It has been a while since I last wrote a weekly diary. I felt like I lost my motivation to improve my English skills for no reason.
But everyday, I face situations where I need to improve my English, so I am finally getting around to doing it by starting to write again.
Recently read articles
I read some articles for my self-study and kept some notes for the blog.
- Disrupting the service economy behind transnational cybercrime operations
- The hidden network: Inside the phishing infrastructure ecosystem powering global cybercrime
- This post examines several phishing kits marketed and sold through YAM Store, an underground marketplace tracked by Microsoft as Storm-3119. We share our analysis of the technical aspects of this Chinese-language phishing kit ecosystem, the shared infrastructure, provisioning methods, and downstream activity by threat actors using these tools.
- AI-driven, large-scale nation-state campaign using ARTEX enables supply chain compromise
- Storm-0940, a China-state aligned threat actor, leveraged ARTEX—an agentic AI penetration testing framework—to automate reconnaissance, password spraying, and application abuse targeting hundreds of organizations across 14+ industries. Following the compromise of ConnectWise Cloud Backup multi-tenant applications, the actor used stolen app credentials and ARTEX to rapidly attempt sign-ins across more than 2,250 Microsoft 365/Entra ID customer tenants, abusing pre-granted OAuth permissions to perform follow-on Microsoft Graph operations without requiring user sign-ins.
- ConnectWise Cloud Backup Issue Investigation
- Cyber-enabled Financial Crimes: A New Era of Risks to Governments, Businesses, and Individuals
Words I learned
I listen to podcast episodes of “The Journal” by The Wall Street Journal when I have time. I can understand the main point of an episode, but when it comes to specific words, I often miss the context needed to understand them fully. The following are the words that I learned this week.
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Parliament | 国会、議会 |
| polarized | 極端に分断された、二極化した、偏光した |
| deficit | 赤字、不足（額）、欠損 ※「trade deficit（貿易赤字）」や「budget deficit（財政赤字）」などでよく使われます |
| a contentious issue | 議論を呼ぶ問題 / 物議を醸す課題 |
| Compelling character | 物語や映画・ゲームなどで「読者や観客の心を惹きつけて離さない魅力的なキャラクター（登場人物）」 |
| unprecedented | 前代未聞の |
Cooking
This is my second winter season in Dublin, and I have come to realize that finding my favorite foods to eat out is quite difficult here.
So I recently started trying to make my favorite dishes myself.
I am looking forward to flying back to Japan next month ✈️