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About Buy-In Hacker summer camp isn't just talks and badges. It's also miles of expo floor, hundreds of booths, and a lot of "let me tell you about our platform." This year, walking the Black Hat vendor floor gave me as much to think about as any session did. The Good: Reps Who Actually Talked to Me A handful of vendors stood out for the right reasons. They weren't reciting a script; they were listening. They asked what problems I was actually trying to solve, answered honest

Siren Warns AI moved into the enterprise faster than most security teams could write a policy for it. Chatbots draft emails, copilots touch production code, and "AI-powered" is now a checkbox on every vendor's feature list. The tooling is real. The safeguards around it are uneven some solid, some theater, and some simply missing. Here's an honest look at where we actually stand, across three fronts. 1. AI Inside the Enterprise Most organizations adopted generative AI tools be

Picture this. You're standing at the front of a room at DEF CON, mic in hand, heart doing something unreasonable in your chest, and you look up expecting to see a handful of polite faces and maybe a friend who promised to show. Instead you see a full room. Every seat. People standing in the back. That happened to me this year, and I still have not fully recovered from it. I want to tell you it is a story about a talk. It is not. It is a story about what happens when years of

Women make up roughly a quarter of the cybersecurity workforce right now. The ISC2 backed Global 50x50 Initiative wants that number at 50% by 2050, and it's not a vague aspiration, it's a coalition of industry, government, nonprofit, and education partners working from three named pillars: knowledge building, capacity building, and sustaining momentum. Why a 25 year horizon Fifty by fifty sounds slow until you look at where the barriers actually sit: awareness (do girls even

Exciting news! This post contains an affiliate link. If you sign up, I might earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend what I'd share with my mentees! If you've spent any time in pentesting circles, you've heard of the PNPT. TCM Security built it as an answer to a real complaint about the certification landscape: too many credentials test whether you can pass a quiz, not whether you can actually run an engagement. What makes the PNPT different No multi

Every year, Las Vegas fills up with tens of thousands of us for the week the industry calls "Hacker Summer Camp": BSides, Black Hat, and DEF CON, back to back to back. It's exhilarating, exhausting, and always worth it. Here's how I get ready so I can spend the week learning and connecting instead of scrambling. Pack Like You Mean It I bring three pieces every time: a checked bag, a carry on, and a personal bag. It might sound like overkill, but trust me, between swag, badges

Black Hat recently announced Black Hat(HER), a new global platform focused on supporting, connecting, and elevating women in cybersecurity. As a woman in this industry, the announcement immediately caught my attention. Not because women need another reminder that we belong here. We already know that. What stood out to me was the recognition that entering cybersecurity is only the beginning. Women also need access, visibility, meaningful connections, and opportunities to advan

We tell the next generation of cyber and IT talent two things that cancel each other out. One: the field is desperate for you, there's a shortage, come on in. Two: apply to forty jobs and maybe one calls back. If the demand were real the way we describe it, you wouldn't need to play a slot machine and pray. A new Stanford-led study just explained why the slot machine doesn't pay out and it lines up exactly with the gut feeling so many of you have. The setup: Over 90% of U.S.

Okay, real talk. You know that friend everyone has who's better than the FBI? Yeah. That's me. Finding things, connecting dots, being a little nosey on purpose it's just how my brain is wired. So picture my face the day I found out there's a giant, free, ridiculously organized catalog of exactly how attackers behave. Not what software is broken. How they actually move. Reader, I fell in love. It's called MITRE ATT&CK. And if you're in cyber and nobody's put you on yet, let m

I had a conversation with a friend and mentee of mine regarding being in male dominated fields and reflecting on it. Yes, I am sure a lot of people are tired of hearing male dominated field this, male dominated field that but it's the world we live in. Talk about the world we live in... Flash Back Let's go back to November 2024, the day after the elections we were hosting an event with another group. All women, all trying to get into or currently in the technology and cyber

This is not a paid or affiliated post; these are my views and do not reflect my job or any organizations I am affiliated with. You ever have one of those moments where someone explains something you thought you understood, and suddenly you realize you've been thinking about it at surface level? That was me watching Truman Kain and Caitlin Sarian break down OSINT and social engineering at Declassified Episode 2. Here's the uncomfortable truth: You are leaving a trail. Not meta

ISO https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11arm64 (MAC) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 (PC with INTEL) STEP 1: Set Up a Virtual Machine (Optional but Recommended) Using a virtual machine (VM) allows you to simulate suspicious or criminal behavior safely. Tool suggestions: VirtualBox (free) VMware Workstation or Player OS suggestions: Windows 10/11 (typical user environment), Windows 10 went end of support on October 10th, 2025 L

Social media has become one of our societal norms. I will show my age here, but before Instagram and Facebook, there was Myspace and Sconex (yes, it was an actual website). Instead of being stuck to our computers for hours, we can access it on our phones through apps. These apps enable us to share pictures, videos, and messages with minimal effort, unless we need to edit them. Where is all this data stored? Millions of pictures, videos, and messages are stored in data centers

Picture this. You’re brand new to cybersecurity. You’re at your first meetup, maybe at a CyberjutsuCon or a BSides or just a happy hour where everyone in the room seems to already know each other. Someone you’ve been chatting with for ten minutes finally asks, “So… are you red or blue?” And you, looking like a deer in headlights (a phrase I have used to describe myself more times than I would like to admit), think, am I supposed to pick a side here? Welcome to one of the most