I’m well over 100 posts into this blog now. Wow! I’ve had several blogs in the past, but this is one of the few I’ve had a consistent run with. The other was the After the Deadline blog, which gets fewer updates since I left the project.

After 100 posts, I feel it’s time to capture what this blog is about and what I hope it says to you. It’s probably no surprise, but this is the “official” blog for Strategic Cyber LLC, which is my company and my full-time occupation. I get asked “what else do you do?” a lot. I want to make it crystal clear that this business has and has had my full-time focus for the past two and a half years.

I try to blog once each week; that’s my goal. Sometimes, I feel like writing and I draft several posts at once. It takes awhile to make a post suitable to publish. Right now, I have hundreds of posts in various draft states. Each week, I try to find the one that is close to publishable and I fix it up.

I blog each week because this is my signal to you that I’m alive. When I evaluate a company, I look at two things. I look at the footer of their website to see the copyright date. I then look at their blog. If the copyright date says 2007 or if their blog is dead, I assume that the company is dead. I don’t want to be that company, so I pay attention to these two things. The rest is gravy.

I write a lot of posts about basic penetration testing and Metasploit Framework stuff. Someone on Reddit once commented that some of my posts have a lot of insight, but others are hacking 101. There’s a reason for this…

It’s probably no surprise, but I don’t know everything about hacking or how different hacking techniques work. I’ve met many who claim they do. I’m not as good as these amazing geniuses among us. I’m learning every day. I watch presentations, I read source code, and I conduct experiments. Cobalt Strike is a great driver of this, as most features I implement require me to learn something new. It’s a lot of fun.

Several of my blog posts capture the essence of something I learned. My popular Bypass UAC blog post summarizes what I learned implementing this feature into Cobalt Strike’s Beacon. I didn’t understand this attack and the left and right bounds of it before this work. I reckoned that if the material were new to me, it’s new to someone else. So, I took the time to write about.

My recent post on getsystem falls along the same lines. I knew how to type getsystem. I understand what SYSTEM is. I didn’t understand what happened when I typed the command. I was surprised by what I found out. I wrote a blog post on it.

Other blog posts come from customer questions. Semi-regularly, I would get exasperated support requests from someone who had trouble sending a phish to their Gmail account. I tired of trying to rapid-fire explain email delivery on a case-by-case basis. I wrote a blog post about Email Delivery and spent a lot of time on issues that affect penetration testers. Writing this post wasn’t a simple matter of transferring my knowledge into the written word. I had to verify everything I wrote. During this process, I found that my understanding of some topics was off (e.g., my working knowledge of SPF was way off).

This verification is another reason I write and I teach. Both of these things keep me honest. Publishing code and writing are two ways to feel very naked. I know that if I misstate something or mislead someone, I will get called out. This is pretty intimidating. That said, if I can’t handle that intimidation, I probably have no business developing tools that other experts use to do an important job. So, I take it in stride.

Some blogs posts summarize my experiences. I care a lot about operations. I like to reflect on how people work, how things work, and how tools can work together and complement each other. When it’s appropriate to do so, I use this blog as a place to share my experiences about how I use my tools, how others use them, and different ways to organize a team. I think it’s important for tool developers to ground themselves in the reality of how people use and react to their tools. I spend a lot of time using my tools with other professionals to keep myself grounded.

My regular use of Cobalt Strike is what gives me so much confidence in this toolset. I see it do amazing things all of the time. Some days, I can’t believe I’m the one who works on it.

In terms of audience, I primarily write for the people who already read this blog. I used to have a keen interest in attracting attention for each post. I’d measure a post’s success by how many views it received in its first day. This pressure took some of the fun away from writing and it restricted me from writing what interested me. I won’t say I have more readers since this change—I don’t. But, freeing myself from this metric allows me to write with more candor. That’s how this blog ends up with posts like this one. It satisfies my weekly goal, allows me to say something I wanted to share, and do so in a way that’s free from any expectations.

So, what’s this blog about? It’s a signal that I’m alive and working on your behalf. It’s also an opportunity to share what I’m learning as I go.