Blog

Longform writing on security, AI, and the systems that protect everything else.

Why Every Dismissed Alert Is Technical Debt

Maliciousness isn't an inherent property of an event - it's a property of its relationship to future context. Every dismissed alert is a liability on your balance sheet.

security-operations soc detection-engineering

The Overfitting Problem in Detection Engineering

Every time you tune a detection rule to silence a noisy alert, you're hard-coding a blind spot. We're trading false positives for false negatives.

detection-engineering security-operations soc

Why Long Context Windows Create an Asymmetric Advantage for Attackers

AI's expanding context windows sound like a defensive breakthrough. In reality, they're structurally easier for attackers to exploit - attackers save the whole board state while defenders rebuild from fragments every move.

ai security-architecture threat-intelligence

SecOps Is Chaos Engineering

Security is theoretically simple. But SecOps in practice is a war against entropy - where the real task isn't correlation, it's intent recognition.

security-operations soc detection-engineering

The Scaffolding Trap in Agent Architecture

Teams build elaborate state machines to compensate for model limitations. The result benchmarks well - and doesn't think. Your architecture is a commitment, not a snapshot.

ai agents architecture secops

The Great Unbundling of RAG: Why AI Agents Are Building Their Own Context

We spent two years perfecting our RAG pipeline. Then our AI started reading markdown files from a filesystem instead of querying our vector store. This isn't a bug - it's the future.

ai agents rag architecture

The Detection Bias Trap: Why AI SOC Evolution Needs Adversarial Balance

AI SOCs inherit and amplify human bias - favoring detections that reduce workload over ones that maximize threat coverage. Without a sparring partner, even AI-generated rules drift conservative.

ai soc detection-engineering security-operations

The Homunculus Fallacy - and Why GPT-5 Might Be Walking Right Into It

You can't explain intelligence by inserting another intelligent agent. If GPT-5's router needs sophisticated judgment to route intelligence, who's routing the router?

ai philosophy architecture

Risk Is Unquantifiable

Howard Marks argues you can't quantify risk even after the fact. We've built an entire vulnerability management industry around measuring the unmeasurable.

risk-management vulnerability-management security-leadership

Gen AI Products Should Be Built Backend-First, Not UX-First

Traditional user-first thinking breaks down when technology constraints shift weekly. Start with rigorous backend validation, then design the minimal human interface around what actually works.

ai product-development architecture

The False Positive Rate: First Casualty of AI-driven SOC Operations

False Positive Rates were never about detection accuracy - they were always about human capacity. AI triage changes the equation entirely.

security-operations ai soc detection-engineering

The Bitter Lesson in Security Operations

Sutton's Bitter Lesson says intelligence emerges from scalable learning, not encoded knowledge. Does that mean we'll outgrow MITRE ATT&CK?

ai security-operations detection-engineering philosophy

AI Agentic Architectures: The Return of Divide and Conquer

AI agentic architectures are a modern manifestation of the oldest problem-solving paradigm in CS - divide and conquer, but with reasoning, adaptation, and evolution.

ai agents architecture

Gen AI Products Are Context Management Products

Every Gen AI product fundamentally excels at one core function: context management. The more precisely you infer and enrich the prompt, the better the application performs.

ai product-development architecture

Impedance Mismatch: The Data Engineering Challenge at the Heart of Security Operations

SecOps reasoning is graph-based but our data arrives as time-series logs. This impedance mismatch - like ORMs bridging objects and tables - is the core data engineering problem in security.

security-operations data-engineering architecture