Everything that runs before your operating system does — firmware, boot sector, loader — is where the quietest attacks live. This is a lab that measures that ground instead of weaponizing it: snapshot a VM, boot it, hash what happened, roll back. Plus a 512-byte Forth OS, to show the whole chain from the first instruction up.
It was 2:00 AM and now 3:00 AM, but I’ve been diving deeper into Assembly and the kernel, now it feels like it was 4:00 AM an hour ago, but it’s only 4:04 AM now. The depth of the SHELL has me… Welcome to assembly, the building blocks of technology and architecture today :) where you are only allowed to learn past 1 AM.— 3XC
It was some 3-odd years ago when I was unpacking a threat hunt on Wireshark and came across an odd packet — an easter egg, a DCOM-hole over a socket with hex that translated to “Meow”. The Meow Packet. Down the rabbit hole we went to get my cat back, with a BLASTER RPC and a CVE from 2003.
The Meow Packet. The four bytes 4d 45 4f 57 — “MEOW” — prefix every object reference marshalled over MSRPC/DCOM. In 2003 that marker rode an ISystemActivator bind on TCP 135 into a UNC-path buffer overflow behind a 0x90 NOP sled: CVE-2003-0352 / MS03-026, the hole the Blaster worm wore. For a hunter it’s a gift — the MEOW prefix, the GUID, and the sled are exactly the fingerprints you key a detection on. NFR’s rapid-response writeup →
Perception is the mechanism. But at what point does perception become self-fulfilling prophecy? Then at what point does it take hold and become the reality? When does it switch — when does ‘One’ become a red-teamer, working in Blue?— 3XC
They say it’s never been done before. Good — that’s the whole job. A defender who can’t imagine the attack that hasn’t happened yet is already a step behind. So I follow the white rabbit all the way down, think the thought the adversary would think — and then I build the thing that catches it. The hypothesis is the point. I don’t swing the blade; I measure where it would land.— 3XC
…Through the wormhole the Vulpus Vigil emerged one Hallow’d Halloween Morning at Dusk before Daybreak Dawn…— 3XC
The off button was always there — consented, kernel-deep, and global. What broke that July morning was not the lock; it was the only thing holding the door. The tool with the most reach to defend you has the most reach to end you — and the capability had outrun its own accountability. Not a breach. A confession, written by accident.— 3XC
Detection starts with motive: who is on the other end, and what they are after, shapes how they move — and how you catch them. The blue team's first map is the cast.
In it for money. Ransomware and extortion (encrypt the disk, sell the key), fraud, access brokering — increasingly organized, mafia-style crews with affiliates and payrolls.
Operates between legal and illegal with no clear authorization — vigilantes who “fix” things uninvited, data brokers trading what they scrape, researchers who cross the line to make a point.
Ethical and in-scope: blue teamers, SOC analysts, pentesters and red teams under rules of engagement. CEH, OSCP, INFOSEC. This chair.
Motivated by ideology or politics, not profit: defacements, leaks and DDoS to make a statement (the Anonymous mold). Where it shades into election and influence operations, it often overlaps with — or fronts for — nation-state info-ops.
Advanced Persistent Threats: funded, patient, strategic — espionage and pre-positioning, long dwell times, custom tooling. E.g. Salt Typhoon / RedMike and Mustang Panda (PRC telecom & government espionage); Mandiant's UNC#### / APT## clusters.
APT## (attributed nation-state), FIN## (financially motivated), UNC#### (uncategorized). Same adversary, three names — threat-intel is half translation.Power hits the CPU and it runs firmware, which hands off stage by stage until an OS is in control. Each handoff is a place code can be swapped. Pick a path and tap a stage.
A defensive simulator. It never writes a boot sector or firmware — it models each stage as a marker, runs a VM under hard guardrails, and emits JSON evidence a SOC can read. The core loop is four steps, and it fails closed if any safety gate is missing.
// run a scenario to capture evidence
The smallest honest version of the whole chain: one boot sector that is a working Forth. It fits in the 512 bytes BIOS loads, ending in the 0x55AA signature. It speaks a two-byte protocol over the serial line — 0x01 <byte> compiles one byte; 0x00 runs what you compiled.
Pick a program. See how a few lines of assembly become the raw bytes the OS compiles over serial — and what lands on screen.
I measure the ground. I never become it.
3XC is a defender who thinks in red. Raised from a child in the glow of old-school hacker culture — the cDc era, when the modem was a doorway and curiosity was the only credential — I learned the machine from the first instruction up, not the manual down.
It usually starts around 2 AM. The house goes quiet, the shell gets deep, and somewhere past 4 the assembly stops looking like syntax and starts looking like terrain — ground you can measure, map, and defend. That is where this lab was written, one hash-chained page at a time. The work is blue; the imagination is red. You cannot defend an attack you cannot picture — so I picture all of them, refuse to swing the blade, and write the detection instead.
Somewhere in the treeline a fox keeps watch. VULPUS vigil — the AI-era nexus, named before the vendors got around to it. The lantern passes; the vigil holds.
Learn the offense cold, then build the thing that catches it — not the thing that does it.
Boot-chain integrity simulator: snapshot → boot → evidence → rollback, marker-only, guardrailed. The subject of this page.
C++17 · NASM · QEMU/OVMFLocal telemetry → explainable SQL detections → hand-traced evidence notebook with a hash-chained journal. The SOC side.
Zeek · osquery · DuckDB · C++A 512-byte Forth OS booted over serial — the boot chain from its very first instruction, nothing hidden.
x86 real mode · NASMRead-only IDT/GDT integrity checks — spot a planted ring-0 gate, never plant one. Detection, by design.
Linux · Windows (kd) · macOS notes