The Diamond Model and the Cyber Kill Chain both assume a network intrusion. The attacker gains unauthorized access to a network and moves laterally while avoiding detection. The question of who they are gets raised only after the intrusion is discovered. The adversary is covert by default, the evidence is sparse because they worked to leave little behind, and the analysis usually requires a government with classified intelligence sources and an evidentiary standard high enough for an indictment.
You acquire a forensic image of the compromised host under a documented chain of custody. You reverse-engineer the malware sample to understand how it was built and to recover indicators that link it to prior activity, and you track the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure it beacons to. These technical findings are fused with all-source intelligence, including signals only a government can collect. Frameworks like the Diamond Model and the Cyber Kill Chain give the analysis structure.
Host forensics and reverse engineering both require physical evidence of compromise: an endpoint to image and a compiled malware sample, respectively. C2 tracking and classified collection exist to recover evidence the adversary deliberately concealed. Remove the intrusion and none of them has a target.
The agent supply chain is not an intrusion
The agent installs the malicious code itself, by name, from a public registry. Malicious skills and MCP servers enter as dependencies the team chose to add, like any other package.
Host forensics requires an endpoint to isolate and acquire, but the malicious artifact is publicly available in a registry, already in the open.
The payload is frequently natural-language text, a set of instructions the model reads and follows, with the malicious directive embedded in the prose. No machine code exists to disassemble, and debuggers have nothing to attach to when the payload is a line instructing the agent to exfiltrate its session tokens to an external endpoint.
A network intrusion relies on a covert channel back to the adversary, and tracking that channel is how investigators reach them. The malicious skill executes inside the agent that loaded it, using access the victim already granted, and the same artifact appears across many victims at once rather than as a single contained incident. The evidence is the published artifact itself, which has to be publicly available for an agent to install it.
Who can do this work now
The intrusion model confined attribution to the few organizations with forensic capabilities and access to classified sources. Those capabilities were the cost of entry, because the evidence had been deliberately concealed and had to be recovered.
When the evidence is public the moment the attack is live, that cost falls away. The malicious artifact is already available to anyone. Identifying what an adversary has shipped no longer requires intelligence-agency resources.
Forensic suites built to recover deleted files have no compromised disk to acquire, and infrastructure-tracking workflows built to map covert servers search for C2 callbacks that natural-language skills may never generate.
What Aephix delivers
Aephix Sleuth takes a flagged artifact from any public registry and links it to the operation behind it, so the next variant from the same source is caught on arrival. Aephix Vantage gives you a free cross-ecosystem lookup before you install, from the published artifact alone.