For a long time, everything I wrote lived either on this blog or in a folder of drafts I never touched again. I was fine with that for a while, but at some point I noticed I kept having ideas that never made it past my own site, and I realized I wanted to take writing a bit more seriously and actually put my work out where other people can read it. So recently I did something I had never done before: I finished a few pieces I genuinely cared about and published them on platforms where I had only ever been a reader. Three articles are now up on Hashnode, DEV, and Medium, and since this is a first for me, I wanted to leave a note about them here.
The most “me” one is probably The Ransomware Attack Starts Before Encryption: The Warning Signs Security Teams Cannot Ignore in 2026, which I put up on Hashnode. The reason I wrote it is simple. Almost every conversation about ransomware jumps straight to the encryption and the ransom note, as if the attack began at that moment, when in a real intrusion the encryption is basically the last step of a chain that started weeks earlier with an unpatched VPN, a stolen session cookie, or a phone call to the help desk. I wanted to walk through everything that happens before the ransom note shows up: the enumeration, the credential dumping, the destroyed backups, the random remote management tool that nobody installed on purpose. That is the window where defenders still have a chance, and I even threw in a KQL hunting query for Microsoft Defender that catches things like shadow copy deletion, so it is not just theory.
Then there is Russia Tried to Break Ukraine Through Its Networks. Instead, Ukraine Rewrote the Rules of Cyber War, published on DEV. This one is personal. I am Ukrainian, so a war where missiles and wiper malware show up on the same timeline is not an abstract topic for me. The piece covers the whole arc, from the 2015 and 2016 power grid attacks through NotPetya to the Viasat satellite attack and the wave of destructive malware right before the full-scale invasion. But the story I cared about is the one most coverage misses: Ukraine took years of that and stayed online, and the lessons about resilience matter far beyond one country. I also wanted to push back on the movie version of cyber war with hooded hackers, because the real thing is slower, weirder, and much more important. Writing it meant sitting through a big stack of public reporting and government attribution statements, and it pushed me to be more careful with sources than I have ever been in a blog post.
And then the one I least expected to write: The Middle East War Is No Longer “Over There”: How Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria Became One Global Crisis, up on Medium. This is the first thing I have ever published that is purely about geopolitics. Over the last year I noticed my reading list quietly filling up with news and analysis about international affairs, and I keep catching how everything connects back to things I already care about: how these conflicts move energy prices, hit shipping routes, shape cybersecurity, and affect Europe and Ukraine. What finally pushed me to write was that Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran kept showing up in my feed as separate stories, when the whole point is that they are one interconnected crisis. So I tried to untangle, as much for myself as for anyone, how all the fronts fit together and what each side actually wants. I am not pretending to be an analyst here. I am a developer who reads a lot and tries to think honestly about what he reads. But finishing this piece showed me this is a direction I really want to keep going in.
None of this means I am done with cybersecurity or programming, by the way. That is still my day job, still what I study, still where most of my energy goes. I am just not forcing myself to stay inside the purely technical lane anymore. Some of the most interesting questions I can think of live right where security meets the real world, and I would rather follow them than ignore them.
Anyway, this is only the beginning. I want to keep writing, keep experimenting with different topics and formats, and I will probably keep bouncing between technology and geopolitics for the foreseeable future, because that is honestly where my head is right now.
If any of the three sounds interesting, the links are all up there and I would really appreciate a read. And if you have thoughts, or corrections, especially on the geopolitics one since I am new to it, I would genuinely love to hear them. I am still figuring all of this out, and that is kind of the point.