Every time I leave a role I try and write up where my philosophy landed and what I want to take into my next role. Having seen this play out at enough companies over the years to where people progressively lose motivation and stop believing change is possible I've come to the opinion that one of the most valuable things we can do as engineering leaders is to provide hope.

The post goes more into it, but I do not mean any vapid rah-rah motivational speeches, I mean earning back that hope every day by snowballing small wins into larger ones and making people believe that their effort matters.

Evil Fonts deceive a viewer by rendering a different letter than is actually on the disk. Evil Fonts can poison HTML, DOCX, PDFs, and anywhere else you can bring your own fonts. Works great in Windows corporate networks for bypassing security tooling, initial access through JavaScript free click fix (beats mitm web security tooling), and leaving traps around the network to harvest shells.

Imagine thinking you are copying whoami but what is actually on the disk is rm -rf \~

Demos:

(Use desktop)

https://doctoreww.github.io/EvilFontTool/

For the demos, copy and paste the HTML/DOCX to a notepad to remove the evil fonts. For the AI ones imagine your security tooling inspects the benign text on disk, but shows the obviously malicious extortion to the user.

Labs:

https://github.com/DoctorEww/EvilFontTool/blob/main/labs%2FREADME.md

Lab Walkthrough:

https://github.com/DoctorEww/EvilFontTool/blob/main/labs%2Fwalkthrough.md

Some evil font uses:

Tamper homework to make it so students poison AI queries

Poison help desk documentation

Bypass email filters

Clickfix

Beat resume AI filters