Iwan Timmer

For years, I’ve been working in various Security Operations Center (SOC) environments, and one thing has remained constant across them: large screens prominently displaying information. The actual usefullness of these screen can be debated, but they are a great way to show off to visitors. Setting up these screens is not that hard, but it can be a bit of a hassle. How to be able to organize the different screens and be able to easily switch between different layouts? For instance, when I’m tired of work and just wanted to watch some F1. ...

In the depths of my hard drive, I recently stumbled upon an interesting project I started working a year ago. But never really took off at that time. After working with various SIEM tooling for several years, I had become a big fan of Microsoft Sentinel. The fact that it was cloud-based and from Microsoft was less appealing (yes, I am still an open-source and Linux fan), but working with KQL was a breath of fresh air compared to the regex hell and GUI systems of other SIEMs. But what if I (hypothetically) wanted to run KQL on local data using open-source tools? Just some random thoughts, but it was enough to get me started. So, I began with what you start with for any language implementation, writing a parser. ...

Introduction Two and a half year ago Signify announced the integration of Philips Hue and Spotify. This integration allows you to sync your lights with the music you are listening to. Spotify will control the lights directly, while the music is playing on your phone, tablet or computer. This is a great feature, but it can only be controlled from the Hue app or the Google Assistant. To integrate this feature in for example Home Assistant, the only option is to use the Google Assistant API. This is not ideal, because you can only start and stop the sync, but you can’t control the settings related to the synchronization. Trying to integrate this feature into my own smarthome setup, I started to reverse engineer the Hue app to see if I could control the Spotify integration directly. ...