About

I'm Aadam Dirie, a Cyber Deception Engineer at the world's largest retailer. My work sits between detection engineering, "reverse" red teaming and threat intelligence: building environments where an attacker's first confident move is also their loudest one.

What I work on

• Deception engineering — decoy hosts, services, and lures designed to be believable to an intruder and invisible to everyone else.
• Honeytokens — credentials, keys, and documents that produce high-confidence alerts with almost no false positives.
• Adversary engagement — turning intrusion attempts into intelligence about tooling, tradecraft, and intent.
• Detection quality — making sure the signal a decoy produces reaches a responder with enough context to act.

Why this blog

Deception is under-documented compared to the rest of security engineering. Most of what exists is either vendor material or academic. I write the middle layer: build logs, failure modes, and patterns that survive contact with a real environment.

Elsewhere

The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn. Everything published here is my own view, not my employer's.