This was a great post, so we wanted to answer, its as close to our manifesto as we will get:
What are we against?
Exploitation dressed as opportunity. Surveillance sold as safety. Vendors hiding behind legal language, scam products, fake methodologies, and compliance theater.
Security theater sold as transformation.
Acronyms like ZTA packaged as salvation, then stapled onto broken environments because CISOs love a clean dashboard and vendors love a budget cycle. Cyber's version of big pharma: manage the symptoms, protect the revenue, never cure the damn disease.
Bootcamps selling desperation to people trying to change their lives.
Misinformers and scammers poisoning the well.
Stalkers dressing obsession up as investigation.
Clout parasites turning harm into content.
Governments laundering harm through acronyms. Companies punishing researchers after those same researchers saved their customers from worse.
Predators with budgets.
Cowards with counsel.
Institutions that break people, then invoice them for the privilege.
That's the easy answer.
What are we for??? that is a bit crazier and harder to explain...
We are for the people who get chewed up by those systems and told it was their fault even when they tried to stand by them.
For the student trying to get in without getting harvested, stuffed full of false hope, fattened on fake salary promises, and shoved into a dead-end career pipeline by bootcamp farmers with better landing pages than ethics.
For the underpaid analyst burning out quietly while the vibe coded dashboard keeps blinking.
For the researcher trying to help without getting punished.
For treating APTs as more than animal names, spooky acronyms, and vendor-slide mythology. Behind every operation are humans: the people who built it, the people who suffered from it, the researchers who reconstructed it, and the defenders who had to clean up the wreckage.
For the victims reduced to metrics, screenshots, and engagement bait by shitty accounts farming someone elses stolen data, stolen identity, lost livelihood, or death for a few dead-eyed impressions here on twitter dot com.
For painting infosec as something more than dry reports, vendor PDFs, breach postmortems, and dead-eyed conference panels. There are victims, villains, ghosts, greed, obsession, betrayal, survival, and consequences in this world. There are also tales of extraordinary accomplishments, impossible missions, quiet interceptions, and breaches worth preserving.
For the next generation, the current generation, and those who came before us: the hackers, artists, researchers, misfits, and feral little weirdos who deserve better than scams, silence, burn out, and corporate rot.
And especially for the weirdos who found computers before they found a safe place to exist, and found friends in terminals, forums, group chats, Discord servers, and late-night DMs while the rest of the mammals never understood it and called it antisocial.
For making cybersecurity feel human again.
So we try to tell the story like it actually has blood in it.
Harder answer... And yea unhinged af looking back at this
What hard did we choose?
We chose the ugly one.
Tell the truth, make it catchy, give it aesthetics, hide the knives in the glitter, and let you mammals dance through the crime scene before you notice the chalk outlines.
reminder, from an old fart:
1. being known for what you’re against is easy.
2. being known for what you’re for is hard.
3. you get to choose your hard.