Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Sep 5 · 7 min readAnonTestLab: Ten Years, Three Attempts, and One Idea That Wouldn't Let GoTL;DR: the tool is at hashtagrr.github.io/AnonTestLab. The rest of this is how it came to exist. Round one: an idea and no coding experience to build it I got my hands on the Tor Browser almost ten y00
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Sep 3 · 11 min readWindows Memory Forensics: Finding a Live Infection with VolatilityPID 1484 had been running since boot. Nothing about that was unusual: it was Explorer.exe, the process every Windows machine on earth is running right now. What was unusual was the process hanging off00
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Sep 3 · 9 min readGNU/Linux Memory Forensics: Is the Compromise Still Live?It's easy to think of memory forensics purely as a hunt for something malicious. On this case, a GNU/Linux server that had already been through a full attack chain, initial access, privilege escalatio00
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Aug 31 · 19 min readOpenID Connect: The Identity Layer OAuth Was MissingBy the time I actually heard the word OIDC, I'd already been through OAuth and PKCE conversations I hadn't fully understood, years apart from each other, and this one arrived even later than those. It00
CSChris Sheridaninhalosecurityhasnodedev.hashnode.dev·Aug 20 · 8 min readWhen the Safety System Becomes the Threat Model: A Case Study in Classifier Drift Field notes from 43 hours of legitimate security research, 35 false-positive blocks, and one support form. The setup I do authorized bug bounty work and CTF practice. My toolchain is unremarkable by d00
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Aug 15 · 10 min readWhat We Got: From Cloud Security Platform to Operational CapabilityA few months after the operationalizing work covered in the last article, it stopped being a project. It became part of how we worked. This article is about what changed once that happened. The Metri00
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Aug 14 · 31 min readUnderstanding OAuth 2.0: Delegation, Grant Types, and the Attacks That Actually HappenThe first time I heard the term OAuth, I didn't know what it meant. I was in a conversation with a DBA lead about something adjacent to authentication and authorization, and he mentioned, almost in pa00
CSChris Sheridaninhalosecurityhasnodedev.hashnode.dev·Aug 11 · 8 min readMy AI Agent Captured the Flag. Then the Platform Refused to Accept It. Today was a good day and a weird day, in that order. The good part: the autonomous pentest agent I've been building — I call it HALO — went from "runs a bunch of tools and hopes" to an actual web-reco00
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Aug 6 · 15 min readIdentity Foundations: Everything Before OAuthBefore any protocol makes sense on its own terms, a few things underneath it need to be settled first: what authentication and authorization actually are as distinct concepts, how identity gets carrie13N
Rrathsarainrr-cyber.hashnode.dev·Aug 5 · 9 min readIdentity Was the Gap I Did Not Know I HadI had worked across cloud security engineering, vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and application security. I had reviewed IAM configurations across multiple cloud platforms, flagged over11N