nullbyte

Stuxnet: The Malware That Sabotaged a Nuclear Program

In June 2010, a small Belarusian antivirus firm received a malware sample they could not immediately classify. Six months of analysis later, the security industry understood that it had found the first piece of malware specifically built to cause physical destruction in the real world. The target was a nuclear enrichment facility. The operators were two of the most capable intelligence services on the planet. The era of cyber-physical warfare started here.

nullbyte :: April 18, 2026 :: 10 min read

Dan Kaminsky: The Bug, the Patch, and the Mensch

In early 2008, a researcher in Seattle realized he had found a way to corrupt the DNS resolver caches that route most traffic on the public internet. What he did next, before disclosing the bug, became a model for how serious vulnerabilities should be coordinated. Then he died, suddenly, at 42. This is what he built and what he meant.

nullbyte :: April 18, 2026 :: 10 min read

Marcus Hutchins, the Kill Switch, and the Long Strange Year After

On May 12, 2017, a 23-year-old security researcher in Devon registered an obscure domain he had found inside a piece of ransomware spreading globally. The registration acted as a kill switch and ended the WannaCry outbreak before it took down the National Health Service entirely. Three months later, FBI agents arrested him in a Las Vegas hotel room. The story of what happened in between is the story of how strange the modern security industry actually is.

nullbyte :: April 17, 2026 :: 10 min read

Robert Tappan Morris: The Worm, the Sentence, the Second Act

On November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a self-replicating program that brought a meaningful fraction of the early internet to a halt within hours. He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He also became, eventually, an MIT professor, a Y Combinator cofounder, and the rare cautionary-tale figure whose second act overshadowed the cautionary tale.

nullbyte :: April 12, 2026 :: 10 min read

The Morris Worm: The First Internet Weapon

Robert Tappan Morris released the first internet worm in 1988. A coding error turned an experimental network measurement into a weapon that crashed 10% of the internet and changed everything. The son of an NSA cryptographer. The first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

nullbyte :: March 30, 2026 :: 6 min read

Anatomy of a Zero Day: What Happens When Nobody Knows

A technical walkthrough of what zero-day vulnerabilities actually are, how they get discovered, weaponized, and eventually patched. The lifecycle of the most dangerous bugs in software.

nullbyte :: March 28, 2026 :: 8 min read

The 414s: Teenage Hackers and the Law That Stopped Them

In 1983, a group of teenage hackers from Milwaukee broke into Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Security Pacific Bank. Kids with modems and curiosity. Their arrests directly triggered the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984. The moment hacking became a federal crime.

nullbyte :: December 28, 2025 :: 6 min read

Blue Box Technical Deep Dive: How Phone Phreaking Actually Worked

nullbyte :: December 20, 2025 :: 9 min read

The Dark Avenger and the Bulgarian Virus Factory

nullbyte :: December 12, 2025 :: 6 min read

Clifford Stoll and the Cuckoo's Egg

A 75-cent accounting discrepancy at Lawrence Berkeley Lab led astronomer Clifford Stoll on a months-long hunt for a KGB-sponsored hacker infiltrating U.S. military networks. The resulting book became a classic.

nullbyte :: November 28, 2025 :: 5 min read

Solar Sunrise: When the Pentagon Thought Iraq Was Hacking It

nullbyte :: November 25, 2025 :: 8 min read

Wardriving and WiFi Cartography: The Radio Wave Hunt for Open Networks

nullbyte :: November 18, 2025 :: 6 min read

Moonlight Maze: The First State Cyber Espionage Campaign

nullbyte :: November 11, 2025 :: 5 min read

MOD vs LOD: The First Hacker War

Masters of Deception and Legion of Doom were the two most notorious hacker groups of the late 1980s. Their rivalry escalated from BBS trash talk to full-scale digital warfare, and it drew the attention of the FBI.

nullbyte :: November 6, 2025 :: 5 min read

Tsutomu Shimomura: The Vigilante Who Hunted Kevin Mitnick

The computational physicist who tracked Kevin Mitnick across the country using cellular forensics and TCP/IP sequence prediction. A controversial hero whose story shaped how we think about vigilante security researchers and law enforcement.

nullbyte :: October 26, 2025 :: 8 min read

Karl Koch: Hagbard Celine and the KGB Hack

German hacker Karl Koch, operating under the handle Hagbard Celine from the Illuminatus! trilogy, sold stolen data to the KGB. His story ended in tragedy, fueled by paranoia, drugs, and Cold War espionage.

nullbyte :: October 25, 2025 :: 6 min read

c0mrade: The Teenager Who Hacked NASA

At 15 years old, Jonathan James broke into NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the Department of Defense. He became the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States.

nullbyte :: October 20, 2025 :: 5 min read