TL;DR # The U.S. Department of Defense publishes a list, under Section 1260H, of companies it has identified as Chinese military companies operating in the United States. I wanted to turn that roster of corporate names into something a defender can use: an inventory of the software those companies publish, and a way to find it on a Windows machine. This is enrichment work. It is the step before a threat hunt, not the hunt itself. I ran it twice. The first pass, with Microsoft Copilot, produced an analysis that looked right and a dataset that was empty. The second pass, with Claude Code, produced a dataset that was disciplined and mostly unverifiable. What shipped is smaller and honest: a sourced catalog of companies and their software, and a simple PowerShell script that gives you a place to start. The other cost was time. The fast start turned into a long slog dragging the work back to something trustworthy, and the lesson I am keeping is about managing that time, not the tools. The result is on GitHub.
From an empty repository to a useful Cisco ASA firewall review tool in about a day. Here is how it works, and where I had to overrule the AI.
TL;DR # I built an offline, read-only tool that reviews a Cisco ASA firewall configuration and reports security findings. Point it at a show running-config dump and it returns a prioritized report: insecure management access, weak or deprecated crypto, overly permissive access rules, missing logging and hardening, and cleartext secrets. Every finding is backed by the exact config line that proves it, or a clear marker when the problem is a missing setting. The review runs entirely on your machine, with no internet and no device access, so nothing leaves the host. The tool is public at github.com/cutaway-security/cisco-asa-review.
Originally posted on the Claroty Nexus Community as “Managing Cyber Risk in Industrial, Automated Environments” on February 23, 2023.
Environments with industrial or automation control systems are built to ensure process availability and resilience. Availability is defined as “the quality of being able to be used or obtained” and resilience as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” These days, these definitions do not necessarily take into consideration the rampant connectivity happening today within automation environments.
