Jeffrey P.

Building secure IT infrastructure & helping newbies master cybersecurity | Founder @KillerVMs | Practical labs & real-world defense for African tech talent.

[Jeffrey P. @codedjeff]

I didn't start my career as a "cybersecurity guy."
I started by learning how computers and networks actually worked. It took me a long time.

IT support
Networking
Servers
Firewalls
Infrastructure
Then security.

And that's one reason I think a lot of people are learning cybersecurity backwards today.
You can't properly secure infrastructure you don't understand.
So I'm changing what I share on this account.

I'll be documenting practical cybersecurity from the infrastructure up:
- Networking
- Windows & Active Directory
- Linux
- Firewalls
- Cloud
- Identity & Access Management
- Security Engineering
- Real attack and defence scenarios.

And instead of only telling you how something works, I'm going to increasingly build it, break it, and secure it.

That's also the thinking behind KillerVMs.
Less cybersecurity theory.

More understanding of what actually happens when things go wrong... Because they eventually do.

[The Hacker News @TheHackersNews]

Google says your Gmail, Drive, and Photos data could influence the ads you see.

The catch? This can happen when you opt to share that data with AI-powered Search features.

Google's updated privacy policy spells out the trade-off.

Here's what you need to know: https://t.co/35Eufqf8sj

[BlackRoomSec @blackroomsec]

Reposting the POC for the PHP thing (Proof-of-Concept for those not in my industry and unfamiliar with this term) of the exploit.

For those of you who are not technical, note the time it takes for full exploitation of the website which is why we are telling you to patch immediately today.

Please do NOT be abusive to the researcher I am retweeting here. That kind of behavior helps no one.

The sharing of knowledge no matter its source is critical to what we do and helps us learn and address problems.

Keep nasty opinions and comments to yourself.

Bookmark the PHP foundation's website and watch it all day until the patch drops.

Then update your sites.

That is today's order of business.

[Jeffrey P. @codedjeff]

@Cyber_GRC Sharp 💪🏾🔥🔥🔥

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

❗️ An iPhone 17 restarted itself mid-use and came back covered in red glitch art, its owner says on Reddit. A force restart turned it blue, and it got stuck there.

The warranty had just run out and Apple's service provider blamed the logic board and quoted about $480.

[Jeffrey P. @codedjeff]

I like these conversations.

[Gregory M. Kurtzer @gmkurtzer]

Wow. I woke up to an impressive number of upset people who apparently don’t understand how LLMs work and can’t cope well with me pointing it out.

An LLM is a statistical next-token prediction model. That’s how it works. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated calculator performing math you could theoretically do by hand (if you were sufficiently masochistic).

Math doesn’t know what it’s calculating. Pi doesn’t spend its evenings contemplating the nature of circles, and c doesn’t ponder the relationship between matter and energy.

That doesn’t make the results any less accurate, impressive, or useful.

Between inference requests, an LLM isn’t sitting around thinking. It isn’t reconsidering its answers, wondering whether it made a mistake, contemplating its existence, or questioning whether it’s conscious. Its weights remain fixed (it doesn’t learn), and computation resumes when it receives input.

We know this because we designed these systems. The architectures, mathematics, implementations, and research are extensively documented. You can study them yourself.

Of course, some people immediately lean into comparisons of biological intelligence or philosophical debates over consciousness because that is what they know.

But biological intelligence and artificial neural networks are fundamentally different systems. Similar outputs don’t establish equivalent internal experiences.

I experience consciousness directly. I infer that other humans do too because we share biological structures and processes. We don’t have equivalent evidence for an LLM, and nothing about its known operation gives evidence of conscious experience.

Which brings me back to my original point.

To me, understanding is conscious comprehension. It means being aware of information, recognizing its meaning, and experiencing that comprehension. If I wasn’t conscious I could not understand.

We can perform actions unconsciously. We can produce correct results without knowing why they’re correct. But I distinguish those capabilities from consciously understanding what we’re doing.

An LLM can solve complex problems, explain difficult concepts, and produce remarkably accurate information. I give it full credit for those capabilities.

But producing an answer that we rationalize as understanding isn’t the same as experiencing understanding.

You don’t have to agree with my definitions. We can debate functional understanding versus conscious comprehension all day, but that won’t establish whether an LLM actually experiences anything.

The right debate is this…

Could machines exhibit something different from human consciousness, something measurable, meaningful, and worth studying?

I think so, absolutely!

I’m entirely open to discussing “machine consciousness” in terms of observable, testable computational properties. We built these systems, we can instrument them, examine their internal mechanisms, and investigate what they’re capable of.

That seems far more productive than endlessly arguing over whether a machine experiences life the way humans do.

So here’s my question:

How would you define machine consciousness, and more importantly, how would you measure it?

[Name cannot be blank @hackSultan]

I’m confused. Was he supposed to share the hackathon winnings with you or give you a cut?
It’s a hackathon, not a giveaway. It’s like someone seeing a job vacancy you reposted and getting the job.

It’s great that they’re coming to thank you, but you shouldn’t be expecting a part of their salary because they used information you posted.

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

If they explain Nigeria to you, you will call the person mad.

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: Security firm Calif unveiled an untethered iPhone 18 Pro jailbreak on stage in Paris.

Its Hexacon demo shows the phone on iOS 27.0.1, Apple's latest, giving up a root shell within 2 minutes of boot.

[Jeffrey P. @codedjeff]

@_DeejustDee 🥹😋

[Merill Fernando @merill]

Little did I know this message to @fabian_bader would lead me to resigning from Microsoft, birth what we now call Maester and build one of the largest community contributed open source projects in the Microsoft security ecosystem.

[Ṣẹ́gunfúnmi😎 @segoslavia]

Took over an hour to get a simple data purchase done on Glo yesterday during the MTN outage… guess what? The internet didn’t work!

Even till now e no Dey work😭😭😭

[Merill Fernando @merill]

Hear that?

Microsoft Entra brings MFA to

LEGACY ON-PREM

not my words.

Microsoft's 👇

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

❗️ Samsung's Galaxy S26 was remotely hacked three times on Day One of Pwn2Own Ireland, while Google's Pixel 10 survived a $300,000 attempt.

Researchers earned $388,500 for 32 zero-days and also broke LiteLLM, Sonos, Philips Hue, Oracle's Autonomous AI Database and OpenAI Codex.

VinSOC leads with $97,500 as Day Two gets underway with KAIST targeting the Pixel 10 over USB.

[Jeffrey P. @codedjeff]

@RedHatPentester Congrats my bro

[Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota]

Anything you want to be good at must be started on time. 34 is very early, and the benefits will only compound.

[vxdb @vxdb]

ZachXBT strikes again, holy shit

[Hybridthegeek @hybridthegeek]

Crazy scenes 😂 1 million of you came to drag me for one PH post 😭

Fair, but hear me: Lagos built first, PH followed.

Truth is, nobody owns "our city as a game." Lol!

So who's next? Abuja? Enugu? Calabar? Owerri?

Builders, the brief is open. Tag your city 👇

[Eureka @eureka_seamless]

Super excited about this one 🥹
Mainland don do. Tomorrow, the Danfo Cross Bridge

Third Mainland Bridge, Makoko, Idumota, Marina, Lagos Island in Danfo Run

[Olúwatósìn Olaseinde @tosinolaseinde]

How long it took these companies to acquire 1 million users:

Netflix 3.5 years 1999
Kickstarter 2.5 years 2009
Airbnb 2.5 years 2008
Twitter (X) 2 years 2006
Foursquare 13 months 2009
Facebook 10 months 2004
Dropbox 7 months 2008
Spotify 5 months 2008
Instagram 2.5 months 2010
ChatGPT 5 days 2022

@Shalom_HeyEliy of Lagos Life did it in 3 Days with ZERO ADS/FUNDING in 2026.