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Latest — 16 Jul 2025

When traceroute starts lying: ICMP tunneling across an MPLS hop from London to Cape Town

Every network engineer learns early on to trust traceroute. It is the pocket‑knife of path‑finding: increment a TTL, read the ICMP “time exceeded,” repeat. Hop after hop accumulates latency and, if something is broken, loss shows up exactly where the trouble is.

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Stop Shipping Snowflakes: A Five‑Stage Maturity Model for Cloud Networking Teams

“Infrastructure that isn’t repeatable isn’t reliable.” The fastest way to rack up incident fatigue and ballooning cloud bills is to treat every VPC, subnet, and firewall rule as a special snowflake. After coaching dozens of scale‑ups and two Fortune‑100s, I’ve found the same pattern: teams

Map the Loopback, Rule the Box

Most developers know 127.0.0.1 as the loopback address. It’s the default for localhost and is hardwired into everything from testing frameworks to networking stacks. But what’s less known—and rarely used—is that the entire 127.0.0.0/8 range is reserved for loopback.

TCP-over-TCP Is a Bad Idea

Tunneling TCP inside another TCP connection seems convenient. Maybe your tool only supports TCP. Maybe the network blocks UDP. Maybe you're trying to force everything through a TLS tunnel. It works, at first. But if you care about performance or reliability, it's one of the worst

Understanding ACLs: Stateless vs. Stateful

Access Control Lists (ACLs) are fundamental to network security, acting as digital bouncers that decide who or what gets in and out of your network. But not all ACLs are created equal. They generally fall into two main categories: stateless and stateful. Understanding the distinction between these two is crucial

Why Modern Tunnels Fail: The Silent War Against Detection

When engineers think about censorship and detection, they often imagine simple keyword filters, deep packet inspection, or IP blocks. They miss the real threat. Modern detection is statistical, adaptive, and fast. It does not care about encryption. It does not need to know what you are sending. It only needs

NAT as a Security Measure: Safeguarding Home Office Users for Two Decades

Since the widespread adoption of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) internet in the early 2000s, Network Address Translation (NAT) has played a pivotal role in securing home office networks. NAT, often implemented in consumer-grade routers, has become an unsung hero in protecting home users from a wide range of cyber threats.

Windows Firewall traffic audit

Windows Firewall is a Windows built-in security feature that helps protect your system by filtering incoming and outgoing traffic based on predefined rules. While the firewall does a great job of blocking unwanted traffic, there are times when you need to dig deeper. For instance, you might want to: * Verify