About the magazine
Stories, fables, and the occasional post-mortem
FirewallFables is a cybersecurity magazine told as short stories. Every breach has a plot, characters, and a moral — most security writing buries those under bullet points, right next to the victims’ patience. Here they lead.
Expect three or four kinds of pieces, usually filed as issues: the incident narrative that reads like a detective story (spoiler: the intern didn’t do it), the anatomy of a specific attacker trick, the defense plan you can actually adopt, and the occasional design essay on building harder attack surfaces.
Meet The Brick, the mascot and de-facto head of security. It blocks pages sometimes, panics photogenically, and adheres to a strict “collect nothing, apologize never” policy — which makes it the perfect face for a magazine that keeps no reader files.
What we cover
Breach narratives, malware sociology, defensive playbooks, and the small human mistakes that scale into incidents. Real events, retold as fables — the moral made explicit.
How it's organized
Every story is filed under one or more departments (tags). Start anywhere; the related-stories links keep leading you sideways through the archive.
How to follow
New issues land as they're written rather than on a fixed schedule. The RSS feed is the reliable way to catch every one.
Corrections & tips
Security nerds keep us honest: if a fact in a story is wrong, it gets fixed in the next build, and the correction note is smaller than the mistake — that's the deal. Tips for future stories always welcome.
How an issue gets made
Everything you can read here started life as a single markdown file — written, edited and version-controlled like source code, then compiled into the pages of the magazine. No content management system, no hidden draft states that later become embarrassing amendments (all embarrassing passages are compiled in full view). If a story changes, the change is a commit.
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title: The Unrotated Key
date: 2026-10-05
tags: [Incident Response, Cryptography]
excerpt: "One-liner shown on cards, search and RSS."
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Body written in markdown…Want to follow along? Point any feed reader at the RSS feed — that's the whole subscription model. For the fine print on what we (don't) collect, the privacy page is a surprisingly fun read, at least by legal-document standards.