Engineering

Pivoting is the bread and butter of modern red teaming. You compromise a foothold, and you tunnel deeper. But the reality of managing tunnels is… messy. The Multi-Tool Chaos In a complex engagement, your infrastructure often looks like this: Team Server: Running in the cloud (AWS/DO). Jump Host 1 (Linux): Compromised web server in the DMZ. Jump Host 2 (Windows): Compromised workstation in the internal network. Target: The Domain Controller deep inside. To reach the target from your laptop, you’re juggling: ...

In software engineering, “Not Invented Here” (NIH) syndrome is a dirty word. We’re taught to reuse existing tools, stand on the shoulders of giants, and never reinvent the wheel. So when I decided to build PentLog—a terminal session logger—from scratch, the obvious question was: “Why not just use script or asciinema?” The answer wasn’t ego. It was Evidence Integrity. The Problem with script The venerable script command has been around since BSD 3.0. It’s solid, it’s everywhere. But it has a fatal flaw for modern engagements: Searchability. ...

In the world of terminal recording, asciinema is the undisputed king. It’s modern, it uses JSON, it’s web-native, and it’s everywhere. So, why on earth did I build PentLog on top of ttyrec—a format from the year 2000 that smells like old C code and despair? It wasn’t nostalgia. It was a tactical decision for Evidence Integrity. The JSON Trap Asciinema (v2 format) logs are essentially a list of JSON arrays (lines of text). It’s clean and easy to parse. ...