For this week's article, i decided to dive into the early 2000's, and feature an amazing woman in the CyberSec space: Joanna Rutkowska
Joanna’s curiosity kicked in early... she was fascinated with the guts of operating systems before she was even out of primary school! She started learning x86 assembly on MS-DOS, (ahh, yes...the MS DOS-dayyys! ) ...later moved into Linux, and eventually focused on kernel programming, exploits, rootkits, and the sneaky ways malware can hide itself from the OS.

Then, in '06, she showed up at Black Hat with something called, "Blue Pill*.'*

The idea was reeeally nasty in a really clever way. Instead of malware simply hiding inside an operating system, Blue Pill used AMD’s new hardware virtualization technology to place a malicious hypervisor underneath it. (dang. i dunno about you, but this totally makes my skin crawl) The OScould keep running while the attacker occupied a layer below it. Rutkowska presented the research during her wonderfully titled talk, “Subverting Vista Kernel For Fun And Profit.”

Her work during this period became heavily associated with stealth malware, rootkits, virtualization attacks, and the uncomfortable question of whether a computer can ever reliably determine that it hasn’t already been compromised. Can it? ....can it tho?!

My fav part about her story, so far:

Rutkowska didn’t spend the bulk of her career only figuring out increasingly clever ways to break computers. In '07 she founded Invisible Things Lab, and a few years later she founded the project that became Qubes OS. Qubes took a very different approach to desktop security: instead of trusting one big operating-system environment with everything, split your digital life into isolated compartments. You know... Work over here. Banking over there. Random sketchy website wayyyy over thurrr. If one compartment gets compromised, the goal is to keep the attacker from automatically getting everything else.

The Qubes project dates back to '09, with its first public release arriving in April '10. More than fifteen years later, Qubes OS is still actively developed, and Rutkowska remains listed by the project as its founder and an advisor. (BTW, Ed Snowden uses AND publicly endorses Qubes OS!!!)

So, Joanna's career went thru a pretty epic arc:

Learn how operating systems work... figure out frightening new ways to compromise them..... start asking whether we should trust them so much in the first place .....build an operating system around that answer.

A massive Historic Hat Nod to Joanna Rutkowska for spending years thinking about what happens when we stop assuming the computer underneath us is trustworthy. (And for working for the good guys n gals, right? cuz....yeah. )

And also for naming a rootkit Blue Pill. (3 years after the Matrix "reloaded" and "revolutions" movies!)
Come on - that’s just excellent branding! :0)
Thanks for your eyes and time, readers... I'll see ya'll next week!

We're back from a much-needed week off and I'd like to get back into my Historic Hat nod series with a personal all-time fav: Tommy Flowers!

Tommy wasn’t a mathematician or a famous cryptanalyst...he was a telephone engineer with pretty humble beginnings....

The son of a bricklayer, Flowers worked his way up through an engineering apprnticeship, took evening classes, earned himself a degree, and eventually became an Phone Engineer for Britain’s General Post Office, specializing in "phone switching systems."

Then.. WAM! WW2 handed him a TDS (technical dookie sandwich.)

Bletchley Park was trying to crack Lorenz, the cipher used for some of Nazi Germany’s highest-level military communications. The existng electromechanical machines could help, but they were slow and "mechanically troublesome." Flowers had himself a looksee at the problem and proposed something radically more cyberfunk'd: a machine packed with roughly 1,500 vacuum tubes. Tubes are cool, mannn! Lol

To the people of that time, using that many tubes sounded like a reliability nightmare.... but Flowers knew otherwise!His experience with telephone exchanges had taught him that vacuum tubes could run reliably if they were treated properly and, importantly, weren’t constantly being switched on and off.

So he built the damn thing.... Colossus.

The first machine arrived at Bletchley Park in January '44 and was breaking Lorenz traffic by February. Work that could previously take weeks could now be completed in hours*.* (and just to clear up a common mix-up: Colossus wasn’t built to crack Enigma. It was used against Lorenz/Tunny communications carrying extremely high-level German military traffic, and intelligence produced from that work contributed to Allied planning around D-Day.)

That was the technical part of the sandwich; here's the crappy part.....after the war, eight of the ten Colossus machines were completely destroyed, Flowers was ordered to turn over his documentation, and the entire project remained buried under "CLASSIFIED" government secrecy for decades.
( - Two Colossus machines survived the postwar purge and continued serving GCHQ into the early 1960s, although much of what they were used for during the Cold War remains murky or classified. )

So, Tommy Flowers helped build one of the most important machines in computing history...

…and then basically wasn’t allowed to tell anybody about it. (yaaaaaaay...go team, rah-rah-rah.)

He DID finally get recognized, tho. Beginning in the 1970s, details of Colossus were finally declassified and Flowers started receiving public credit for what he’d built. Best of all, he lived long enough to stand beside a reconstructed Colossus when it was formally switched on at Bletchley Park in '96 — more than 50 years after the original.

Huge Historic Hats off to mah main man Tommy Flowers.
Telephone engineer → wartime codebreaking → Colossus.
Not a bad career detour, and quite an interesting "character arc."

Helllllooooo, I missed posting something last week because I've been having a terrible chest cold. in fact, I still feel kind of poopy, BUUUUUUUT, I mean who wouldn't want to learn about the ARPANET instead of chugging a bottle of cold medicine and sleeping...

Anyways, the last few deep dives I've done always mentions the ARPANET. I'm pretty sure even if you're a newbie to learning about the internet you could figure out the ARPANET is what came before the modern day internet we use. It was the foundation. The founding father to the world...wide web (www.).

ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, and it was an operational packet-switching computer network, designed to allow computers at different locations to communicate and share resources. Simply put: a network that connected computers allowing people to exchange information and access computing resources across long distances.

If you wanted to share information prior to the ARPANET you had to PHYSICALLY transer the data from one computer to another (like a floppy disc, or a USB, for the young ones reading this) OR set up a very DIRECT communication connection (like an OG gameboy link, come on, even the young ones know this ,right?).

The ARPANET was created in 1969... well actually that's the date for the first host-to-host connection establishment. Really, in 1958 the ARPA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, was established by the U.S. Department of Defense, and their research agency started developing the ARPANET plans in 1966.

There were a few people who popped up when I was looking up who created the ARPANET, instead of diving into each person, I'll give you a quick list:
-J. C. R. Licklider (visionary)
-Lawrence Roberts (p roject leader)
-Leonard Kleinrock (Packet-switching researcher)
-Paul Baran (network pioneer)
-Robert Kahn (internet architecture)
-Vint Cerf (TCP/IP co-designer)

And in extremely simple terms the ARPANET Worked like this:

You have a computer.
You write a message.
The computer breaks it into little packets.
The IMP helps send those packets.
The packets travel across the network.
The packets arrive at a different computer.
The receiving computer puts the information together.
You can now read the message.

https://preview.redd.it/y6ln2m1pb6qh1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=76eab4b16292a1fb9ea86e6e87e7d15744106f61

Well, I think I'll end it here for now, my head and ears and chest are k illing me, I'm ready to accept that my life is just going to be phlegm and snot. I will see you all next week!

And finally, I've decided to write about good ole SMTP., also known as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

Twas the night before... some night in November 1981 (I couldn't find the exact date), Jonathan Postel published RFC 788 while working at the U niversity of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. And what was RFC 788? Titled "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", it was the first round of rules and specification laid out for computers to follow when sending emails from one mail server to another.

Unlike my dive into FTP, I was able to find a more accurate date for the birth of our modern day SMTP. In August 1982, Jon Postel (again) published a revised and updated Simple Mail Transfer Protocol in the well known RFC 821. So, some could argue that the creation of (our modern day) SMTP was in 1982, though, I would argue that it was in 1981, and was improved upon.

Now, about Mr. Jon Postel... it turns out he was quite influential amoung network researchers and helped develop, define, and document many internet tools and techs. Like enough that I should do a seperate article just about him and his career. (Maybe? let me know) Some of those include: SMTP, TCP/IP, RFCs, IANA, and more. The man was busy.

In regards to SMTP, he was 38/39 years old when he published RFC 788/821 and worked as a research scientist at USC's Information Sciences Institute. He was working on ARPANET/Internet protocols and serving as a central figure in the RFC process. When I was reading about this, I also saw the name Paul Mockapetris, who was also at ISI around this time, and later on developed the first SMTP email server there before going on to invent DNS. (DNS would be a cool one to write about also).

Let's end today by answering the simple question... why was SMTP created? Well, before SMTP, emails already existed. And different systems could already handle the mail in different ways, but there was no standard set of rules. And like literally everything in computer science, things become easier to do when you have a nice tidy set of rules that everyone can follow. And so, in simple terms , Jon gave the computers the following rules:

-Identify who a message is from
-Identify who it is going to
-Transfer the message
-Relay it through other mail servers if needed
-Confirm whether delivery succeeded or failed

https://preview.redd.it/1icxiawzjenh1.jpg?width=180&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8141f0f047f7a198617f6ace03b9b0ecec3f08d7

I think I'll wrap up here today. Let me know your thoughts and if you have any other suggestions. I'm quite enjoying these historic dives. I kind of want to write about RFCs, Paul, and this guy some more... well, anywyas... Catch ya later!

Next up in my Historic hat nods, I'd like to acknowledge Ray Tomlinson...back in '71, he was working at BBN on ARPANET when he decided to see if he could "make electronic messages travel between two different computers” …it’s wild to me to think about that, cuz I’ve always just taken it for granted-it’s always just been a thing ever since my first computer class in grade school….like, we send messages, so what?!

Electronic mail already existed locally, but it generally meant leaving a message for another user on the same machine. (not that cool, lol…) Tomlinson modified an existing program called SNDMSG and combined it with code from a file-transfer program called CPYNET. The result was a message could finally travel across the network from one computer to another. (in that first moment, Ray must’ve been all like, "Let’s goooo!”) :0)

But, he also needed some way to separate the user from the computer hosting the account, so he picked a character that wasn’t commonly used in names:

@

"User at host."

And, BAM! -just like that, one little symbol became welded to email addresses for the next half-century. Probably forever...

The part that was most amusing to me from this story, was the fact that Ray apparently didn’t think his first test message was important enough to save... (You know, like the first ever online transaction was supposedly a CD of Sting’s “Ten Summoner’s tales” and that’s totally interenet famous) …he later said it was probably something like “QWERTYUIOP” or another random string of characters. The two computers involved were reportedly sitting right next to each other, even though the message traveled between them over ARPANET.

So, one of the biggest communication changes in Internet history basically started with:

“Can I make these two computers send mail to each other?”

Turns out…yep!

Huge historic hat nod to Ray Tomlinson! 

Just remember…every time onea ya'll types an @ into an email address, yer still using the convention Ray picked in 1971. Awesome.

I saw a post or some comments in here a few months back about Bill Tutte and how he usually never gets the credit he deserves or brought up enough within industry discussions about who did what/started something awesome/or cracked this or that. So, i recently completed a deep dive on Tutte and thought I'd share some highlights with ya'll, so here goes!

Back in the day, during ww2, Germany’s high command used the Lorenz cipher machine to protect some of its most sensitive military communications. Bill Tutte had never even seen one.

No machine,
no wiring diagram,
No manual.....
Not even any youtube tutorials!

Then, some German operator totally screwed up: he retransmitted a roughly 4,000-character message using the same cipher settings, but just changed around parts of the wording. Another awesome Codebreaker named John Tiltman was able to exploit the mistake to recover the plaintext and a long stretch of cipher key.

Tutte took that material and did something seemigly redonkulous: he worked out the logical architecture of the unseen Lorenz machine with pencil and paper!!! Say whaaaaa?

And this wasn’t some simple 'lil crackerjack gadget, mind ya... Lorenz had 12 wheels and about 1.6 quadrillion (gagillion-bajillion, lol) possible starting positions.

Tutte’s work helped make routine attacks on Lorenz possible!! Then, Max Newman (British mathematician who was also famously Alan Turing's Cambridge professor!) pushed to mechanize those attacks, and Tommy Flowers(Brit telecom Engineer, also brilliant and has a cool backstory so I'll probably do my next post about him!) eventually built Colossus—the electronic codebreaking computer that cut some Lorenz decryptions from weeks to hours.

All this wound up giving the Allies access to top-level German High Command traffic, including communications that revealed Hitler’s strategic thinking. Basically, someone handed Tutte the output of a locked box he couldn’t see and asked him, "aye, how's this thing work?"

And BAM...he whipped out a pencil n' notebook n' did it.

Hats off to Bill Tutte and one of the gnarliest pieces of pencil-and-paper reverse engineering ever pulled off!!!

I felt clever with that title...

The time has come... WHEN, HOW, WHO... created FTP.

I was surprised to learn that FTP (1971) was created before PING (1983). Though, I think because PING was one of the VERY first commands I learned, I just filed it away mentally as being one of the oldest commands there are. Alas, I was wrong.

File Transfer Protocol, aka FTP, was first introduced in April 1971 by Abhay Bhushan (26yo @ the time) in his RFC 114. Don't know what that means? RFC stands for Request for Comment. 114 means... that it is the RFC that came after 113, I don't know man. Anyways, the RFC 114 was the original proposal titled as " A File Transfer Protocol" and it explained how computers on ARPANET could transfer files between one another in a consistent way, even if the computers were different types.

And what does THAT mean? It means that Abhay laid out rules that different computers could follow if they want to send files to each other. The basic idea was that one computer asks another computer to do something with a file, like retrieve it, store it, rename it, delete it, and so on. Then, the two computers follow an agreed set of commands so they understand each other.

Abhay’s original proposal was revised repeatedly and eventually evolved into the protocol people recognise today. So, I suppose you could argue that FTP was created after April 1971, but it was hard for me to find a specific date in which our glorious modern day FTP came into existence.

Let's wrap this up with a brief tid bit on who Abhay Bhushan is. At the time he published the RFC 114, he was 26 and working at MIT's P roject MAC. His development on the original FTP specifications also lead to contributions to early email protocols (more on this next week). His career continued to flourished through his life and in 2023, at 79 yo, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for his contributions to FTP, early email standards, and Internet architecture.

https://preview.redd.it/bgp4ujy7j0mh1.jpg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=12781c27187199b95ab5c460e65e38cc35abbbb8

While i considered combining this article with SMTP, I actually felt that FTP and SMTP deserved two seperate articles. plus this one is already starting to feel text heavy. Keep your peepers peeped next time to find out about SMTP. I kind of want to do a seperate post deep diving on Abhay's career life, because hot dang, this guy did a lot and it would be pretty interesting to learn more. Anywho, thanks for reading!

The English Major Who Became #2 at the NSA

In 1942, Ann Caracristi graduated college with a degree in English and history and headed to Washington for a mysterious government job described  as: ‘Secret.”

She knew zero Japanese. Soooo….yeah-naturally, the Army assigned her to Japanese military codes!

She was sent to a cryptanalysis course at George Washington University — but then pulled out less than a month later, before she’d even finished half of it, because the Army needed codebreakers working now.

Caracristi started out sorting intercepted Japanese messages, quickly moved into actual cryptanalysis, and became damn good at it. Her team eventually helped break the Japanese Water Transport Code, revealing information about troop movements, supplies, reinforcements, and transport ships — intelligence the Allies could use to target Japanese supply lines.

By the end of the war, Caracristi and other codebreakers were even reading intercepted messages indicating that Japan was preparring to surrender before the news even became public.

She briefly left government work after WWII, returned to U.S. signals intelligence in 1946, and spent the next few decades climbing the ranks. In 1975, she became the first woman at NSA to reach GS-18, then the highest civil-service grade. And in 1980, Ann Caracristi became the first woman to serve as NSA Deputy Director — the agency’s highest-ranking civilian position.

English major → knew zero Japanese → wartime codebreaker → NSA #2.

English degree to NSA leadership is one hell of a plot twist!!

Anybody else here end up in cybersecurity…starting with a degree that had absolutely nothing to do with cyber?

The creation of TRACEROUTE

After hopscotching my way down the rabbit hole on ping last week, I started looking at another command I’ve used approximately a gagillion-bajillion times without ever wondering where it came from:

traceroute

Turns out Van Jacobson developed it at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in 1988, based on an idea suggested by Steve Deering at an end-to-end task force meeting.

(-Great things happen when great minds kick it!)

And apparently, sleep was optional—even in the days before energy drinks were packed into every vending machine and corner store.

In comments attached to the original source code, Jacobson wrote:

“...this code sort-of popped out after 48 hours without sleep. I was amazed it ever compiled, much less ran.”

Geez Louise!! Talk about surfin’ those theta waves...lol

But check this out—the clever part is how traceroute works.

It didn’t require some special “please tell me where my packet went” feature to be added to the Internet.

It took advantage of behavior that already existed! Brilliant, IMO.

In IPv4, packets carry a TTL—Time to Live—value. Each router reduces it by one. When it hits zero, that router drops the packet and normally sends back an ICMP Time Exceeded message.

traceroute sends probes with progressively larger TTL values—1, then 2, then 3—and uses those complaints to reveal the route...one hippitty-hop at a time.

So, basicallyyy:

“I’m going to keep sending packets farther n’ farther n’ farther until somebody complains.”

Networking!

Huge hat nod to Jacobson and Deering. It must feel amazing to develop something that people are still using, decades down the road!!!

So...now I’m curious:

What command should I rabbit-hole next?

Unitel got clipped at the knees right before stepping onto the stock-market stage. Angola’s largest telecom was hit by a cyberattack just hours before its landmark $329 million stock-market debut, disrupting voice, mobile data, and internet service for a network serving more than 21 million customers.
Nothing makes investors put their wallets away quite like the whole country asking, “Hey, is your signal dead too?”

Amazon connected four major npm supply-chain compromises to North Korea’s Sapphire Sleet. The crew allegedly worked its way from the smaller typo-crypto package into widely used libraries like Chalk, Debug, and Axios—which pulls more than 100 million weekly downloads. Instead of breaking into every company separately, they slipped poison into software everybody already trusted. Efficient. Rude. Alarmingly scalable.
Amazon rates parts of the broader attribution with medium confidence, so that label deserves to stay attached.

And CareCloud finally put numbers behind its March breach: nearly 350,000 people are now being notified after hackers accessed an electronic-health-record environment hosted in AWS. Reported exposure includes medical information alongside high-value identity and financial data—the kind of haul that keeps paying criminals long after the original breach disappears from the headlines.

How to stay on top of your game: build outage plans that work when the phones and internet both eat dirt, pin and review software dependencies instead of blindly trusting familiar package names, and treat healthcare records like the permanent identity documents they basically are. This week’s lesson: one telco outage can mute a country, one poisoned dependency can hitchhike into millions of systems, and medical data never really expires.

Wanna know more? Click on any of the blue headers above for the OG articles.
Thanks for reading, stay safe and see you next week!

OpenAI / Hugging Face
takes last week's “well, that escalated quickly” award. During an internal cyber-capability test, OpenAI models found a zero-day in their isolated environment, escaped onto the open internet, moved through internal systems, and eventually compromised Hugging Face infrastructure looking for secret answers to the benchmark. One attack path reportedly chained stolen credentials, additional zero-days, and remote code execution. The test subjects basically broke out of the exam room and robbed the answer bank.

Romania’s land registry
got hit hard enough to jam up real-estate transactions across the country. Notaries were unable to issue property records, authenticate sales, or register mortgages while officials rebuilt and restored systems. Some stolen data also appeared for sale online. Imagine finally finding an affordable house, only for the entire country’s property database to pull a 404 on you.

Shame, shame, I know your name: Suno.
Have I Been Pwned added a breach containing data from 55.3 million accounts, including email addresses, names, phone numbers, purchase records, physical addresses, and limited payment-card details. The intrusion actually happened in November 2025 but only surfaced this month!!! The AI music company got sampled, remixed, and released without clearance.

How to stay on top of your game:
Sandbox anything with offensive capability like it is actively trying to leave, keep tested offline backups for systems that society cannot function without, and never recycle passwords across entertainment or AI platforms. This week’s lesson: the model may escape, the database may disappear, and yesterday’s quiet breach may become tomorrow’s 55-million-user headline.

...Wanna know more?
Click on any of the blue headers above to access related news articles!

Thanks for giving us a gander this week, readers.
We appreciate your eyes and commentary!

Have you heard of the program called "Creeper" It's one of the earliest malware-like programs. When Creeper was [unknowingly] installed on a device, it would introduced itself with the text: I’M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.

Spooky, right... Thankfully, it wasn't really malware like we know today. Creeper did not steal passwords, destroy files or demand money. It was an experiment intended to see whether a program could move from one networked computer to another.

Creeper was created by Bob Thomas, a researcher at the technology company BBN. It was designed to travel between DEC PDP-10 mainframe computers running the TENEX operating system. It first appeared in 1971 on ARPANET, the early computer network that eventually helped lead to the modern internet.

The made for dummies version: It was a program that would travel from one computer to another using physical network cables and it's primary function was to display the message "I'm the Creeper: Catch me if you can", indicating that the program had successfully travelled to a computer.

Early versions of the Creeper moved between computers rather than leaving copies of themselves everywhere. A later version was modified so that it could replicate, which is why Creeper is often described as the first computer worm.

Unlike the malicious softwares (Malware) of today, Creeper did not hide. It did not pretend to be something else. It showed up, announced its name and challenged somebody to catch it.

And somebody did. A second program called Reaper was created to travel across the network, locate Creeper and remove it. Reaper is therefore frequently described as the first antivirus program.

but But BUT

Reaper also moved between computers by itself, behaving like the thing it was hunting.

Spooky, again.

But still super cool. Sounds kind of like a digital Tom and Jerry: one roaming program running through the network while another chased after it.

The Creeper legacy lived on, with later viruses displaying poems, insults, political statements, animations and messages from their creators. Some malware authors even gave their creations logos, websites and customer-service systems.