The name's Samuel. I'm a psychology BSc and cyber security MSc graduate now working in infosec. I love films, reading fiction, PC gaming, playing the drums, and doing a little coding.
For the past ~11 months, I was studying for the TCM Security Practical SOC Analyst Associate (PSAA) certification. This is an entry-level SOC analyst cert that covers security fundamentals like phishing analysis, network traffic analysis, endpoint log investigation, searching a SIEM, threat intelligence sources, basic digital forensics, and the phases of incident response.
‘Don’t roll your own crypto’ is one of the most popular phrases in cryptography. Unfortunately, people use it without considering whether it really applies in that context, and in this blog post, I’m going to explain why it doesn’t apply a lot of the time and when it definitely does apply.
Deterministic password managers are (in my opinion) a cool idea but are they a good idea? There have been a few blog posts/articles covering this topic, but I don’t think any of them tell the full story, so let’s dive in!
I just attended a conference for the first time, albeit virtually. What motivated me was to see a talk related to my MSc dissertation on committing AEAD. Unfortunately, I regret paying and will likely not be attending, at least virtually, in future years.
The problem
I’ve been working out for the last 5 or 6 years, and one thing I’ve learnt is that there’s a lot of misinformation going around. The fact that such misinformation causes increased risk of injury at worst and reduced muscle gain at best means it’s important to try and stay educated on the subject to make your time in the gym worthwhile, and that’s why I’ve decided to dedicate some time to writing…
The Hated One just released a video discussing some of the problems with Signal, and I agree with a lot of what he said, except for the recommendation to switch to Element.
I was recently asked via email about some good resources for learning about cryptography and thought I should share a padded-out version of my reply here. I hope this is useful.
As my first blog post of 2021 (I’m going to try and write a blog post once a month), I’d like to talk about Kryptor v3 Beta. This is the next version of my free and open source file encryption software that will hopefully be released in February.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the first game I’ve ever preordered. I’ll be honest, I fell for the hype a bit, but I also just wanted a brand new, high quality game to play. However, I cancelled my preorder over a year ago after CD Projekt Red released more gameplay that indicated the presence of some problems.