Byte by Byte: My Path into Cyber

In the last few weeks, Recent cyberattacks on the UK retail sector have made headlines in particular M&S, Harrods, and the CO-OP. These attacks have hit retailers hard, with M&S losing £1 billion in market value alone. Retailers have faced empty shelves, electronic payment failures, and delayed deliveries as a result. A blog post from the NCSC on the 4 th May 2025 says  “Whilst we have insights, we are not yet in a position to say if these attacks are linked, if this is a concerted campaign by a single actor or whether there is no link between them at all. We are working with the victims and law enforcement colleagues to ascertain that.”   Quote from NCSC blog post https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/incidents-impacting-retailers A cybercriminal group known as Scattered Spider appears to be the likely culprit. Who is Scattered Spider? Scattered Spider is a cybercriminal group known for targeting large organizations, particularly in retail, finance, telecoms,...

  I’ve not posted in a while, so I think it’s time for an update. In this blog post, I am installing the OPNSense firewall in my home lab. After evaluating different firewalls like pfSense and IPFire, I decided to go with OPNSense due to its comprehensive set of features and robust performance. To begin, I downloaded a virtual machine image from the OPNSense website. OPNSense is an open-source, feature-rich firewall and routing platform that offers cutting-edge network protection. I opted for the AMD64 version, which is well-suited for my system's architecture. Next, I prepared my virtual environment using VirtualBox. I created a new VM specifically for OPNSense and loaded the downloaded image into it. Setting up the VM involved configuring the virtual hardware, such as assigning adequate memory, processor cores, and network adapters to ensure optimal performance. With the VM prepared, I proceeded to boot it up and eagerly watched as the system initiated its detailed boot seq...