OPSEC isn’t just offense
…it’s also about not shooting yourself in the foot.
Lately, OPSEC seems to have become the new buzzword in the red teaming world. Everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s writing about it, and every new tool has at least one “OPSEC-safe” feature proudly listed in the README. But do we actually know what it means? I’m not trying to play the guru here (first because surely i’m not), but maybe it’s worth pausing for a second and taking a hard look at our own backyard.
In the military world, OPSEC is serious business (and not by coincidence, since they came up with it). For them, it’s straightforward: I need to get from point A to point B, what are the risks? How do I minimize them? Not eliminate, minimize, and that’s already a massive difference.
And that’s where the whole idea begins, with a simple question: how do I avoid screwing up the mission?
Now, back to us: what’s the point of chasing the latest stealth technique found on GitHub (ehm…) if we operate in an environment that looks like a minefield? Ten thousand scripts scattered everywhere, zero version control worth the name, barely written notes that you can’t even decipher a week later. If we’re already losing track at that stage, what exactly are we talking about when we say OPSEC?
Because here’s the truth, or at least the way I see it: OPSEC is not intended to be a technique. It’s a mindset.
It’s the sum of decisions we make before, during, and after an operation. It’s not some elite hacker power-up, and it’s definitely not a magic filter that makes us invisible. It’s the ability to manage an engagement end-to-end while reducing operational risk, especially the kind we create for ourselves.
Operational security starts right where you work: your machine, your tools, your habits. If that setup’s a mess, no stealth technique will save you. How do you manage the risk of a misconfigured box? How do you avoid losing track of what you’ve done? How do you ensure your actions are reproducible or at the very least, precisely reconstructable? Those, at least in my view, are the real questions worth asking.
my personal approach: containerized ops
To better explain what I mean when I talk about “personal” OPSEC, I want to walk you through how my operational environment is set up today. Don’t take this as some universal truth, as stated before I’m not here to play guru and sell truth, it’s just an honest breakdown of an approach that came together over time, shaped by bad decisions, really bad scripts, and yelling at a screen during ops.
These days, I work with a container-based setup. My base environment is a clean, minimal Debian 12 with no fluff, just what I need to run Docker and VSCode, which have become my trusted companions.
For each engagement, I spin up a dedicated container from a customized base image. If I need to install weird tools, weird dependencies, or run borderline experiments, I do it in there: isolated, contained. No impact on the main system, no exploding dependencies making me curse in ancient languages. The result is really simple, something that I consider a stable, modular, and controlled environment that I can recreate in seconds.
But it’s not just about achieving some kind of zen desktop aesthetic. For me, this is how I reduce operational risks: by working inside a controlled environment that’s always ready to kick off the next engagement and more.
Yes, more. I decided to adopt this controlled approach for a selfish reason: it allows me to manage the risk of completely losing my shit.
Every container has its own logs, every action gets recorded in a dated file, all neatly stored in the corresponding engagement folder. At any point, I can answer a simple but critical question: who did what, where, and when. Even if the only “who” is - well - me (and honestly, I can be pretty self-dangerous sometimes. I swear).
This approach answers a fundamental question for me: “How do I make sure every action is reproducible, traceable, and if needed reviewable in a week or six months from now?”
To me, that’s the core of OPSEC.
Sure, we could talk about super stealth techniques or the latest fancy way to wrap a syscall - and there’s a time for that. But as a starting point, it’s really about working in a controlled, ready-to-go environment where I can focus on the operation without constantly fearing I’ll lose track of something important mid-engagement.
That’s my take. Nobody asked, but here we are.
OPSEC isn’t just offense, it’s also about not shooting yourself in the foot.
so, I ended up writing a tool
Starting from these considerations, I began asking myself how to manage engagements in a realistic way, without pretending to be an inherently organized person. The idea was simple: make my life easier by adding a layer of complexity, yes, but one that’s controlled and actually digestible (mostly by me).
I looked at existing solutions like distrobox, which is essentially another wrapper around Docker/Podman, well built and based on a set of bash scripts. I used it in real activities for quite some time, until I realized I kept ending up in situations where sometimes there was too much abstraction, and other times something was missing exactly when I needed it.
That’s where the idea of engwrap came from: a system designed to create, manage, and maintain a containerized environment for each engagement or activity, in a simple way and with a resilient logging system.
Everything revolves around templates: plain YAML files that define what goes inside the container and how it should be configured at startup. Templates are the foundation from which an engagement or any specific activity begins.
This was exactly the operational gap I felt in my workflow: containerizing is easy, maintaining discipline, traceability, and context is not. The idea behind engwrap is to make the “right way of working” (as defined by me, yes) the default one, without relying on memory or good intentions.
Each container (template) can have its own level of isolation, every command is logged, every session is recorded (output included) and stored in a dated file, with the entire engagement context archivable through a single command.
It doesn’t make the operation more stealthy, and that’s not the point.
All of this eventually turned into engwrap, a small, opinionated tool built to keep operational environments under control. It was very much vibecoded: written to solve a real, recurring headache rather than to be pretty or over-engineered.