◈ Project 08 · Security
Paranoid Penguin
paranoid so you don't have to be

A one-click desktop app that checks how locked-down your own computer and home network really are, hands you a plain A–F security grade, and lists exactly what to fix first — every finding mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework real security teams use, and organised around the eight CISSP domains, including honest notes on the ones a scanner can't reach.

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A look inside01
paranoid penguin — my machine
B
84 / 100
Top things to fix
HIGH
Update 3 vulnerable app packages
Known advisories affect flask-cors, gunicorn, jupyter-server.
MED
Remote Desktop is enabled
A common attack target — disable it if you don't use it.
MED
1 unrecognized device on your network
Appeared since the last scan — identify it or change your Wi-Fi password.
01 World threats
Threat Intelligence
02 Endpoint
Computer Scan
03 Software
App Vuln Audit
04 Config
Hardening Audit
05 Identity · D5
Identity & Access
06 Data · D2
Asset Security
07 Persistence
Startup Review
08 Intrusion
Login Monitor
09 Network
Network Map
10 Live traffic
Connection Monitor
11 Wireless
Wi-Fi Audit
Eleven checks, one grade02

Threat Intelligence

Pulls today's list of vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild — straight from CISA KEV and FIRST.org EPSS, the feeds the pros watch.

Computer Scan

What's installed, which ports are open, whether your firewall and antivirus are actually on — cross-referenced against the live threat list.

App Vulnerability Audit

Checks your Python packages against real CVE databases and tells you exactly what to update. Version-accurate, so it's the finding you can trust.

Hardening Audit

A mini CIS benchmark: disk encryption, UAC, Remote Desktop, the ancient SMBv1 protocol, guest account, update history.

T1210 · T1021 · T1548

Identity & Access Audit

Who can get in, and how hard it is once they try: admin rights, password policy, account lockout, autologon, saved credentials. The domain home setups are weakest in, because none of it looks like anything until it matters. It never reads or stores a password — the autologon check knows Windows keeps that one in the registry in plain text, and deliberately reports only whether the setting is on.

T1078 Valid Accounts · T1110 Brute Force · T1555 Password Stores

Asset Security Audit

Not the machine — the data. Encryption at rest on every drive, backup state, how much you'd actually lose, key and certificate files, what's still sitting in the Recycle Bin. A laptop with no backup and an unencrypted drive passes every other check in this tool. Counts and sizes only; no filename is ever recorded.

T1490 Inhibit Recovery · T1552 Creds in Files

Startup Review

Everything that launches at boot — exactly where malware hides to survive a restart. Flags anything running from a temp folder.

T1547 Autostart

Login Monitor

Reads the Windows event log for bursts of failed sign-ins — the fingerprint of someone guessing their way in.

T1110 Brute Force

Network Map + Alerts

Lists every device on your own network and yells when a new one shows up that it hasn't seen before.

T1200 Hardware Additions

Connection Monitor

Shows what your PC is talking to right now — every live outbound connection, the program behind it, and the server it's reaching. How you catch malware phoning home.

T1071 C2 · T1041 Exfil

Wi-Fi Security Audit

Is the network you're on actually encrypted? Also flags open networks your laptop has saved — the thing that gets you at coffee shops.

T1557 AiTM
CISSP domain coverage03

The eight CISSP domains are a map of what a security professional should know — not a checklist a scanner can tick off. Some a program running on one laptop can assess properly. Some it can assess partly. One it cannot touch at all, because you can't scan a machine to find out whether someone has an incident response plan. Forcing all eight to look equally covered would be dishonest, so the gaps are stated instead. Security teams produce exactly this artifact — a control coverage assessment — and the gaps are the interesting part of it.

1 · Security & Risk Management

Partial. A scanner can measure your exposure to vulnerabilities the world is actively exploiting. It cannot tell you whether you have a policy, a recovery plan, or a legal obligation you're failing. Those are decisions and documents, not machine state — so the tool asks you instead.

2 · Asset Security

Assessed. Encryption at rest, backup state, data volume, key material, disposal. All readable from the machine.

3 · Architecture & Engineering

Assessed. A mini CIS Benchmark — the configuration questions an auditor asks, answered from the registry and system state.

4 · Communication & Network

Assessed. The strongest coverage here: devices on the network, live outbound connections, wireless encryption, alerts when something new appears.

5 · Identity & Access

Assessed. Account inventory, privilege, password policy, lockout, second factor, stored credentials.

6 · Assessment & Testing

Partial. This tool is an assessment — that's the domain in action. What it can't do is independent verification: it tests configuration, not whether a control actually stops an attack. And you can't honestly assess yourself on your own machine.

7 · Security Operations

Assessed. Persistence review, failed sign-in monitoring, live connection watching — the detection half of operations.

8 · Software Development Security

Partial. Dependency scanning is real and version-accurate. But the domain also covers secure coding, review, testing and the build pipeline. It checks what you installed, not what you wrote.

Five assessed, three partial. For the parts no program can answer, the dashboard asks directly — if this machine died right now, what would you lose? · have you ever verified a control works, rather than that it's switched on? · is there anything in your code history that shouldn't be there? Answering those is on you. The tool's job is to ask.

Under the hood04

How it works

Two authoritative, free feeds power the global view: the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and EPSS exploitation-probability scores. Local checks use read-only PowerShell, pip-audit, and nmap. Everything is scored and prioritized into one grade, then rendered as a self-contained dashboard. It runs entirely on 127.0.0.1 — nothing is uploaded anywhere.

PythonPowerShellMITRE ATT&CKCISA KEVEPSSnmappip-audit

Where I'm honest about it

  • The "your software matches a known-exploited product" check cannot confirm you're vulnerable, and never will. The CISA KEV catalog publishes the vendor, product and CVE — it does not publish which versions are affected. Confirming that needs NVD's CPE data, which this tool doesn't ship. So every row reads "go check whether I'm patched", and the grade deliberately scores it at zero. Matching is on the whole product name with the vendor as a confidence signal, not on any token appearing anywhere — which is what used to make "Office" match LibreOffice.
  • Every check reports skipped or errored, never a single vague "unknown". Those meant opposite things and shared one grey label: needs admin looked identical to this check broke eight months ago. A scanner that quietly stops checking something is worse than one that never checked it.
  • A real posture-management platform runs around the clock on a server watching a whole company. This runs on a laptop when you click a button. Same idea, a lot smaller.

Paranoid so you don't have to be.

Free and open source. Runs on your own machine, nothing leaves it.