Progress Report: A Few Days Off and Personal Project Updates (Part 1)

Less than a month flew by since the previous update, and I felt more progress than in the entire year since I’ve gotten back into content creation. A large part of this was due to the snowball effect of writing down drafts and blog ideas.

Cybersecurity & Tech Blog Progress Report

After taking a few vacation days this month, it was time to sit back and evaluate the direction for the blog. Recognizing the inability to compete with larger websites, I’ve started to take a step back from posting every possible news item in the cybersecurity world and started to focus more on writing guides and long articles and insights that blend my technical background with recent events.

Recommended Read

News

Despite the mentioned shift, I couldn’t help but to cover some news. One example is “Meta faces consequences for storing millions of passwords in plaintext“, that was immediately removed from facebook, due to spam out of all possible reasons:

Following up on the Telegram’s CEO’s arrest, I’ve continued with updates regarding Telegram’s shift in privacy, [2], and covering the decision of the Ukrainian officials to limit the app usage for government officials, military personnel, and employees within critical infrastructure.

Other news:

“Raptor Train” Botnet Exposed: Massive Chinese IoT Botnet Disrupted After Four Years
Sensitive Information of Over 3,000 Congressional Staffers Found on the Dark Web

In a blend of news and analysis, I’ve posted: Analyzing Fidelity Investments’ Latest Data Breach and Its Implications

Nobel Prize 2024: Pioneers of Machine Learning Recognized in Physics Category

Career Hub

A new type of article for the blog documents the transition from web development to cybersecurity, including steps to evolve in these domains, training, and certifications. Future articles will explain job types, such as Pen Testers, day-to-day tasks, and how the domain evolves over time.

Cybersecurity Certifications for Web Developers: Your Path to Digital Defense

Insights

The current focus now is providing insights regarding news events or general tips to improve personal cybersecurity hygene.

Cybercrime in 2024. After evaluating the latest data sources and global trends regarding cybercrime, we arrived at some not very optimistic findings, to avoid saying stark conclusions: Threat actors are becoming more sophisticated while, at the same time, our defenses are generally becoming weaker. Well, it’s more complicated than that, because for software vulnerabilities we have seen really fast security patches, but it seems like a multi-faceted problem ranging from:

• Unprepared or untrained internet users for this insurgence in cybercrime
• Increasing number of internet accessing devices, from smartphones, to IoT devices
• Software update even if delivered fast, are not being applied as quickly to systems. This leads to the issue of a lot of un-updated, exploitable software in every imaginable domain.
• With help of LLM’s cybersecurity specialists can be more productive, but at the same time “AI” is used by thread actors successfully. For tailoring very good phishing text, but also for building malicious software.

Other Insights

Top 6 Personal Cybersecurity Risks: From Public Wi-Fi to Phishing Attacks

From Cloud to Home: Is Self-Hosting Right for You?. Following security risks, this is the type of article I always wanted to write on this blog. Not entirely cybersecurity related, but still relevant. This is one of the series that will be posted more often, where I document findings after switching from cloud providers for my phone, camera, and websites to fully self-hosted.

The Human Internet Is Dying, And All We Can Do Is Watch. An article that is more on the personal spectrum, which I chose to post there instead of on the personal blog. It’s nothing new under the sun, the information is more or less understood by many. I do want to end on a positive note, and imagine a future internet that is plastered with AI content, where people will eventually get bored and start searching for the authentic. Let’s hope they will find it too.

What I’ve learned so far

The power of drafts and taking time to write down ideas has been lucrative. It has added up in recent months and completely changed the way I write blog posts. This approach removed the urge to just post something to avoid having a lot of downtime, shifting more towards exploring drafts when there’s no inspiration for current events. And if there’s nothing to be written about, better to just take a break.

It’s a nice change of pace that has allowed me to write not necessarily more, but content that, when I check it after a while, I can honestly say, “Hmm, lots of work to be done here, but actually, this is not terrible.”

Looking ahead, the focus will be on refining this process further, perhaps exploring more structured ways to organise these drafts and ideas. The goal is to maintain this newfound balance between consistent output but more important, writing meaningful content.

As with any journey, in this context of content creation and cybersecurity blogging, it’s now clear to me that taking time to step back, reflect, and plan can lead to better results.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay.