Have you noticed it? There’s a strange melancholy floating about. Maybe it’s because major brands are being traded like Pokémon cards. Because some friends who are being laid off. Or even because the cybersecurity industry, in a single stroke, might have caused more damage than it ever prevented. When I go to the conferences I’ve attended for almost a decade, I get a feeling that we’re just going through the motions now, pushing out varying shades of the same research – myself included.
Early 2023, a weird thought crossed my mind. Everyone was pondering on how AI would affect the tertiary job market, and there was already a soft consensus around the idea that those systems shouldn’t be left running unattended; that their maximum utility could only be attained under human supervision. I wondered then if there was anything computers wouldn’t be able to do for us in the future, and eventually it hit me. The reason why we would always need human supervision is not because machines make mistakes, but because when they do, we need someone to be held accountable. The one job computers and androids can never take away from us is taking the fall.
In January 2021, a debate had coursed through the infosec community regarding Google’s TAG and P0 decision to publish a report on what they suspected could be a western antiterrorism operation. While there were dissenting voices back then, it seemed like there was a degree of industry consensus that Google’s decision was the correct one. Fast forward to June 24, 2024: Michael Coppola releases a blog post firmly in favor of not disclosing such cyberattacks, which I encourage reading. This is as good an occasion as any to lay down my thoughts on the subject.
Whenever I post research on X/Twitter, and also at other random times, I get DMs from people who are interested in starting a career in the field. It’s not like I’m Internet’s guidance counselor or anything, but it’s gotten to a point where writing down a complete answer once and for all will save me a lot of time. Hence, without further ado, here are my unfiltered thoughts on starting a career in infosec.
A lot has been going on at the intersection of AI and the art field recently. There's a lot to say about how AI will change our lives, and I feel that the current debates are missing the point.
This essay was published on VentureBeat on December 19, 2021.
Smart people in my industry have noted the growing role of cyberspace in inter-state conflicts and called for the development of cooperative, global regulation and governance. There are a few ethical dilemmas that this raises, including one that not much has been written about: the morality of cyberattacks.
In 2022, some time before FTX's demise, I wrote a long three-part series on cryptocurrencies and NFTs which was published on Kaspersky's blog. It was translated in several languages, and I thought it would make sense to put all the links on my blog. It ended up being my biggest writing project for the year and I'm very proud of the way it turned out. I hope you'll find it an interesting read!
Hey everyone. I haven’t posted here in a while. The world made no sense the last time I did, and it makes even less sense now. That translates (among other things) to people being crazier on the internet, constantly challenging my personal illusions about what I imagined to be rock bottom. Maybe in five years, I will come back to this post, read it again, and go “oh, man, those were the chill days, I miss those”.
A few days ago, Kaspersky published a blog post regarding a likely false flag in the wiper component of OlympicDestroyer. The attempt is based on an undocumented, lesser-known PE header called the RICH header. I don’t want to go into too much details regarding its layout, as many other sources have done a great job documenting it.
These are troubled times indeed. If you’ve been using the Internet for a while, you must have noticed that the general climate has been steadily declining. In fact, it feels like we have grown quite used to our weekly offense-fest. It is speculated that social media platforms are engineered in a way that encourages them: nothing generates more “engagements” than an inflammatory post that the audience will retweet in feverish, self-righteous anger. The mainstream media certainly doesn’t seem to mind, as this provides a constant stream of highly clickable opinion pieces.
