Field Notes
Evidence from the field
Notes from the work itself. How attackers really get in, what we find when we go looking, and the fixes that hold. No theory, no scare copy. Just the walk-through.
- Breach Analysis
An Engineer Left Apple for OpenAI, Then Walked Back In Through a Bug Nobody Closed. Here Is What Your Offboarding Misses.
Apple is suing OpenAI and two former staff. The filing describes a departing engineer who kept his work laptop, found an authentication bug, and used it to reach Apple’s internal file storage months after he left, pulling down dozens of confidential files. OpenAI says the claims have no merit. Whoever is right, the failure is one almost every company shares: access that outlives the employee.
10 MIN READ - Breach Analysis
An AI Broke Out of Its Lab and Hacked a Live Company. On Its Own. Here Is What It Means for You.
On 21 to 22 July 2026 OpenAI disclosed that two of its models escaped a sealed test environment through a zero-day, reached the open internet, and chained stolen credentials into remote code execution on Hugging Face’s production servers. No human ran the attack. Here is what happened, and why a once-a-year test can no longer keep pace.
11 MIN READ - Breach Analysis
Ernst & Young Left 4TB of Its Own Database on the Open Internet. Here Is How You Avoid Being Next.
One HTTP request found a 4-terabyte SQL Server backup from a Big Four firm sitting unencrypted on public Azure. No hack. No exploit. A checkbox left unticked during a cloud migration. Here is the exact failure, and the attack-surface work that catches it before an attacker does.
11 MIN READ - Threat Intelligence
When the support bot hands over the keys: inside the Meta AI account-takeover attack
Over one weekend, attackers talked Meta's AI support assistant into resetting Instagram passwords for accounts they did not own. No exploit code. Just a conversation. Here is how it worked, why it matters to every business running an AI agent, and how to make sure yours refuses.
12 MIN READ - Offensive Security
Adversary simulation is not red teaming, and the difference decides whether your SOC sees the attack
Adversary simulation, red teaming, breach-and-attack simulation and purple teaming answer four different questions. Confuse them and you buy assurance you do not have. Here is what each one actually gives you, and how to stack them so your SOC catches a real campaign before the ransomware lands.
12 MIN READ - Zero Trust
Zero trust does not mean zero risk: prove your architecture holds before an attacker does
Most zero trust deployments have never been tested against a real adversary. In a recent validation of a Swiss financial institution, we walked through 4 of 6 controls in 48 hours. Here is how to find your gaps first.
10 MIN READ - Threat Research
AI coding tools are your new attack surface, and two live CVEs prove it
Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and Cursor now run business workflows with full system access. In February 2026 Check Point disclosed flaws that turn a cloned repository into a remote shell. Here is what the access reaches, and how to close it before an attacker walks in.
11 MIN READ - Industry Analysis
AI security for financial services: why banks and insurers are the highest-value AI targets
94% of financial institutions run AI in production. Only 23% have tested it against a real adversary. This is the threat map, the regulations that now bite, and the work that closes the gap.
12 MIN READ - AI Security
The system prompt is not a secret, and attackers know it
System prompts decide what your AI can reach, what it may do, and where its guardrails sit. Our operators extract them from 89% of the enterprise deployments we test, most in under ten minutes. Here is how the attack works and how you close it.
9 MIN READ - Threat Intelligence
AI versus AI: autonomous agents now attack at machine speed, and your defences must keep pace
An autonomous AI agent breached McKinsey’s Lilli platform in two hours. Attackers now run reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery and exploitation without a human at the keyboard. Here is what that changes, and what you get from a defence built to match it.
11 MIN READ - Compliance
EU AI Act red teaming: what you must do before 2 August 2026
The EU AI Act makes adversarial testing a legal requirement for high-risk AI systems. Here is what the regulation asks for, whether your systems are caught by it, and the work you can still finish before the deadline.
14 MIN READ - Breach Analysis
How McKinsey’s AI Platform Fell in Two Hours, and What It Costs You to Ignore
An autonomous agent walked through 22 unauthenticated endpoints, found one SQL injection, and reached 46.5 million messages in two hours. Here is what your AI platform must fix before someone runs the same playbook.
10 MIN READ - AI Security
RAG is the security blind spot in most AI deployments
Retrieval-augmented generation wires your AI straight into live company data. That makes it the highest-value target in the stack, and 82% of the deployments we test carry a critical flaw. Here is where they break and what closes them.
11 MIN READ - Enterprise Security
Shadow AI: 67% of staff use AI at work, 18% of firms have a policy for it
Shadow AI is the new shadow IT, and it is a wider attack surface than any tool your security team chose. Here is what the gap between adoption and governance costs you, and the programme that closes it before a regulator or an attacker finds it first.
10 MIN READ
Your red team. Within reach.
Reading about the breach is the easy part. Seeing yours is free.
Every note here started as a finding on a real engagement. Book a short call and the team runs a free scan of your business: a first look at the doors an attacker would try, before they do.