tag: craft.

2026·04·02 In defence of writing the code yourself On staying technical while sitting in chairs that don't expect you to be. ned · craft · operator 5 min 2026·03·28 What I got wrong An honest account of the calls I have made in the past three years that did not land — what I was reading into the evidence that was not there, and what I would do differently. reflection · craft · leadership 6 min 2026·03·14 Living with it: the costs of offline-first Post five of six on the Covert Cyber Deck. Honest notes on using the slate as a daily driver for several months. What I gave up. What surprised me. Where the bargain felt good and where it felt silly. cyberdeck · craft · honesty · sovereignty 7 min 2026·03·07 The two disciplines that quietly do most of the work Default-deny on USB and hardware-backed multi-factor authentication. Two unfashionable practices that, between them, would prevent more compromise than any tool a CISO will buy this year. operational · craft · hardening 5 min 2026·01·24 What I deliberately left off Post four of six on the Covert Cyber Deck. Every component is a question. These are the things I chose not to include — Bluetooth on the management plane, a camera, GPS, cellular, several others — and the single question that flushed each one out. cyberdeck · subtraction · privacy · craft 7 min 2025·12·20 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. cyberdeck · supply-chain · craft · sovereignty 7 min 2025·11·17 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. leadership · ukcd · hedgehog · craft 7 min 2025·10·18 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. cyberdeck · privacy · sovereignty · craft 6 min 2025·09·15 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. pen testing · craft · governance · ned 7 min 2025·08·23 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. crest · incident response · craft · standards 6 min 2025·08·22 Carrying the pager: a list, not a manifesto Things you can only learn by being woken up by them. Plain language. No revelations promised. ir · operator · craft 5 min 2025·07·26 Carrying the pager, revisited A reflection on a year of mature incident-response practice — what carrying the on-call pager has taught me about the shape of leadership, the cost of not training your successor, and what the work actually looks like at three in the morning. incident response · craft · leadership 6 min 2025·07·08 The thing an accreditation cannot do I have sat on the CREST European Council since 2022. This is what the work has taught me about what accreditation can and cannot do, and why I think the next chapter is harder than the last. crest · governance · craft · standards 6 min 2024·03·19 Operation Cronos: what disruption actually achieves A month on from the NCA-led takedown of LockBit's infrastructure, the affiliate group is already back online and claiming new victims. What Operation Cronos achieved is real and worth defending — but it is not the dismantlement the headlines suggested. ransomware · law enforcement · craft 7 min 2022·01·12 Log4Shell, and the inventory question we cannot keep ducking A month on from CVE-2021-44228, the headline-grabbing exploits have slowed but the underlying problem has not. The discomfort of the past month was not really about Log4j. It was about how few firms could answer the question 'where is it running?' vulnerability · supply chain · governance · craft 7 min 2021·04·06 Hafnium and the patch-window asymmetry Five weeks after the Microsoft Exchange ProxyLogon disclosure, the dust is settling on what may turn out to be the most consequential mass-exploitation event of the decade. What it teaches us is structural, not tactical. incident · patching · craft · ned 7 min