Alex Macra

AI Automated Pentesting: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly As with any recent domain, I’ve heard the term “AI pentesting” more often than one would want to. From my perspective, it feels tiring to hear that artificial intelligence touches every conceivable…

AI Automated Pentesting: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

alexmacra.com/career-hub/a...

#cybersecurity #pentesting #AI #ethicalhacking

Do LLMs exhibit ideological biases? An experiment across today’s top models As more and more of us use Large Language Models (LLMs) for daily tasks, their potential biases become increasingly important. We investigated whether today's leading models, such as those from OpenAI...

Do LLMs exhibit ideological biases? An experiment across today’s top models
anomify.ai/resources/ar...

Signal calls on Germany to vote against ‘Chat Control,’ saying it would leave EU market The head of the Signal Foundation raised concerns around Germany now refusing to say whether it will support Chat Control in an upcoming vote.

Signal calls on Germany to vote against ‘Chat Control,’ saying it would leave EU market

therecord.media/signal-calls...

CI/CD Security in Automotive Software: More Questions than Answers There are many challenges in automotive software development. Not only with the need to deliver fast, while making sure that the software actually works as intended inside the car. Once it’s deployed…

CI/CD Security in Automotive Software: More Questions than Answers

alexmacra.com/insights/ci-...

#CyberSecurity #AutomotiveSecurity #DevSecOps #CICD #InfoSec

Pentesting a Web Application: A Case Study Following my previous case study on Windows application security testing, I returned to my area of expertise: web applications. Familiarity doesn’t guarantee ease, particularly when facing deadlines…

Pentesting a Web Application: A Case Study

alexmacra.com/career-hub/p...

#cybersecurity #PenetrationTesting

Web App Security Architecture: Implementing Defense-in-Depth In this article, we are going to explore the defense-in-depth principle applied to web applications. Actually, it can apply to most software. Nowadays, modern software is designed with an internet…

🛡️ Web App Security Architecture: Implementing Defense-in-Depth
alexmacra.com/cybersecurit...
#WebSecurity #DefenseInDepth #CyberSecurity #AppSec

LLMs are on their way to becoming our greatest security vulnerability LLMs are currently transforming all fields and are being weaponized by cyber attackers. In a brief span of time, GenAI has left its mark on cybersecurity as well. While gaining traction…

🚨 LLMs are becoming our biggest security threat 🚨

alexmacra.com/insights/llm...

#CyberSecurity #AI #LLM #InfoSec

WhatsApp gets the boot: House of Representatives the app from official devices The US Office of Cybersecurity finally banned WhatsApp on all staff devices, a move that has left many wondering why it took so long. The memo: Meta also confirmed this announcement…

🚫📱 WhatsApp gets the boot: House of Representatives bans the app from official devices
🔗 alexmacra.com/news/whatsap...
#WhatsApp #CyberSecurity #DataPrivacy

Signal is in the news and for the wrong reasons, yet again “The human is the weakest link in the security chain.” Recent events in Washington have demonstrated this cliche with clarity. This week, we’ve all witnessed yet another high-profile security breach…

Signal is in the news and for the wrong reasons, yet again

techsplicer.com/news/signal-...

#cybersecurity

Pentesting a Windows Application: A Case Study With time, pentesting develops into a somewhat predictable process. Years spent coding web applications now frequently result in web penetration testing assignments for me.

🔍 Just published my latest case study on pentesting a Windows application!

Read more: 🔗 techsplicer.com/career-hub/p...

#dev #cyber #pentest #infosec #windowssecurity

Mitigation Strategies for Desktop and Web Applications" - practical security approaches for developers and architects to protect against common vulnerabilities.

Check it out here: techsplicer.com/career-hub/m...

#InfoSec #WebSecurity #AppDev #CyberSecurity 🛡️ #tech #dev

Cybersecurity 101: Understanding Confidentiality, in the CIA Triad Continuing with our cybersecurity fundamental series, we’ll explore one essential concept in cybersecurity – the CIA Triad. While the acronym might evoke thoughts of a certain intelligence agency…

🔐 Deep Dive: Understanding Confidentiality in the CIA Triad

techsplicer.com/cybersecurit...

#Cybersecurity #InfoSec #tech

🔐 The Mathematics of Password Security: A Simple Truth

techsplicer.com/cybersecurit...

🔑 Tl;dr: Length beats complexity!

#InfoSec #CyberSecurity #PasswordSecurity #dev #Tech

DORA 2025: The Financial Sector’s New Cyber Reality The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will apply as of 17 January 2025, marking another checkpoint in EU’s regulatory landscape. While organizations still struggle to adapt to NIS2…

DORA 2025: Reshaping the financial sector's digital resilience landscape

Changes ahead for EU financial entities:
🔐 Enhanced ICT risk management
🚨 Incident reporting standards
🤝 Third-party risk oversight
📋 Testing requirements

🔗 techsplicer.com/career-hub/d...

#DORA #tech #Cybersecurity #dev

Always On Guard: The Mental Health Cost of Cyber Threat Awareness Two years ago, I joined the cybersecurity field. I began on my own, but then pursued it as a career change, coming from development and tech lead role. What I completely did not foresee was how this…

🔐 Always On Guard: The Mental Health Cost of Cyber Threat Awareness

🧠 An important discussion on how constant #cybersecurity vigilance impacts our mental wellbeing.

techsplicer.com/insights/cyb...

#infosec #MentalHealth #tech #DigitalWellness

🛡️ Security Scanner for Web Applications
🔒 Privacy-First Security Analysis 👩‍💻 Built by Developers, for Developers

Try it now: webscan.dev

#SecurityTools #WebSec #DAST

The Psychology of Phishing: Why Smart People Fall for Scams Do you know that feeling of dread when you realize you’ve clicked on a suspicious link? I know it perfectly. It has happened to me several times in the last year! The positive aspect of it is that it…

📝 The Psychology of Phishing: Why Smart People Fall for Scams

🧠 Exploring how mental exhaustion makes us vulnerable to phishing attacks, with practical tips to protect yourself

🔗 techsplicer.com/insights/the...

#CyberSecurity #MentalHealth #PhishingAwareness #InfoSec #CognitiveFatigue

🔄 Self-Designing Software

Code that learns to rebuild itself on the fly - hot-swapping pieces to match real-world conditions 🛠️

cacm.acm.org/research/sel...

#tech #coding #dev #software

Where Humans Still Have the Edge on AI Gen AI has several attributes that humans lack. It’s always on. It boasts encyclopedic knowledge. It generates output instantly. It can scale endlessly. This new era of AI can feel intimidating for th...

Where Humans Still Have the Edge on AI

hbr.org/2024/12/wher...

Which AI Companies Are the Safest—and Least Safe? A new report graded companies including Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI on their AI safety measures. Many were found lacking.

Which AI Companies Are the Safest—and Least Safe?

time.com/7202030/ai-c...

Security ProbLLMs in xAI's Grok: A Deep Dive · Embrace The Red Large language model applications suffer from a few core novel issues that have been identified over the last two years. Let's see how Grok fares on those.

Security ProbLLMs in xAI's Grok: A Deep Dive

embracethered.com/blog/posts/2...

AI and the coming inequality

jimmyislive.dev/posts/ai-ine...

Foreign hackers need to face real consequences, Mike Waltz says

www.politico.com/news/2024/12...

#cybersecurity

It's Surprisingly Easy to Jailbreak LLM-Driven Robots Researchers induced bots to ignore their safeguards without exception

It's Surprisingly Easy to Jailbreak LLM-Driven Robots Researchers induced bots to ignore their safeguards without exception

spectrum.ieee.org/jailbreak-llm

Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP): Understanding the Technical Challenge The Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) certification stands as one of the most demanding technical assessments in cybersecurity, as of today. Unlike other certifications that test…

🛡️ Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP): Understanding the Technical Challenge

techsplicer.com/career-hub/o...

#OSCP #Cybersecurity #EthicalHacking #Pentesting #RedTeam #InfoSec

Meta’s Infrastructure of Influence: Technical Analysis of Romania’s 2024 Election Campaign Detailed technical investigation reveals sophisticated infrastructure behind Meta’s coordinated influence operation during Romania’s 2024 presidential election, highlighting cybersecurity implications...

📊 NEW RESEARCH: Investigation uncovers sophisticated technical infrastructure behind Meta's influence operation in Romania's 2024 election.

🔗 techsplicer.com/news/metas-r...

#CyberSecurity #ElectionSecurity #digitalservicesact

Romania’s Electrica Group Responds to Cybersecurity Incident Electrica Group, serving 4M+ Romanian customers, reports cybersecurity incident. Latest in series of attacks targeting critical infrastructure in Eastern Europe.

🚨 Romania's largest power distributor Electrica (4M+ users) confirms ransomware attack. Critical systems secure, but incident follows 85k+ cyber attacks on election infrastructure.

More: techsplicer.com/news/romania...

#cybersecurity #Romania #infrastructure #NATO

Cybersecurity 101: Understanding Reconnaissance - The First Step in MITRE ATT&CK Continuing our mitre series, we will explore how attackers take the first step. As we will later uncover, the same principle applies if we discuss a specific target that threat actors want to attack…

🔍 New blog post: Understanding Reconnaissance - How Attackers Gather Intelligence

Read more: techsplicer.com/cybersecurit...

#cybersecurity #infosec #MITREattack

EU Orders TikTok Data Preservation in Romanian Election Interference The European Commission issued a retention order to TikTok on December 6, 2024, mandating the need to keep all data related to the Romanian elections for further investigations. This order comes a few...

🚨 BREAKING: EU orders TikTok to preserve Romanian election data after Russian interference exposed

🔍 Romanian Intelligence:
📱 25k coordinated TikTok accounts
💰 $381k covert influence operation

techsplicer.com/news/europea...

#CyberSecurity #EU #Elections #TikTok #DSA #InfoSec #ElectionSecurity

🛡️ Top 6 Personal Cybersecurity Risks: From Public Wi-Fi to Phishing Attacks

🔗 techsplicer.com/insights/cyb...

#CyberSecurity #DigitalSafety #InfoSec