Story 01 — Vanishing in Plain Sight

TLDR

Getting in was easy. Staying hidden was the hard part—my own arrogance left residue, a junior analyst tugged the thread, and I learned why tradecraft beats raw technique.

The Setup

I still remember the engagement. Covert red team, mid-sized enterprise, segmentation like Swiss cheese. Within hours I had a foothold—an unpatched web app dropped me a shell, and I let the dopamine do the steering. I even typed in Slack: “Game over already. Too easy.”

The Mistakes

• I stood up persistence as a scheduled task under my op username—predictable and attributable.
• I reused the same egress IP for several nights—patterned behavior, easy to baseline.
• I pushed data through noisy DNS tunneling—distinctive enough to flag in a PCAP.
• I never validated the footprint I was actually emitting—no “outside-in” checks.

I told myself no one was watching. That was the biggest mistake.

The Catch

Somewhere in the SOC, a night-shift junior started with a gut feeling: the same destination showing up after midnight, every night. He pulled a PCAP, saw my clumsy DNS pattern, and followed it back. Forty-eight hours later I was locked out. Instead of a clean final report, I was explaining to the client how their greenest analyst had burned my op.

The Lesson I Learned

Tradecraft is the difference between a story you tell and a story told about you. Breaking in is table stakes. The craft is staying indistinguishable from background noise—rotating infrastructure, blending with normal traffic, validating for leaks, and keeping identities compartmentalized. Real operators don’t smash windows; they look like they belong on the network they’re moving through.

Practical Fixes

• Rotate egress: change exits and paths; avoid time-based patterns.
• Blend behavior: align beaconing and protocol profiles with what the environment already emits.
• Validate leaks: check IP/DNS/WebRTC after each change; test what defenders will see.
• Compartmentalize: separate personas, creds, and exits—no cross-contamination.
• Minimize residue: ephemeral persistence, controlled logging, and deliberate cleanup.

Key Takeaways

• Assume someone is watching. Act accordingly.
• Patterns burn ops faster than exploits do.
• Normal traffic is camouflage—match it, don’t fight it.
• OPSEC isn’t a tool; it’s a discipline you practice every minute.

First Layer of Cover

I don’t start an engagement without layered egress. If you’re getting your foundation in place, begin by protecting your IP and DNS pathing. Here’s the VPN I recommend—step one in keeping your origin out of the logs.