Deep dives, guides, and strategic commentary on software engineering leadership, security compliance, scaling databases, and building production-grade LLM workflows.
The 2025 Coinbase breach required zero hacking. Here's exactly how attackers used insider bribery and social engineering to steal customer data — and what any business can learn from it.
Phishing is just the beginning. Here are all 7 social engineering attack types with real examples from 2025–2026 that show exactly how each one works.
Social engineering is responsible for 60% of all data breaches. This complete guide covers every technique, 2025–2026 case studies, and how to defend your team.
Security testing an AI-powered application is not the same as testing a traditional web app. It starts the same way — then it goes somewhere entirely new. Here is the full methodology, the tools that actually work, and what a proper AI security assessment looks like.
Three years ago 'OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications' would have been a meaningless phrase. Today it's the most important document in AI application security. Here is what every item means — in the language of someone who builds and ships products, not a security academic.
You built a RAG system to make your AI accurate and grounded. You fed it your documentation, your product data, your knowledge base. But did you consider what happens when an attacker plants something in that knowledge base before your users query it? Five documents in a database of millions is all it takes.
A startup's OpenAI bill jumped from $400 to $67,000 in a month. Their API key had been sitting in a public GitHub repository for 11 days. Automated bots found it within minutes. This is LLMjacking — and Microsoft has already filed lawsuits over it.
The attacker never touched the chat interface. They sent an email. The AI read it, followed the hidden instructions inside, and silently exfiltrated data from files the attacker had no access to. This is indirect prompt injection — and it's the most dangerous AI vulnerability most organisations haven't heard of.
Prompt injection is to AI applications what SQL injection was to web apps in the early 2000s — a fundamental confusion between instructions and data that attackers know exactly how to exploit. Here's how it works, why it's so hard to fix, and what real-world breaches look like.
Your team shipped an AI feature last sprint. You tested it for bugs. You tested it for accuracy. Did anyone test it for security? AI features introduce a class of vulnerabilities that traditional security tools simply don't look for.
Everything a SaaS startup needs to know about cloud security — the risks, the mistakes, the tools, and the step-by-step process for securing your AWS or GCP environment. A permanent reference, updated for 2026.
Ten AWS security settings that take under 2 hours to configure and protect against the most common cloud attack vectors. These are the first things I check — and the first things you should fix.
"But we're on AWS — aren't they responsible for keeping our data safe?" I've heard this from almost every startup founder I've worked with. The answer is yes and no — and understanding the difference is the most important thing you can learn about cloud security.
The commit was pushed at 11:47 PM. By 12:03 AM — 16 minutes later — an automated bot had found the AWS access key and began spinning up EC2 instances. By morning, 340 instances were running across 6 regions. The bill: $80,000 over 36 hours. Here's exactly how it happens — and how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.
Customer invoices for hundreds of thousands of users — indexed by Google, sitting in a public S3 bucket set to public during a dev sprint and never changed back. Discovered by a security researcher who typed 'site:s3.amazonaws.com invoice' into a search bar. Here's how it keeps happening — and how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.
Seven developers with AdministratorAccess. Three inactive accounts from ex-employees still enabled. Root account with no MFA. No API key rotation in 18 months. This is what I find in almost every startup AWS account I audit — and it's your single biggest cloud security risk.
A founder received an AWS bill for $74,000. They'd been paying $800 a month. In 48 hours, someone had spun up hundreds of EC2 instances for crypto mining. 'Why didn't AWS stop this?' The answer changed how they thought about cloud security permanently.
What exactly gets tested during a web application penetration test? Here's the complete checklist I use on every engagement — organised by category, with a plain-English explanation of what each item looks for and why it matters.
Most vulnerabilities I find in web applications would have been prevented by a handful of habits that add less than 30 minutes to a developer's week. Here's the list — specific, framework-agnostic, and immediately actionable.
XSS has been in the OWASP Top 10 for over two decades. A comment field with unencoded output silently harvested 2,400 session cookies over 6 days. Here's how it still works in 2026, what attackers do with it, and why modern frameworks don't fully protect you.
