Practical security insights for teams without a SOC

An open port in cyber security is a TCP or UDP port that is reachable and has a service accepting network traffic. Ports allow one device to reach a specific service on another, such as SSH on TCP port 22 or HTTPS on TCP port 443. Open ports are necessary for websites, email, DNS, remote […]

A use-after-free vulnerability happens when a program keeps using a piece of memory after it has already handed that memory back to the system. The leftover reference, called a dangling pointer, still points at the old spot. If an attacker manages to fill that spot with their own data, the program may read or run […]

The most common wordpress vulnerabilities almost never live in WordPress core. They hide in the plugins and themes you installed and forgot about. Security researchers logged 7,966 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2024, and 96% of them sat in plugins, 4% in themes, and only seven in core itself. So the honest version of this guide […]

Knowing how to check if a WordPress plugin is safe before you install it is the single most useful security habit a site owner can build, because plugins, not WordPress itself, cause the overwhelming majority of hacks. A polished-looking plugin can still carry outdated code, an unpatched vulnerability, or in the worst case, deliberately malicious […]

Vulnerability management vs exposure management comes down to one question: are you fixing individual software flaws, or reducing everything an attacker could actually use to get in? Vulnerability management hunts and patches known CVEs. Exposure management is the wider discipline that also covers misconfigurations, exposed identities, shadow IT, and third-party risk, then prioritizes by real-world […]

Learning how to test for SQL injection vulnerability by hand is the fastest way to understand one of the most damaging flaws on the web: a single unescaped quote in a URL can hand an attacker your entire database. This guide walks you through the whole workflow, first testing manually with a handful of safe […]

The POODLE vulnerability is a design flaw in SSL 3.0 that lets a man-in-the-middle attacker decrypt small pieces of an encrypted session, one byte at a time, until they recover something valuable like your session cookie. Tracked as CVE-2014-3566 and disclosed by Google researchers in October 2014, it cannot be patched, because the weakness is […]

An SSL vulnerability is a weakness in the SSL/TLS protocol, its software implementation, or how it is configured that lets an attacker read, alter, or hijack traffic that is supposed to be encrypted. Despite the name, most of these flaws now live in TLS, SSL’s successor, but the label stuck. This guide defines what an […]

Can vulnerability scanning ensure NIS2 compliance? No, and any vendor promising otherwise is selling a false sense of safety. Vulnerability scanning is a required technical control under the NIS2 Directive (EU 2022/2555), but it satisfies only one of the ten risk-management measures in Article 21. Real compliance also demands board governance, 24-hour incident reporting, supply-chain […]

Active vs passive vulnerability scanning comes down to how the scanner looks for weaknesses. Active scanning sends probes and test traffic to your systems and reads the responses, going deep on specific assets. Passive scanning watches existing network traffic quietly, covering everything but only what the traffic reveals. One is a foot wide and a […]

To scan an API for vulnerabilities, you discover every endpoint, feed the scanner an OpenAPI or Swagger definition, authenticate it with the right API key, OAuth, or JWT token, run active and passive tests, then map each finding to the OWASP API Security Top 10 and retest after the fix. APIs cannot be crawled like […]

The difference between an authenticated scan and an unauthenticated scan comes down to one thing: whether the scanner logs in. An unauthenticated scan probes your system from the outside like an anonymous attacker; an authenticated scan uses valid credentials to inspect what sits behind the login. Authenticated scanning finds far more, but unauthenticated scanning shows […]