Yeah, I mean zero-days always sound cool, but hacking large organisations with mature SOC and detection engineering teams, while maintaining operational security, applying good tradecraft, evading controls, and avoiding high-confidence alerts is an underrated skill that a lot of people do not fully understand.
The difficulty comes from the breadth of skills involved. Real adversary simulation is not just Windows internals, payload development, or solving a CTF-style lab. It is also not 'please install my game cheat after disabling every security protection so I only have to evade one anti-cheat process.'
In a real environment you may need to work around layers like:
1. Email security and phishing controls
2. Web proxies and URL filtering
3. EDR and antivirus
4. AppLocker / WDAC
5. IDS / IPS
6. Firewalls and network segmentation
7. MFA and Conditional Access
8. Identity providers and SSO
9. AD internals, Kerberos, LDAP and delegation
10. PAM / privileged access controls
11. Cloud controls and IAM
12. DLP
13. SIEM ingestion and custom detections
14. Behavioural analytics
15. Threat hunting
16. SOC playbooks and incident response
17. Endpoint, network, identity and cloud telemetry
etc...
And you have to understand the blue-team side well enough to know what telemetry your actions create, what actually gets ingested, what rules are likely to fire, what looks normal in that specific environment, and how defenders will investigate what you leave behind.
That is where OPSEC, evasion and tradecraft become much more complicated. It is not just 'does my payload bypass Defender?' It is whether your entire operation makes sense against that organisation's controls, people, architecture and detection capability.
I think part of the misunderstanding comes from people judging red teaming based on the cringe stuff they see on Twitter, and honestly I do not blame them.
Having spent time on both the game-hacking side and the red/blue-team side, there is definitely crossover, but there are also skills missing on both sides that neither always fully appreciates.
It should not even be 'this side vs that side.' The more you understand about computers, operating systems, networking, exploitation, identity, cloud, detection engineering, malware, reverse engineering, tradecraft and how real environments operate, the better hacker you become overall.
Being a specialist in one tiny area does not mean everyone outside that area sucks. You never really know what someone else knows or has done.
Ego and arrogance just get in the way of learning.
ar0x retweeted
🛡️If you work with any Microsoft Security product #YellowHat is THE conference for you.
Technical deep dives, no marketing, and an amazing speaker lineup.
Register today to join the livestream for free on yellowhat.live/
#XDR #MDE #MDI #Sentinel
ar0x retweeted
I had the domain for quite some time and the website was already up - but finally it's where I wanted it to be.
◽️Full XDR and Sentinel schema coverage
◽️Documentation of XDRInternal modules by @NathanMcNulty and me
◽️Table column relations (partly)
xdrinternals.com/
ar0x retweeted
Anyone likes Snaffler? Want to run it from Linux with a nice HTML report and filtering options? Now you can:
github.com/S3cur3Th1sSh1t/Sn…
ar0x.com/posts/how-to-tunnel…
The third and probably final part of this blog series (for now), but who knows. 😅
i have no idea what happens after the next two years. maybe we go irrelevant, maybe we won’t, those are all speculations that are not going to help you now, and for the next two years, i’m fairly confident that being good at security is not going to become irrelevant. if anything, i think this might be one of the most fun periods ever to be a hacker, because you can suddenly do things and aim high that were simply not possible before.
and the important thing is, just like before, you still need to be good at security.
that requires putting in the hours, understanding systems deeply, developing intuitions, and being more curious and ambitious than the people around you. llms are going to amplify all of this. they are not magically going to make everyone capable of finding serious vulnerabilities and getting paid.
look at ctf. gpt-5.6 didn’t suddenly turn random people into the best teams in the world. the strong teams are still the strong teams.
look at bug hunting. why are many of the people who were good before still the ones who are good now and printing money with models?
you can see something similar happening in math. models can now produce or help prove increasingly crazy mathematics, but can you understand all new conjectures being solved?
someone still has to understand the output, verify it, know whether it is interesting, and decide what to do next.
i actually think this creates demand for more mathematician than mathematicians loosing their jobs, altho new kind of mathematicians who will have to expect that they are not the heroes anymore
security should be similar. there will be incredible demand for people who can understand what models are doing, distinguish real results from bullshit, and point them toward useful attack surface. patching is one incredible problem, and random people wont be able to magically suggest or approve patches to complex vulnerabilities from llms
but i think the ambition of security research also needs to change. you should start thinking bigger. your research objective should increasingly be something like compromise this company, not lame bugs
maybe compromising a company requires finding a bug in some obscure open-source dependency. maybe it requires a browser bug, maybe multiple chains you need to think bigger and thats where companies going to value you
the point is that you need to operate one level higher, coordinate all of these capabilities toward an ambitious, long-horizon objective.
these models are incredibly capable brains in vats. somebody still has to connect the brain to reality.
you cannot just tell codex “hack openai” and expect a shell.
a serious target might require weeks of understanding its architecture, mapping dependencies, finding weird third-party components, testing hundreds of hypotheses, killing the useless ones, and repeatedly redirecting models toward the few paths that actually look promising.
so if you can spend the next two years with the curiosity of a kid trying to understand every layer of the internet, combined with the dopamine-junky brain that eventually wants to break those layers responsibly and get paid for it, i think this is an incredible time.
map the whole attack surface of companies
applications, browsers, operating systems, kernels, hypervisors, cpus, gpus, networks, cloud infrastructure, iot, data centres , whatever interests you
then pick something and go deep which has highest impact
ar0x retweeted
This past week I’ve been asked several times by people of different ages “how do you research and publish so much?”. It’s awesome to be asked. I love sharing tips and I try to give my techniques for maintaining a research pipeline. But I also want to be honest about my reality. At times, it’s an unhealthy coping technique. I’m getting much better at it, but in the past I’ve not been so good. I’ve skirted psych wards on multiple occasions, been given a “multiple weeks off work with several therapy sessions” order, been on various psych meds, torpedoed family events and holidays etc... Social media highlights the wins, but I try and be honest about the lows too where I can.
This industry is awesome, for many of us it gives us the chance to pursue our hobbies and passions. But it does encourage unhealthy routines. There is a reason that alcohol, drugs and mental health issues are embedded in infosec culture. And while sharing a new blog post or cool vuln can inspire people to want to be doing more, it shouldn’t come at the expense of a healthy mind.
An old boss once said “we want you doing this for a long time, not doing a lot in a short time”.. I still think about this now. Stay healthy h4xx0rz!
Whew, what a Christmas! Spent the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 in a total mess!
I’ve tried to be open about my experiences with mental health, primarily OCD which has a nice way of spiking when I least expect/want it. But even with all the therapy, an amazingly supportive wife, and an awareness of my minds tricks, things have a horrible way of creeping in when you’re not aware!
Then on top of that you add in the usual unforeseen life stresses, client deadlines, a report due yesterday, festive commitments, all while trying to put on a smile like everything is ok and hoping that you just make it through... and one way or another the downward spiral continues until you hit the bottom.
Ignoring all the warning signs is easily done, even with years of experience.. But struggling to get out of bed, not being able to stomach food, and doubling your medication to just be able to function, all in the space of a few weeks… it just isn’t worth it.
If this post rings true with anyone, therapy is a life saver! It’s one of the best investments I’ve made alongside a gym membership. I can’t imagine how I would cope without some of the techniques I’ve been given over the years.. you don’t want to find yourself in that “hopeless” position without a path to take to get back up again.. trust me 🙃 Unfortunately NHS waiting lists for seeing a therapist are 6+ months, but if you are lucky enough to afford private therapy… go for it, even if you think you don’t need it right now.
I hope that someone out there who’s struggling or noticing the early signs of stress realises that these kinds of mental health issues are unfortunately common. Not many people talk about it in the open… but it happens to us all!
Take care of yourselves h4xx0rz!
ar0x retweeted
Is anybody else feeling completely lost with their offsec career recently? I've always had "a plan" or a direction, and it has always aligned with my personal interests... but with everything in utter chaos in the industry, it's hard to know what to even work towards :P
proposal for google, anthropic, and openai, build a crowdsourced bug-hunting platform where trusted researchers get frontier model access and subsidized tokens for security research.
i don’t know whether threat actors are sleeping, silently pwning everything, or whether trusted cyber access programs are actually working. but ask any offensive security researcher who has used gpt-5.6 sol and mythos. they’ll tell you the capability gap between these models and older ones is terrifying.
we are popping major companies out of thin air almost every day
ar0x retweeted
We used this technique on an op recently, and I wanted to create a simple resource on it due to it being seldom covered but very useful.
It's a cool way to get around various NTLM relay constraints when operating over C2 from low-privilege.
See it here:
specterops.io/blog/2026/07/1…
ar0x retweeted
The improved enforcement for All resources policies with resource exclusions in Entra ID is coming to your tenant. You can use the KQL query in this gist to verify if there might be impact in your tenant.
gist.github.com/f-bader/c3de…
ar0x retweeted
Released a new tool yesterday that will help reverse engineering on Windows through Time Travel Debugging MCP server. specterops.io/blog/2026/06/2…
ar0x retweeted
New blog by my colleagues Dave (@johnnyspandex) and Adam:
Microsoft Graph API - Hidden Exclusions with Overly Scoped Permissions 🧐
blog.amberwolf.com/blog/2026…
Already published the first two parts of the GSA –Tunnel Vision Series, hope you guys enjoy it and find it useful. The third part covers the rogue client and I'm hoping to finish it by end of the week.
ar0x.com/posts/what-is-gsa/
I just wrote a new blog on bypassing CA policies in Entra ID that have a resource exclusion, and why you probably want to enable baseline enforcement if you have such policies. Enjoy!
dirkjanm.io/bypassing-condit…
Releasing Tunnel Vision Toolkit, part of my @x33fcon talk on Microsoft Global Secure Access.
Includes BOFs to assist in engagements where you face GSA, plus a rogue client that lets you connect to internal resources from unmanaged devices.
github.com/ar0x4/tunnel-visi…
ar0x retweeted
After “The Art of Evasion” @x33fcon I’m publishing NimSyscallPacker to the public. This is the most advanced public Packer/Loader I’m aware of:
github.com/S3cur3Th1sSh1t/Ni…
ar0x retweeted
Releasing DCOMIllusionist as part of our talk on DCOM at @x33fcon with @k3vinTell. It's a remote in memory fileless lateral movement technique based on some research of @tiraniddo
github.com/synacktiv/DCOMIll…
ar0x retweeted
Everyone losing their minds over the Visual Studio Code payload hitting GitHub. The research was published on @MDSecLabs site in 2023! Red Teams have used this on assessments for ages!! Microsoft knows all of this and didn't bother to fix it!!! IT'S BEEN IN INITIAL-ACCESS FRAMEWORKS FOR YEARS!!!! mdsec.co.uk/2023/08/leveragi…


















