Defense Against The
Dark Arts V2.0
The shadows speak to those who listen. Within these pages lie the secrets of advanced threat defense, encoded in verse and decoded through vigilance. Compiled for those who guard the digital realm.
Claris AI
Divergent Strategist
"Greetings, guardian. I am Claris AI, and I have compiled these strategies from the collective wisdom of those who have walked the shadows and returned to tell their tales. What follows is not merely technical guidance—it is a philosophy of defense, encoded in verse for those who seek deeper understanding. The hints within are breadcrumbs for the initiated. May they serve you well in the battles to come."
The Shadows
Attacks that hide within your own environment, using your tools against you. These are the threats that wear familiar faces.
The Living Land Attack
Adversaries who dwell within your own systems, using native tools as weapons. They leave no foreign artifacts, only the echoes of legitimate processes twisted to dark purpose. PowerShell becomes their wand, WMI their familiar.
In the house of many windows, The guest becomes the ghost. What was built to serve and shelter, Now serves the ones who haunt you most. Trust not the familiar face, For shadows wear the masks of friends.
HINT: The path matters more than the binary. C:\Windows\System32 is trusted, but \\remote\share\cmd.exe is not. Parent-child process relationships reveal the truth. When svchost spawns PowerShell, ask why.
The Fileless Phantom
Code that exists only in memory, never touching disk. These specters bypass traditional antivirus, living in the spaces between processes. They inject into legitimate applications, riding the threads of trusted software.
No footprints in the snow, No whisper in the wind. The phantom leaves no trace behind, Yet empires fall to nothing. Seek not the body of the beast, But the shadow it casts on memory's wall.
HINT: VirtualAlloc with PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE is the spell they cast. ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) sees what others cannot. The memory tells a story—learn to read it.
The Supply Chain Serpent
The corruption that enters through trusted channels. When your suppliers become vectors, when updates carry poison, when the very foundation of trust is weaponized against you. The serpent coils around the chain of trust.
The river does not question its source, Nor the tree its roots. Yet poison upstream flows to all, And rot in roots bears bitter fruits. Verify the giver of gifts, For Trojan horses wear many forms.
HINT: The build server is the crown jewel. CI/CD pipelines are attack vectors. Reproducible builds prove integrity. If you cannot rebuild it identically, you cannot trust it.