Opinionated analysis, guides, and expert takes from security operations practitioners.
AI-powered detection is usually three different models wearing one label. Here's how to tell classifiers, UEBA baselines, and LLM reasoning apart, and why the difference decides what a proof of concept should measure.
A threat hunting solution is really three different products with three different handoff points. Here's the procurement test that finds where each vendor's story ends and yours begins.
Practitioner takes on SOC modernization, detection engineering, threat hunting, and more. No fluff. No product pitches.
Eleven action items assigned to "the team" is what a failed post-incident review program looks like from the inside. Here's the four-check test to find out if yours is real, and the accountability language that quietly stopped meaning anything along the way.
Your SOC already produces Govern-function evidence for NIST CSF 2.0. It's just not labeled, owned, or priced. Here's the crosswalk that survives an external assessor, and what it costs to run.
A second remote-management tool on a newly issued laptop is what a deepfake-enabled hire looks like in your logs. Here are the correlations that catch the infrastructure around the fake, and the one rule nobody can build reliably yet.
I asked a vendor what fires when a stolen access key gets used against a correctly configured bucket. The answer was a saved filter in the log explorer, and I'd been about to budget for a search bar as detection. Here's the working definition I use to tell real cloud threat detection apart from logging with a console attached, and what to make a vendor prove before you sign.
I've signed awareness-training renewals for a decade and rarely had a credible way to tie them to a prevented incident. Here's what the line item reliably delivers, what it cannot carry on its own, and where incremental phishing budget reduces exposure more directly.
I've run triage behind Proofpoint and Defender for Office 365. A secure email gateway removes a large volume of spam, malware, and known-bad content before delivery, but compromised accounts, text-only BEC, thread hijacks, and later-changing URLs can still land clean. Here's the post-delivery workflow that closes that gap.
Here's how I turn that advisory into rules a detection engineer can build and procedure a security leader can enforce, and the cadence that keeps this current without chasing every headline.
Here's the taxonomy I use to separate copilots, triage agents, investigators, detection engineers, and automation platforms, and the validation questions I ask before approving auto-close.
Every MDR deck I've sat through this year implies the SIEM is optional, but it isn't even the same kind of purchase: one is a staffed service, the other a data-and-detection platform. You can consolidate some of it, but only after you know who owns the logs, who owns the detections, and what survives when the provider leaves.