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§ WRITING Writing

Notes from the work.

Field notes on building dependable systems, reading slow queries, and doing consulting that actually leaves a team stronger.

10 min read

Found by Google, not by monitoring — a WordPress zero-day post-mortem

A site was fully compromised for ten days through a WordPress Core zero-day. Nothing the operators did caused it, nothing they had running detected it, and the only reason we could prove the entry vector was two database rows the attacker could not delete.

SecurityIncident ResponseWordPressForensics 7sources
8 min read

Pricing cyber risk in euros, not traffic lights

I spent this year building Nisura — a European cyber risk quantification engine. Here are the modelling decisions that mattered, including the one I argued about with myself for weeks.

SecurityCyber RiskNIS2Product 12sources
8 min read

Six hours to mitigate a DoS — a connection-flood post-mortem

An unprotected origin server took a sustained flood on port 443 until its file descriptors ran out. Here is how we diagnosed it, stopped it in an afternoon, and why it was avoidable.

SecurityIncident ResponseDevOps 7sources
6 min read

Ship boring software on purpose

The most reliable systems I have built were also the least clever. Here is why I reach for boring first, and when I break my own rule.

ArchitectureReliability 3sources
7 min read

How I read a slow query before touching it

A repeatable way to go from "the database is slow" to a specific, measured fix — without guessing or adding indexes at random.

PostgresPerformance 6sources
5 min read

What I do in the first 90 days of an engagement

How I earn trust as an outside engineer — by shipping something small and real before I propose anything large.

ConsultingProcess
Available Q3 · 2 slots

Have a system that needs to hold up? Let’s talk about it.

Tell me what you’re building and where it hurts. I’ll reply within a day with an honest read on whether — and how — I can help.

Book a call boris@szelcsanyi.net