Cybersecurity, AI & Python Programming Blog

Cybersecurity blog featuring artificial intelligence projects, Python programming tutorials, CTF writeups, and security research by Mark LaCore.

Trust Issues CTF: Supply Chain Attack on a GitHub Actions Runner

2026-02-25 12:00:00 15 min read

Trust Issues CTF writeup: incident response tracing a trojanized pytest package exfiltrating secrets from a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner via Fernet-encrypted dead drops.

Migrating from JSON Files to DynamoDB with boto3

technology

2026-02-23 03:57:44 3 min read

How I moved my Flask blog from flat JSON files to AWS DynamoDB for durable storage, and migrated hardcoded secrets to environment variables.

Wiz Cloud Security Championship - Cracked the Top 30

2026-02-14 12:00:00

Climbed from page 5 to #30 on the Wiz Cloud Security Championship leaderboard with 8 of 12 challenges solved and 137 points. Up from 3 challenges in September.

Wiz Cloud Security Championship - Cracked the Top 30

Confession Booth CTF: Race Condition Privilege Escalation

2026-01-28 12:00:00 15 min read

Confession Booth CTF writeup: race condition exploit between user registration and permission assignment.

State of Affairs CTF Challenge Writeup

2026-01-06 12:00:00 12 min read

State of Affairs CTF writeup: Terraform state poisoning via TF_DATA_DIR and malicious provider injection.

Malware Busters CTF Challenge Writeup

2025-12-21 12:00:00 18 min read

Malware Busters CTF writeup: Go binary reverse engineering with UPX, garble obfuscation, and AES-CBC.

Game of Pods CTF Challenge Writeup

2025-12-10 12:00:00 15 min read

Game of Pods CTF writeup: Kubernetes privilege escalation via SSRF, path traversal, and nodes/proxy.

Needle in a Haystack CTF Challenge Writeup

2025-10-07 12:00:00 10 min read

Needle in a Haystack CTF writeup: client-side bypass and GitHub OSINT to exploit exposed API secrets.

Meet 'nerdbot' - My Personal Robot Project

robotics

2025-09-18 14:30:00

Nerdbot: an autonomous robot companion built with Python, OpenCV, and computer vision.

Now Cross-posting to Bluesky with AT Protocol

technology

2025-09-18 08:30:00

Automated blog cross-posting to Bluesky using AT Protocol SDK with duplicate detection and rich previews.

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