Since the first days of the web, users and administrators have sought to control the flow of information from the Internet to the local device. There are many different ways to implement internet filters, and numerous goals that organizations may want to achieve: Today’s post explores the last of these: blocking content based on category.Continue reading “Web Category Filtering”
Author Archives: ericlaw
Fiddler in 2025
The Fiddler Web Debugger is now old enough to drink, but I still use it pretty much every day. Fiddler hasn’t aged entirely gracefully as platforms and standards have changed over the decades, but the tool is extensible enough that some of the shortcomings can be fixed by extensions and configuration changes. Last year, IContinue reading “Fiddler in 2025”
Attack Techniques: Fake Literally Everything! (Escrow Scam)
The team recently got a false-negative report on the SmartScreen phishing filter complaining that we fail to block firstline-trucking.com. I passed it along to our graders but then took a closer look myself. I figured that maybe the legit site was probably at a very similar domain name, e.g. firstlinetrucking.com or something, but no suchContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Fake Literally Everything! (Escrow Scam)”
Vibe-coding for security
Recently, there’s been a surge in the popularity of trojan clipboard attacks whereby the attacker convinces the user to carry their attack payload across a security boundary and compromise the device. Meanwhile, AI hype is all the rage. I recent had a bad experience in what I thought was a simple AI task (draw aContinue reading “Vibe-coding for security”
Understanding SmartScreen and Network Protection
The vast majority of cyberthreats arrive via one of two related sources: That means that by combining network-level sensors and throttles with threat intelligence (about attacker sites), security software can block a huge percentage of threats. Protection Implementation On Windows systems, that source of network threat information is commonly called SmartScreen, and support for queryingContinue reading “Understanding SmartScreen and Network Protection”
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