
I always forget the syntax of SCP and so this is a short article with a simple example of how to SCP a file from your laptop to your EC2 instance and how to copy it back from EC2 to your laptop: Copying from Laptop to EC2 scp -i identity_file.pem source_file.extention username@public_ipv4_dns:/remote_path scp: Secure copy protocol-i: Identity […]
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Passkeys in Banking, Part 2: Securing Passkey Enrolment with Browser Registration
This is the second of two articles. Part one, Passkeys in Banking: What They Actually Fix, and What They Quietly Don’t, sets out the benefits and the risks. This part addresses what a bank can do about the risk that matters most. In short. A passkey is a strong credential, and the strength of a […]
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