Notes as I go
Write-ups on detection work, home lab builds, and the tooling I use day to day. I write these so the next person searching the same error message finds an answer.
The Vocabulary Showed Up Before I Did
A data center tour at NCCI with the FAU cyber club, and the odd experience of following a room full of infrastructure terminology because of a cert I have not even taken yet.
- FAU Cyber Club
- Networking
- Net+
Three Routers, Two PCs, And Nothing Configured
An hour in Packet Tracer with a club member on Jeremy IT Lab Day 11, building static routes across three routers from a blank config and working out why a ping needs a path in both directions.
- CCNA
- Networking
- Packet Tracer
- Static Routing
Forging A Session Cookie Out Of A Deleted Git Commit
A CTF challenge called procrastinator: a Flask app shipped with its .git directory, a secret key that was removed in a later commit but never actually gone, and the forged admin cookie that fell out of it.
- CTF
- Git
- Flask
- Web
- SFISSA
First CTF, First Place, And A Reality Check
My team won SFISSA Hack the Flag, my first CTF ever. The scoreboard and what I actually contributed are two different stories, and the second one is the useful one.
- CTF
- OSINT
- SFISSA
Ten Levels Into BreachLab, And The Pipe Was The Lesson
Working through BreachLab levels 0 through 9 on the command line: the level where I had the right two tools and could not get them to talk to each other, and the one that taught me a secret in an environment variable is not a secret.
- Linux
- CTF
- Command Line
- BreachLab
- Detection
Catching Lateral Movement With Nothing But Logs
Building the log ingestion pipeline and the first detection rules that fired in the SentinelZero lab.
- Detection
- Python
- MITRE ATT&CK