Peter Bassill — latest writing on cyber security
Latest articles · page 9 of 14
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Where I trusted, where I didn't
Post three of six on the Covert Cyber Deck. The supply chain decisions behind the build — why I chose the parts I chose, why I rejected several I considered, and why I ended up drawing the carrier PCB myself rather than buying one.
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Year in cyber AI 2025: the agentic year that mostly was not
Post 17 of the AI series. The 2025 retrospective. Operator agents arrived but mostly in pilot, the determinism property went mainstream in procurement, the regulators caught up, and constrained agency became the named shape. The honest read going into 2026.
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Building a Honeypot with T-Pot on Ubuntu
I have run honeypots since 1998. T-Pot bundles a dozen of them behind a single dashboard and turns passive observation into actionable intelligence.
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Hardening Firefox for Privacy
Tor is for when you need anonymity. This is for the everyday browser — configured so it stops volunteering information about you to every site you visit.
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The threat model, written down
Post two of six on the Covert Cyber Deck. The threat model I have spent the last month writing down — what I am protecting against, what I am not, and why putting it in plain English changed the rest of the build.
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What the merger was actually for
Hedgehog Security and UK Cyber Defence merged this month. Here is the thinking the announcement did not contain — what we were trying to fix, and what kind of firm we are now trying to be.
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How to Use GPG to Secure Your Email
Generate a GPG key pair, publish your public key, encrypt and sign email on the command line and in Thunderbird.
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Frontier AI in CNI: the regulators are paying attention
Post 16 of the AI series. The autumn joint statements from the BoE, FCA and HM Treasury on frontier AI and operational resilience signal where financial-services regulators have arrived. The implications for AI in cyber security are sharper than the public conversation suggests.
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Building a machine I can fully describe
First in a six-post series on the Covert Cyber Deck — a portable slate I am building around a Pi CM5, two SDRs, a custom carrier PCB, and a hardened Ubuntu. The argument is not the hardware. It is what designing it forces you to think about.
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Full-Disc Encryption with LUKS on Ubuntu
If someone takes your machine, encryption is the difference between a hardware loss and a data breach. LUKS makes it a checkbox at install time.
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The line the ICO is now drawing
Capita £14m. Advanced Computer Software £3.07m. Neither fine was for the breach. Both were for the controls that preceded it. The ICO has redrawn what "adequate security" means in evidence — and most boards have not noticed.
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The single-tin posture: why we still ship on a Dell
Post 15 of the AI series. A single Dell PowerEdge R760, racked at the customer site, running the whole platform — analyst, inference, persistence, audit. The deployment shape the hyperscaler default would have us abandon, and why we have not.
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Setting Up Unattended Security Upgrades on Ubuntu
Most Linux servers that get compromised had a patch available weeks before the breach. Unattended-upgrades applies security fixes while you sleep.
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What pen testing now actually buys you
AI-assisted offensive tooling, cloud-native estates, supply-chain shaped scope — what pen testing in 2025 actually looks like, and what boards are still mis-reading in the deliverable.
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The incidents that do not make the papers
What three years on the CREST Incident Response Pan-Europe board has taught me about the work the headlines never cover, and the kind of firm a customer should actually want to be on the end of the phone with.