Field Notes

Dispatches from the offensive.

Research, methodology, and teardowns from our operators. Techniques and checklists we use hunting — targets anonymized, methods in full.

Case Study · Stored XSS → ATO

A Support Widget Handed Me Every Parent's Account

The login page was hardened, the session cookie was HttpOnly, and the whole app looked buttoned up. Then a help button loaded a third party support widget, and a guardian's own name turned into running JavaScript.

Aug 2026 · 14 min read
Case Study · BOLA

The Print Button That Skipped the Bouncer

The main endpoint checked your tenant on every request and returned nothing you were not allowed to see. Its little sibling, the print action, did not check at all. One query parameter later I was reading every district on the platform.

Aug 2026 · 12 min read
Case Study · Mobile · Stored XSS

A Note From an Employee, a Cookie From the Boss

A shift scheduling app let the lowest privileged employee leave a note. When a manager opened that note in the web console, the note ran code in the manager's browser. A field for text became a channel for privilege escalation.

Aug 2026 · 12 min read
Case Study · Red Team

From a Locked-Down Citrix Desktop to a Domain Shell

The Citrix environment was supposed to be a sealed glass box. No command prompt, no C drive, no way out. It took an address bar, a leftover RDP file, and the Run dialog to walk straight through the glass into a domain joined shell.

Aug 2026 · 13 min read
Case Study · BFLA

How a Read-Only Employee Account Exposed an Entire Workforce

On a workforce-management platform, a standard low-privilege employee account could read every colleague's full record — home address, phone, and hourly pay — through an API that enforced authorization on writes but not reads.

Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Case Study · Mobile

Auditing a React Native App — What the Binary Gave Up

A static and dynamic teardown of a production React Native app: certificate pinning that fell to a one-line hook, backups left enabled, and a secure-storage flag that quietly disabled device authentication.

Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Case Study · Methodology

The Privilege Escalation That Wasn't

Mass-assignment testing looked like it granted admin — until we verified server-side. A case for proving impact instead of trusting the response, and why a rejected finding is still good work.

Aug 2026 · 6 min read
Case Study · Methodology

Retesting a Fixed Program — Verifying the Patch, Finding the Gap

A client had fixed a prior round of findings. The patches held — insecure storage, an IDOR delete, and a broken message authorization were all genuinely closed. But the fix pattern revealed a class of bug the patches never addressed.

Aug 2026 · 7 min read
Web · Methodology

Finding SSRF That Actually Matters

Most reported SSRF is a screenshot of a callback. The bugs that pay chain that callback into cloud metadata, internal services, and real impact. Here's how we hunt it.

Aug 2026 · 9 min read
Web · Methodology

Business Logic Flaws — The Bugs Scanners Never Find

No scanner flags a coupon you can apply twice or a refund that runs before the charge. Logic bugs live in the gap between what the code does and what the business meant. Here's how we find them.

Aug 2026 · 8 min read
Web · Methodology

HTTP Request Smuggling — A Practical Field Guide

Front-end and back-end disagreeing on where a request ends is still one of the highest-impact web bugs of the decade. Detection, the modern variants, and how to prove it without breaking production.

Aug 2026 · 10 min read
Methodology · Architecture

Threat Modeling That Ships — What to Actually Cover

Most threat models are a diagram no one reads and a STRIDE table no one actions. A useful one is short, adversarial, and produces a ranked list of things to fix. Here's the model we run.

Aug 2026 · 9 min read
Fintech · Architecture

Securing Fintech & Payment Platforms — An Offensive Checklist

Payment systems fail in ways generic web apps don't — idempotency, reconciliation, webhook trust, and money-movement authorization. The checklist we run against fintech, from the attacker's side.

Aug 2026 · 11 min read
Web · Methodology

Hunting RCE in Modern Stacks

Command injection in a query string is mostly gone. Today's remote code execution hides in deserialization, template engines, dependency confusion, and file-processing pipelines. Where we look.

Aug 2026 · 9 min read
Mobile · Methodology

Testing Mobile Apps — A Working Methodology

The interesting bugs in a mobile app aren't in the app — they're in the API behind it and the trust the client wrongly assumes. Static, dynamic, and network, in the order we run them.

Aug 2026 · 10 min read
Fuzzing · Methodology

Fuzzing That Finds Bugs, Not Just Crashes

Throwing random bytes at an endpoint wastes everyone's time. Effective fuzzing is structured, coverage-guided, and aimed at a hypothesis. How we fuzz web APIs, parsers, and protocols.

Aug 2026 · 9 min read