Better Ingredients. Better Security. Blackbox.
I hate bad pizza.
I mean really hate it.
Paid good money for "premium" delivery from the big-name chains—fancy boxes, big marketing, promises of perfection.
Opened it up: cold, tasteless crust, cheap sauce, ingredients that fooled nobody.
Who were they kidding? It looked like pizza, cost like gourmet, but left me hungry and regretting every bite.
Same with security in 2026.
Step 1: The 2025 Wake-Up Call A client got hit hard—state-level tools slipping through compromised sites, grabbing admin rights, killing AV, drifting sideways unchecked. Expensive "business-class" solutions (EDR from the giants, firewalls, all the bells) sat there doing nothing. Naive belief in north-south borders while the real attack lived east-west. Ransacked the reports—Mandiant, Palo Alto, every breach autopsy screamed the same: grifters don't need a home on endpoints anymore; they con in once, hide in encrypted payloads, hop forever internally.
Step 2: The Beacon Scanner Birth Couldn't stomach the lies. Built a simple beacon scanner from scratch—code, scripts, raw idea to working model—just to spot the whispers phoning home. It worked. Saw what the "premium" tools missed: sideways chatter no endpoint agent could touch.
Step 3: The Ugly Truth Discovery Digging deeper, nothing was safe. East-west was the new war—90%+ of dwell time sideways, memory-only lives, LOLBins, stolen tokens. Off-the-shelf business solutions? Designed vulnerable—guarding front doors while hallways burned. Expensive theater, bad ingredients, fooling owners into thinking they were secure.
Step 4: Blackbox—The Painful Grind to Reality Shrunk a $110k/year analyst into a box. Built the full appliance from the ground up—same open-source hearts as the giants (Zeek, Suricata, OpenVAS, TCPDump)—pre-tuned on-prem, automated plain-English reports, cheap full mirroring. But don't kid yourself it was easy. With 35 years across multiple domains (mostly IT), I was still a complete novice here—new to everything, impossibly slow learner. What takes normal people days dragged into weeks for me: brutal learning curve, endless failures, 18-hour days stretching weeks, late nights staring at errors because my brain just wouldn't click fast. Terrible, exhausting grind. No pretending you're safe. Blackbox knows the truth: you're not secure. It's built for that reality—to light up the hallway early, spot the drift before it becomes disaster.
Step 5: The Taste Test – Why Blackbox Wins Big EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne) runs thousands yearly guarding empty doors. NDR suits (Darktrace, Vectra) hit $200k+ yearly recurring (the "bells and whistles" version no one escapes), scaling to millions in TCO with tuning, storage, MSSP. Bad ingredients: bloat, false positives, PhD tax, subscription hostage.
Blackbox? Better ingredients—honest, agentless, east-west dominant. Better security: sees the grift early, stops the bleed before ransom notes. Built from pain, not marketing.
I hate bad security. Who are they fooling with tasteless, overpriced pizza? Not me anymore.
Skip the bad pizza. Get Blackbox at smitebyte.com/merch—real protection, no regrets.
Better Ingredients. Better Security. Blackbox.
— Paul @ SmiteByte