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.
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 →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 →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 →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 →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 […]
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 →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 […]
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The Proxy Metric Fallacy in Cyber Risk Management
1. Two different questions, and only one of them is being answered Before assessing whether a three day cooldown is a good idea, it is worth being precise about what question a dependency update policy is supposed to answer, because there are two available and they are not the same question at all. The first […]
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 […]
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
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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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