Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) allows tools to inspect, debug, instrument, and profile Chrome and other Chromium browsers. CDP provides a tempting target for C2 communication because the traffic can blend in with existing traffic and because browsers are usually already configured with appropriate proxy and firewall information. This post demonstrates a C2 implant that uses CDP to run in a headless browser and communicate with the C2 server via XHR requests driven by CDP JavaScript.
AI-powered attackers are already chaining recon, exploitation, and lateral movement autonomously, as shown in Anthropic's GTG-1002. Watch XBOW's Nico Waisman and Albert Ziegler break down offensive AI [11]—and how the same agentic technology behind the #1 HackerOne AI can defend you. Try XBOW Lightspeed by Dec 26 with a money-back
KustoHawk is an incident triage and response tool for Microsoft Defender XDR and Sentinel. It collects indicators of compromise and shows device or account activities. Using Graph API, it runs hunting queries in the Resources folder.
RegScale provides an AI-powered Continuous Controls Monitoring platform that automates governance, risk, and compliance processes, replacing manual, document-based workflows with real-time, integrated, “compliance as code” across highly regulated environments.
Pro-Russian hacktivist group CyberVolk's new VolkLocker ransomware-as-a-service contains a critical implementation flaw that hard-codes AES-256 master keys in binaries and writes them to a plaintext file in the %TEMP% folder, enabling free decryption without paying the ransom. The Golang-based malware targets Windows and Linux systems, featuring privilege escalation, VM detection, shadow copy deletion, and a 48-hour enforcement timer that wipes user folders if payment isn't made. Victims should check for the system_backup.key file in their Temp directory before considering a ransom payment, as this oversight renders the $800-$2,200 RaaS offering ineffective for attackers.
Jaguar Land Rover confirms that a cyberattack in August not only halted factory production, it also exposed payroll data for current and former staff, including bank details and tax information. The incident has driven reported sales losses of £1.5 billion, plus £196 million in related losses, and is estimated to have cost the broader UK economy up to £2.1 billion, with the Scattered Lapsus Hunters group blamed.
Nathan Austad, a 21-year-old from Minnesota known as “Snoopy,” admitted to helping run a credential stuffing scheme that compromised over 60,000 betting-site accounts, drained roughly $600,000 from about 1,600 victims, and sold access via online shops. He now faces up to five years in prison and is the third defendant tied to the DraftKings-related hacks.
Get Infosec IQ security awareness training for your organization and receive 3 complimentary Infosec Skills seats—giving your technical staff access to hands-on cyber ranges and labs. Limited time offer.
Have I Been Pwned has added 630 million passwords from FBI-seized devices, including 46 million previously unseen credentials originating from dark web marketplaces, Telegram channels, and infostealer malware, to its free password-checking service, which now handles over 18 billion monthly queries.
Hamas-linked threat group Ashen Lepus (WIRTE) has expanded its espionage campaign to target diplomatic offices across the Middle East using new AshTag malware delivered via geopolitical-themed lure documents.
Google is increasingly showing social media posts directly in search results, boosting visibility for platforms. Since October, LinkedIn posts generated an estimated 2.2M organic sessions, Twitter threads 19M monthly sessions (up 243%), and Threads 1.2M sessions. This growth reflects the wider placement of the What People Are Saying feature in core search results. Posts that rank tend to be longer, focused on queries, and cover topics like companies, people, AI, careers, entertainment, and sports. Even minimal SEO-style optimization on social content can now have an impact.
Marketers should treat AI Mode and AI Overviews as separate visibility channels since being cited in one does not guarantee exposure in the other. Across 730K response pairs, the systems agreed on meaning 86% of the time but shared only 13.7% of citations and 16% of words. AI Mode produces responses about 4X longer and includes 3X more entities, and a brand mentioned in AI Overviews appears in AI Mode 61% of the time alongside more competitors. AI Overviews show no brands or entities in 59% of responses, while AI Mode misses citations only 3% of the time, versus 11% for AI Overviews.
The core problem for most copywriters is not lead volume but lack of exposure, and small safe tactics do not fix that. High leverage plays include guest teaching in paid communities, running monthly workshops, guesting on podcasts, and building referral partnerships instead of free work or low-scale outbound. Referral-driven channels matter because referral leads convert 3 to 5X better, and 84% of B2B buyers start with a referral. Consistent visibility through buyer-led LinkedIn content, collaborations, and owned events creates warm trust at scale and keeps the pipeline full when it is maintained.
Grüns reached a $500M valuation in 20 months by creating 6 distinct customer journeys for a single product. Each segment addresses a specific use case, such as gut health, weight loss, or GLP-1 support, with unique landing pages, testimonials, and lead magnets. This segmentation produced 40X revenue growth and a 14% drop in customer acquisition costs. The strategy centers on relevance at scale, with over 1,200 Meta ads active at any time and ad creative matched precisely to user intent.
The Simple Signature Editor allows users to customize professional email signatures by adding text, images, logos, links, and spacing with selectable fonts and formatting options. Once designed, signatures can be integrated into email clients for consistent messaging.
Winning GTM teams spot and monetize trends upstream before markets saturate. Examples show how quickly trends now move, as RAG research grew from 10 papers in 2022 to 1,201 in 2024, enterprise AI adoption jumped from 33% to 71% in one year, and vibe coding became Collins Dictionary Word of the Year in 5 months. The framework lays out a 3-phase operating system that mines early signals from niche communities, experts, and filings, validates demand through search, funding, ads, and hiring data, and monetizes through clear narratives, free tools, and contrarian positioning. Teams that operate upstream gain a 12-24 month advantage and capture demand before competitors react.
Traditional models of brand value based on logic and efficiency are losing relevance. Consumers make choices driven by emotion and meaning rather than features or pricing. Research in neuroscience indicates that emotional significance is a better predictor of behavior than stated intent. Brands that create emotional shifts, such as confidence or delight, tend to outperform those focused on transactional benefits. Small, intentional actions like handwritten notes or moments of vulnerability generate loyalty that scaled automation cannot replicate.
Once done, you'll get a copy of The Pricing Experimentation Playbook: [4] an in-depth guide from Metronome to help you test, validate, and optimize your pricing strategy.
The rise of podcast-to-clip media has made nerds more influential by rewarding nonlinear, idea-rich thinking over polished linear storytelling. Through McLuhan's Laws of Media, this format enhances idea discovery, replaces traditional broadcasting, revives pamphleteering, and is now becoming institutionalized at scale.
Strategy isn't about saying yes to everything that fits a narrative. It's about making hard choices that turn focus, goals, and discovery into real progress.
Use AI deliberately, or lose the skills that make you effective. The best managers stay close to the work, think first, and let AI assist rather than replace their judgment.
2025.12.16·
theengineeringmanager.substack.com·9 min read·TLDR Product
AI works best when you treat it as a collaborator, not a vending machine. Empathy, clarity, and perspective-taking outperform clever prompts every time.
Words don't fail organizations. Reified models do. The cure is designing systems that tolerate ambiguity, span abstraction levels, and stay anchored in real work.
Design-stage localization can reduce time-to-market, but it can also get messy. Lokalise's checklist covers 4 implementation phases + free FigJam templates, workflow maps, and integration guides. Get the
When AI becomes part of your software stack, you need more than agentic DAG. You need an AI backend [5] that treats agents like microservices — distributed, observable, and governable.
SpaceX has started the selection process for a banker to advise it on its initial public offering. Investment banks are scheduled to make their first pitches this week. SpaceX is also pursuing a secondary share sale that would value the company at roughly $800 billion. The US IPO market is picking up momentum after several years of relative quiet.
The Netflix House is a new permanent brand activation/movie theater/retail outlet designed to extend the lives of Netflix's most popular shows. They will enable fans of shows to experience more of a franchise in real life. The company has already opened a Netflix House location at the King of Prussia mall in the Philadelphia suburbs and a second at the former Belk department store, which anchors the Galleria Dallas mall in Texas. It plans to open a third location at BLVD Las Vegas in 2027.
Our brains are able to both detect and produce magnetic fields. Researchers at Meta were able to decode the brain's magnetic fields into actual images and words by training models on public datasets. This opens up the possibility that the brain may be able to read and write its own field. This article explores the idea and how it could relate to consciousness.
The Quantified Self movement has largely fizzled out. It's not easy to collect data about yourself, and it's hard to make real use of it. There's also a cost to building vast data profiles of yourself that people may want to avoid. People still track their data, just not as a larger self-quantification project.
AI spend is rising, but how are you measuring return on investment? We love this guide from You.com [11], which gives leaders a step-by-step framework to measure, model, and maximize AI impact. Get clear KPIs, four ROI formulas, and a battle-tested LLM prompt for quickly creating your own interactive ROI calculator.
Design is like a search, not a production pipeline. The design process is valuable. Early design needs freedom, but later design needs reality. You might ship faster when you collapse these phases, but you lose a lot in the process. New technology makes it faster to build, but that's not what design is really about.