Author: pswapneel

Media and AI workshop to journalists

I was invited by the Department of Information & Public Relations, Belagavi to deliver a workshop on Media and AI to print and new media journalists.

My objective was to demonstrate a few different ways of how I use various AI chatbots and point out some of the issues one needs to be careful about.

Figure 1: Swapneel Patnekar presenting a workshop on Media and AI

Image of presentation agenda, Media and AI

Figure 2 – Agenda of the workshop

OpSec best practices

The first thing that I spoke was about being cognizant of the fact on the information that is shared with the AI chatbot. From an operational security (OpSec) perspective, this is extremely important.

I’ve seen people putting in PII and other sensitive information into the AI chatbot without knowing the implications of it.

Media and AI – Biases, logical fallacies and misinformation

Then, I introduced the journalists to Spinscore. Using AI chatbots, the creation and modification of content is extremely easy, thus, it’s important to separate the facts and the misinformation.

Welcome to SpinScore – an advanced AI tool designed to analyze and score potential biases, logical fallacies, and misleading information in content. Our system uses a combination of state-of-the-art Large Language Models and sophisticated mathematical algorithms to deliver comprehensive insights into the content you explore.

I’ve personally used Spinscore in the past few months and I have found it quite useful to uncover potential biases and incorrect information. I also tend to use it lately with my own writing to find my blind spots, so that I can improve my writing.

I encourage anyone, not just journalists to use this tool to optimize their reading/writing of news on the Internet.

A large focal point of my presentation was spent on using various chatbots for translating text from a link or a video from English to Kannada or Marathi language. If you have used an AI chatbot for translation of text, you will know, it’s not a hundred percent perfect.

I also spent sometime in prompt engineering, explaining the methodology and demonstrating a few use cases to generate content based on topics such as industrial waste, climate change etc.

Self-hosted AI chatbot

And lastly, I showed what a self-hosted LLM using Ollama and OpenWebUI looks like.

Image of presentation slide outlining options for Self-hosted AI Chatbot

Figure 3: Self-hosted AI Chatbot

The benefits of self-hosting and running a local AI chatbot are many.

The workshop gave an exploratory tour of using AI chatbots for translation of text, video and generation of text based using prompt engineering.

My gratitude to the Department of Information & Public Relations, Belagavi for having me.

If you enjoyed reading this blog post, you might find Why I’m rejoining social media interesting.

Cybersecurity awareness session at St. Joseph’s Canossian Convent Higher Secondary School

I was tasked with educating bright young minds at St. Joseph’s Canossian Convent Higher Secondary School on the do’s and don’t in terms of cyber security hygiene. As the saying goes, catch them young!

Teaching and explaining Cyber security concepts and best practices to different age groups is a challenging exercise.

From setting unique passwords and enabling 2FA to the dangers of sideloading apps on Google Android phones etc. I covered a lot of ground and had an engaging session with lots of interesting questions.

Photo of Cyber security awareness workshop at St Joseph's Convent School, Belagavi



I am grateful to Sr. Mary Abraham, Principal, St. Joseph’s Canossian Convent Higher Secondary Schooland the PTA members for inviting me and organizing this.and

The event has been covered by The Hindu

If you would like to organize my session at your school/college in Belgaum, please contact me

RBI Cyber Security policy .bank.in and .fin.in

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its latest cyber security policy released on 7th February 2025, has mandated all banks to use .bank.in and non-banks(other financial institutions) to use .fin.in. The goal of the measures is to curb phishing attacks against citizens of India.

RBI Cyber Security policy for banks to use .bank.in and non-banks to use fin.in

Figure 1: Snippet of RBI’s Cybersecurity policy

Notably, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) will be the registrar for the parent domain names (.bank.in and .fin.in)

Technical details

In a DNS context, I am guessing IDRBT would control the parent zones .bank.in and .fin.in and delegate for example icici.bank.in to ICICI Bank authoritative nameservers.

Similarly, zerodha.fin.in would be delegated to Zerodha authoritative nameservers.

IDRBT would be able to control the namespace and delegate child zone to the respective bank or financial institution.

Delegation of DNS namespace from the root to .in and .bank.in and .fin.in

Figure 2: Diagrammatic representation of possible delegation of bank.in and fin.in domain namespace

Limitations of the cyber security policy

In my opinion, this is an excellent move at the policy level from a cybersecurity perspective. There will be operational challenges from the perspective of the banks or financial institutions. I will reserve them for another blog post.

However, this measure will not eliminate all types of phishing/impersonation , typo-squatting or domain shadowing attacks

Despite this, the RBI Cyber Security Policy aims to build trust in the namespace by restricting domain names for banks and non-banks to .bank.in and .fin.in, respectively. From a consumer’s perspective, this simplifies decision-making. As I mentioned earlier, this won’t eliminate all threats, but it is a good start and certainly better than the common advice banks give—checking for the padlock to ensure a website uses HTTPS!

At the time of writing, the delegation from .in at NIXI to IDRBT was not yet operational.

Delegation of bank.in and fin.in not yet implemented in .in namespace at NIXI

Figure 3: Delegation of bank.in and fin.in not yet implemented at NIXI

It is to be noted, that the RBI cyber security policy implementation will start April 2025 onwards.

If you liked this blog post, you might also enjoy reading Jio VoWiFi issue – It’s always DNS! or The curious case of esic.in DNS

RPZ Feed list: OSINT Threat Intelligence for DNS Security

This page lists OSINT DNS RPZ Feeds for recursive resolvers to enhance security by blocking malware, phishing, and C2 domains. Submit your RPZ feed if it’s not listed.

Response Policy Zones(RPZ) or DNS Firewall or Protective DNS (thanks CISA) is a solid way to use the DNS protocol as a defense. For a primer on DNS RPZ, please see the blog post

URLhaus Abuse.ch – Primarily malware domain names

CERT.pl – Phishing domain names targeting Polish citizens

YOYO – Advertisement domain names

StevenBlack hosts – Advertisement domain names & others(malware, gambling, porn)

DNS RPZ (Response Policy Zones) – Using DNS as a layer of defence – Part I

Why I’m rejoining social media

Hello again! Starting today, I am back on these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) after quitting them a long time ago. Here, I am outlining why I am rejoining social media.

The primary reason to quit these platforms was for a number of reasons, and I will not get into this bit here. If you are interested, I urge you to read the book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”

Book image - The age of Surveillance capitalism

In the past couple of years, aside from building a cyber security company, I have tried my best to educate folks in my network by conducting seminars and workshops about some of the cyber scams and cyber security best practices. Rejoining social media will help me reach a wider audience.

One of the consistent feedback I have received from many is that awareness of on these cyber scams and cyber threats does not spread enough.

Considering that fellow Indian citizens lost ₹11,333 crore to cyber scams in the past year(2024) alone, rejoining social media platforms makes sense, as per data from the Home Ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) division, it’s no brainer that awareness and education are need of the hour.

The figure could be more than ₹11,333 crores, considering folks who haven’t reported the cybercrime.

Considering that, to many, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc is the Internet it would be foolish to not use these platforms.

I am flipping the switch today by rejoining social media and will be using these social media platforms to share the latest cyber scams and best practices in safeguarding your accounts and data.

If you are following me on any of these platforms, and feel this is noise or spam, please feel free to mute/block me 🙂

If you believe these cyber scams and best practices to counter these need to be amplified and shared with others, please spread the word.

For the nerds reading this, irrespective of how futile this attempt is, I am following OpSec practice by compartmentalizing each website in it’s own VM 🙂

Little Snitch Blocklists

What is Little Snitch?

Little Snitch is a network monitor & application firewall for the Mac OS. On 21st May 2024, with the release of Little Snitch 6.0, a notable Blocklists feature has been made available.

While the ability to add a custom blocklist existed in prior versions, it was a manual step. Little Snitch 6.0 changes that. Little Snitch 6.0 now provides a prepopulated list of blocklists for blocking Advertising, Malware, Tracking, Gambling etc.

Little Snitch Blocklists

Little Snitch Blocklists

Considering that the StevenBlack hosts file is one of the premier list for blocking adware, I was surprised not to find the StevenBlack blocklist in the list.

The other nice addition to the list is URLhaus. At the time of writing, there were 183 malicious domain names in the list.

And, the lists auto-update,

What is the advantage of blocking using Little Snitch over a browser extension like uBlock Origin?

I use both the methods. But the method of using Little Snitch is more powerful because it covers access to network connections (adware/malware etc) from any process in the Operating System and not just from those made from within the browser.

For example, Skype making a connecting to dns.google will be detected and can be blocked using Little Snitch.

Little Snitch detecting Skype connection to dns.google

It’s also important to note that this method of blocking network communication using an application firewall like Little Snitch might not scale if the blocklist is pretty large.

For example, the newly registered domain names dataset will most definitely cause the application to misbehave. In such cases, nothing beats having protection by using a DNS Firewall/DNS RPZ (Protective DNS).

Open Snitch for GNU/Linux

On similar lines to Little Snitch, Open Snitch is a GNU/Linux application firewall. Though I have to mention that I haven’t tried it yet.

Little Snitch can also be used to capture network traffic of a specific process.

Exploring Geopolitics, International Relations and Strategic Studies

A post here after a long time. I have been going down the rabbit hole and exploring Geopolitics, International Relations, and Strategic Studies.

I am stoked to share that I will be part of the Graduate Certificate in Public Policy(GCPP) Defence & Foreign Affairs cohort the Takshashila Institution offers to start tomorrow.

While I have been self-learning for some areas of interest, such as geopolitics, international relations and India’s foreign policy, I am looking forward to the course to gain a deeper understanding and networking with peers from various backgrounds in Indian armed forces, public policy Etc.

The classes will be held online on Saturday, requiring 4-5 hours in addition to the assignments and class work. It will be interesting to juggle my $dayjob and manage the class work and the deadlines, but as the saying goes, there is no gain without pain. 😀

One of the objectives for applying for the course was to understand the topics deeper and that geopolitics and international relations play an important role in dictating the flow of events in the cyber threat landscape.

Thanks to my good friend Karthik Bappanad for the encouragement.

CERT-In : Sensor for MSME networks for logs

If you are an MSME and are looking at complying to the CERT-In directives on logs, then, a sensor we’ve built for generating and storing logs of the entire network, might just be what you are looking for.

What do the CERT-In directives on logs state

All service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and
Government organisations shall mandatorily enable logs of all their ICT
systems and maintain them securely for a rolling period of 180 days and
the same shall be maintained within the Indian jurisdiction. These should
be provided to CERT-In along with reporting of any incident or when
ordered / directed by CERT-In.

Challenges faced in incident response environments (MSME) with no logs

The idea of building a sensor stemmed from our experiences of incident response in environments with zero security posture.

CERT-In sensor MSME logs

The same sensor can capture network packets and generate logs per the CERT-In directives.

At the btNOG-9 Conference on the 14th October 2022, I’ll be presenting Incident Response on a shoestring budget

In the presentation, I’ll share the challenges we faced in incident response environments with zero security posture, i.e. lacking logs, etc. The presentation will then focus on the solution – a sensor we built using open-source software such as Suricata and Zeek, logging DNS queries etc.

By deploying a sensor in the network, MSMEs can comply with the CERT-In directives and also facilitate incident responders to investigate security incidents.

Incident responders can leverage the rich logs by intercepting and ingesting packets into tools such as Zeek. If you are new to Zeek, check the blog post, Packets don’t lie – Threat Hunting with Zeek and the APNIC Academy page where a recording of the webinar will be available soon.

For a broader deep dive into why Network Security Monitoring is important in the context of incident response, check my presentation on Packets don’t lie – Network Security Monitoring (NSM) for the masses

Aside from the folks at BtCIRT, I am hoping there would be a bunch of other folks from a security background interested in incident response.

Packets don’t lie – Threat Hunting with Zeek

Earlier today, I presented a webinar on ‘Packets don’t lie – Threat Hunting with Zeek.‘

Thanks to the kind folks at APNIC for initiating the request and starting the email thread.

The gist of the presentation was about using Zeek to look for anomalies. Before jumping into Zeek, I introduced Network Security Monitoring. Spoke about conn.log and dns.log and used PCAPs from Stratosphere IPS Project to demonstrate threat hunting with Zeek.

Zeek logs are a great source in the context of threat hunting and Incident Response.

A total of 203 folks had registered for the webinar, and around 55-60 attended. That’s been my experience with online webinars and workshops – many folks will register, but a small fraction attend.

While one hour webinar is a brief period to talk about all-things-zeek, I hope the webinar gives a quick introduction to getting started.

But the most important thing was the interactive Q&A session at the end.

The webinar was recorded and should be available in a few days. I will update the blog post with a link to the recording and the slides.

Also, since I am on the topic of Zeek, ZeekWeek 2022 is an in-person event on October 12th – 14th in Austin, TX.

An excellent line-up of speakers, and the schedule is packed with goodness.