About

Who am I

I'm Darryl.

By day, I've spent nearly two decades delivering projects and programmes. Information Security, Infrastructure, Cloud, the lot. Change portfolios, supplier wrangling, RAID logs. I've sat in more steering committees than I've had hot dinners. I've got very good at asking the people doing the actual technical work sharp questions, whilst wondering to myself how it really works.

Now, I've stopped wondering and started finding out.

The blog

This blog is my late escalation. After years working adjacent to the technical coalface, I'm going hands on. TryHackMe, Hack The Box, home labs, malware analysis, and all the command-line mistakes on the way. It's a mid-career pivot into the things I genuinely enjoy. Better late than never.

What you'll find

Write-ups from labs and rooms, but not the "EYYY GOT FLAG" type. I'm documenting how I approached things, where tools let me down, where I let myself down, what stuck. Expect proper methodology, confessions, and analysis that benefits from my experience on the project delivery side: the governance, the risk appetite, the reason nobody patched the thing.

Is this relevant in 2026?

Security is also being rewritten by AI as I write this. I don't know where exactly that leaves a nearly 40-year-old beginner, but I'd rather understand what the machines are doing than just watch them do it. When AI takes the drudgery off the table, someone still has to know what to do with the results.

Why listen to me?

Why listen to someone still learning? Because nearly two decades in delivering change for organisations, including InfoSec change, means I know what good looks like from the outside, and now I'm learning what it looks like from the inside. That journey is the interesting bit, come along for it.