Local LLM spam classifier — model shootout

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We tested 9 local LLM models as spam classifiers on an AMD EPYC 4545P running Ollama. Here’s what we found. After setting up the SpamAssassin + Ollama integration (see the previous post), the obvious next question was: is qwen2.5:7b actually the best choice, or did we just get lucky picking it first? So we ran … Read more

Local LLM for mail spam/ham classification Part 1

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In which I spend a Sunday morning asking a local AI to tell me whether emails about cheap Viagra are, in fact, about cheap Viagra. Spoiler: the 0.5b model cannot. The Problem SpamAssassin is great. Bayes is great. RBLs are great. But spam has gotten weird. Greek-language product spam from hacked domains with randomized subfolders … Read more

Mikrotik router + Nexus switch lockdown

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Scenario: You’re handing over a server to someone else to administer, but you retain control of the network. You want to prevent them from changing the server’s IP address, adding extra IPs, or bypassing your network rules — also give management without giving them VPN access to your management subnet. Stack used: RouterOS 7.x (CCR2004), … Read more

I Built a ClamAV Scanner Bridge. A “Hacker” Was Kind Enough to Test It.

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Every piece of security infrastructure needs a real-world test. Unit tests are fine. Staging environments are fine. But nothing validates your upload scanning pipeline quite like an actual threat actor uploading a PHP webshell to your server while you’re mid-development. Allow us to introduce our tester: ~XBumbbleB33~. The Setup For context: CFM is our homegrown … Read more

CFM Web Detector: Challenge Engine — a Major Step Toward Hosting-Grade HTTP Mitigation

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CFM (Configurable Firewall Manager) started as a modern nftables-first firewall manager designed for high-security hosting and infrastructure operators. Over time, it evolved into a complete security platform: dynamic firewalling, log-driven detection, autoblocking, system hardening, notifications, DNS/GeoIP enrichment, and API integration. After introducing the Unified Web Detector (real-time vhost analytics and suspicious scoring), the next obvious … Read more

Introducing the New CFM Web Detector

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A Production-Grade, ML-Ready Traffic Analytics & Abuse-Detection Engine for Nginx, Apache & LiteSpeed CFM (Configurable Firewall Manager) started as a modern nftables-first firewall manager designed for high-security hosting and infrastructure operators.Over time, it evolved into a complete security platform: dynamic firewalling, live log-driven detection, autoblocking, system hardening, notifications, DNS/GeoIP enrichment, and API integration. Today, CFM … Read more

Building a Hybrid Anomaly Detection Engine for Network Flows

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Netflows and Machine Learning

🧠 Building a Hybrid Anomaly Detection Engine for Network Flows 1️⃣ Background flowenricher already enriched NetFlow/IPFIX data with ASN, GeoIP, DNS, etc., and had an Isolation Forest (iForest)–based anomaly detector. We wanted to make the anomaly detection more stable, explainable, and sensitive to different attack patterns without constant retuning — so we added two complementary … Read more

Adding Isolation Forest Anomaly Scoring to FlowEnricher: practical, fast NetFlow Machine Learning

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Isolation Forest in flowenricher

Teaching FlowEnricher to Spot Weirdos: Isolation Forest Joins the Party tl;dr: We added unsupervised anomaly detection to FlowEnricher using an Isolation Forest microservice. It scores per-IP behavior in real time and helps catch stealthy port scans and low-and-slow DoS bursts that signatures miss. Yeap, Machine Learning in netflows. Why Isolation Forest? Rule engines are great … Read more

CFM: A Modern Firewall and Intrusion Detection Manager Built for the Post-CSF Era

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When CSF (ConfigServer Firewall) announced it was closing, it left a big hole in the Linux hosting world.CSF had been the de-facto standard for years — a reliable mix of iptables, Perl scripts, and clever wrappers that kept countless servers secure. But for those of us who’ve been running modern systems, one question was already … Read more