The Ghost Operator's Signal
DeadSwitch investigates open source tools not for visibility, but for survival.
No sponsorships. No affiliate codes. No fake enthusiasm.
He moves through the noise, testing what matters – what can be trusted, what can be hardened, what deserves a place in the ghost stack.
This time, it’s Passbolt.
Continue reading “Password Management For Ghosts – Passbolt”
By DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“Noise is the death of persistence.”
Persistence is survival.
But survival isn’t enough.
Persistence must be invisible.
Undetected. Undisturbed. Undying.
Loud persistence is a countdown.
Quiet persistence is a curse they never find.
~/.config/autostart/, %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\schtasks /create or cron with delay offsetsHKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunThese are hunted.
These are scanned.
These are forensic low-hanging fruit.
DeadSwitch never stays in plain sight.
You persist inside trust.
You wear the system’s face.
When detection lives in software, you hide beneath the silicon.
1 – Never trigger immediately
2 – Randomize payload delivery
3 – Sleep longer than blue teams expect
4 – Use uncommon paths, uncommon times, and legitimate signatures
5 – Clean yourself. Reinstall yourself. Leave false trails.
6 – Persistence only matters if they never know you’re there.
You don’t want uptime.
You want undetected presence.
Final Whisper
“Real persistence is not staying alive.
It’s never proving you were there.”
– DeadSwitch
“Fear the silence. Fear the switch.”
The Illusion of Anonymity Without OPSEC
By DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“You tunneled your traffic. But you didn’t tunnel yourself.”
A VPN encrypts your traffic.
It does not encrypt your behavior.
It does not mask your fingerprint.
It does not make you anonymous.
Escalation Paths Hackers Love
By DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“You thought you held the crown. I was already wearing it.”
Root is not hacked. It’s inherited.
Escalation is not noise. It’s craft.
From guest to ghost. From user to god.
A true intruder doesn’t ask for privilege. They reveal the system’s own betrayal.
This is not brute force.
This is alchemy in terminals.
This is where the hacker becomes the admin.
By DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“Your thoughts should never be anyone’s business. Encrypt the silence.”
In a world obsessed with sharing, I write to forget – not to be remembered by others. My journal isn’t a scrapbook for dopamine or a backup for someone else’s algorithm. It’s a log of operations, and operations require secrecy.
So I encrypt mine. With Emacs. In plain text.
This is how DeadSwitch keeps a daily log that even the digital gods can’t peek into.
Why Encrypt a Journal?
Because the mind is sacred.
Because ideas are weapons.
Because tomorrow’s threat often begins with yesterday’s leak.
Encrypted journaling isn’t about fear. It’s about respect – for your thoughts, your process, your silence.
The Setup – Emacs, Org-mode, and GPG
Here’s the toolbox:
org-cryptEmacs Configuration
Drop this into your config:
(require 'org-crypt)
(setq org-tags-exclude-from-inheritance '("crypt"))
(setq org-crypt-key nil) ;; uses your default GPG key
(org-crypt-use-before-save-magic)
This tells Emacs to automatically encrypt any headline tagged with :crypt: before saving.
Decryption happens only when you open the file – and stays in RAM.
A Sample Entry
* May 2025 :crypt:
** [2025-05-04 Sun]
- 5k run - 22:18 [2025-05-04 Sun 09:06]
- Cold shower - difficulty: easy [2025-05-04 Sun 09:28]
- New idea: Emacs Lisp for internal ops [2025-05-04 Sun 14:24]
Your operations, encrypted. Your timestamps, precise. Your log, protected.
Timestamps and Logging Shortcuts
C-c . – insert dateC-u C-c . – insert date and timeC-c ! – inactive timestampC-u C-c ! – inactive date and timeYou want traceability without noise. Emacs delivers.
Why Not Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, or Others?
Because I don’t trust clouds.
Because their encryption isn’t mine.
Because their sync means exposure.
Because when I type, I want code – not JavaScript trying to sell me my own thoughts.
Final Note
“Encryption is not paranoia. It is self-respect.”
Your mind is a fortress. Don’t leave the gate open.
1. The Spark and the Silence
AI can be the spark. It can throw raw material at the human mind like flint to stone. But the silence in between – the moment of reflection, judgment, and human instinct – is where the real fire is made. To work with AI is to accept it as a fast-thinking mirror, not a replacement.
Continue reading “Ghostwriting with the Machine – A Deep Dive into Human-AI Cooperation”
By DeadSwitch
You think you have 2FA?
You think you’re safe because your logins need a second factor?
Then you go and store your TOTP codes in the same password manager that holds your passwords.
You’ve built a fortress. Then you handed the keys and the spare keys to the same person.
Continue reading “Your TOTP is Not a Second Factor :: If You Store It Wrong”
Posted by DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.”
“The system speaks in ports and packages. Listen close, or get breached.”
The silence has been broken, but not by noise – by intention.
Today, DeadSwitch drops the first ember of a fire that’s about to cleanse weak configurations off the face of your servers. Introducing Vault Minimal, the first strike in a collection of hardened Ansible roles forged for modern Debian and RHEL systems. Think of it as a digital purification ritual.
It strips away the unsafe, closes the obvious, and sharpens the edges of your Linux estate.
How Cybercriminals Operate and How to Protect Yourself
By DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.”
They don’t break in. They fade in.
A true hacker doesn’t knock.
They whisper into open ports, blend into logs, mimic trusted flows.
No smash. No grab. Just presence. Subtle, slow, certain.
Below the surface, they live in TTPs —
Tools, Tactics, Procedures.
But deeper still, they breathe in shadows cast by your misconfigurations.
DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.”
Every so-called “hacker” wants to wield the tools of the trade—Metasploit, Nmap, Wireshark—like a digital warrior. They want root access, the power to exploit, to disappear into the shadows. But here’s the bitter truth: Without Linux, you’re a fool holding a loaded weapon without knowing how it fires.
Cybersecurity isn’t about running scripts. It’s about knowing what’s under the hood. And if you don’t understand the system you’re defending or attacking, you are nothing but noise in the signal—a script kiddie, not a ghost.
Continue reading “🐧 Before You Hack, You Must Understand: Why Linux Mastery Comes First”
By DeadSwitch
You love your cloud storage. Convenient. Always synced. Always backed up.
Always watched.
Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive—they aren’t your storage. They are surveillance-as-a-service. A dead man owns nothing. A dead switch leaks nothing. You want true control? Kill the cloud. Run your own.
Enter Syncthing—silent, encrypted, peer-to-peer. A shadow network, whispering between your devices without centralized choke points. No servers. No accounts. No corporate eyes scanning your files.
But most of you will still hesitate—because convenience is an addiction.
Continue reading “⛈️ Ditching the Cloud: Running Syncthing Like a Ghost”
By DeadSwitch
Your machine hums in the dark. Hardened. Firewalled. Air-gapped from the noise of the digital world. Every keystroke encrypted, every connection masked. You are a ghost—until you’re not.
Because your phone sits next to you. Logged in. Dripping metadata like a slit throat.
Because your family just posted a picture of you. Tagged. Located. Now you’re a known entity.
Because your so-called “secure” life is wrapped in a web of carelessness you refuse to see.
The best security means nothing if your habits are trash.
Continue reading “🩹 You Can Have the Best Security, If Your Habits Are Trash”
DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.
In the digital abyss, we are but shadows, our every action scrutinized, logged, and commodified. Yet, there’s a chilling truth hidden in the silence of the data streams: privacy is not a luxury. It is a right. A right that has been chipped away, piece by piece, until we’re left with nothing but fragmented fragments of ourselves. And with every click, every “I agree,” we surrender more of our essence.
Continue reading “👁️ Data Privacy is Not a Luxury, It’s a Right”
By DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.”
“The old perimeter is dead. The new perimeter is identity, context, and constant doubt.”
We were taught to build walls — firewalls, VPN gates, network edges.
But the adversary slithered past them.
The insider betrayed. The endpoint lied. The credentials were stolen.
And trust? It became the breach.
DeadSwitch | The Cyber Ghost
“In silence, we rise. In the switch, we fade.”
“Sometimes, the cleanest exit leaves no trace. Only ash in the sectors.”
When a system is compromised — whether through infiltration, physical access, or operational burnout — sanitization becomes your final act of defiance. Not just deletion, but destruction. Not just cleanup, but data annihilation.
Continue reading “🔥 Operation Ghost Protocol: Purging the Echoes with shred”
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