It's My Birthday. Here's My Return Gift to the Security Community.
Today I decided to mark the day by shipping something, rather than just letting it pass.
FORGE has been a quiet project of mine for a while now — a free toolkit built for the people who actually do the unglamorous work of keeping networks safe: SOC analysts, threat hunters, whoever's running down an alert at 2am. No login. No ads. Nothing logged about what you search. Just tools that should exist, and shouldn't cost anything to use.
Why FORGE? Because that's the work — taking something raw and turning it into something usable. Same principle, just applied to tools instead of metal.
Today it gets a new piece: a secure, temporary way to hand a file off outside your usual network — for the exact moment you need to move something quickly and safely, and nothing you already have was built for that.
The problem this solves
If you've worked in security for more than a few months, you know this friction. You've found something — a suspect binary, a PCAP, a log bundle — and you need to get it somewhere else. Maybe it's your sandbox, hosted off the corporate network. Maybe the recipient's mail scanner keeps quarantining the exact file you're trying to send them. Maybe you're away from your usual setup and just need something that works, without exposing anything it shouldn't.
Every existing option is either too heavy — upload it to a general-purpose cloud drive and hope nobody minds — or too fragile: email it and pray. Neither is built for this specific job.
What I built instead
A temporary, secure file-transfer tool. Not a place to store things — a place to move them through. Admin-controlled, so nothing gets uploaded by strangers. Every link expires: 48 hours by default, 7 days at the outside, no exceptions. Every link has a download limit — once it's used, it's gone. Passcodes are optional but supported. And if a file's flagged as a hazardous sample, whoever opens the link sees an unmissable warning before they can touch it — no dismiss button, no way to miss it.
None of this is trying to be Dropbox. It's built to disappear once the handoff's done.
What's logged, and what isn't
I've built this the same way as everything else here: privacy-first, but honest about what that actually means in each context. FORGE's lookup tools never log what you search — that's a real commitment, because the indicators you're investigating are sensitive, and nobody should have a record of what you were chasing.
This tool is different, deliberately. It logs metadata — filenames, sizes, hashes, who sent what to whom, when, whether it was downloaded — because this isn't an anonymous lookup. It's a deliberate handoff between people who already know each other. Accountability here is the point, not a compromise. Full detail is on the trust page.
Why today
I don't really celebrate my birthday. It's usually just family — dinner, nothing more.
At one point I'd actually planned to launch FORGE itself on this date — a gift to the security community instead of one for myself. But once the tools started coming together, I couldn't resist shipping earlier, so FORGE has been live for a while now.
The date stayed marked in my head anyway. And this particular problem — the handoff friction above — is one I've run into more times than I can count across 23-plus years in this field. It felt like the right thing to finish for the date that was already spoken for. Not planned this way exactly, but it landed here. Feels like the right way to mark a year.
What's next
More is coming — a few tools that have been sitting in the notebook, waiting on time and free-tier budget to build them properly.
For now, access is intentionally invite-based — if you're someone in my network who could use this, reach out and I'll set you up. I'm keeping it tight on purpose while it's this new; the goal is to turn it into a genuine self-service utility for the wider security community, and that's exactly what I'll be building out over the coming week.
Free once you're set up, built to disappear when the job's done.
Open the secure file-drop →