October 29, 2017

Volunteering at GrrCON 2017

GrrCON 2017, the seventh year and my third time attending. I volunteered again this year because it is a lot more involved than being a regular attendee. I’ve been to other conferences where volunteering burns you out. GrrCON is the only con where I could be in the middle of one job and ask “What more can I do to help?”. The 2017 Difference GrrCON hasn’t changed much since I have started coming to it.

September 13, 2017

Installing Kali and Metasploitable on VirtualBox

Have you ever wanted to be a 1337 hacker like you see in the movies? Metasploit automates some of the harder tasks related to penetration testing. This blog post is a quick setup to install two virtual machines that will allow you to explore how to use Metasploit. Step 1: Get files needed to create the VMs Download VirtualBox Download Kali for VirtualBox Clone Metasploitable2 Step 2: Setup Kali Open VirtualBox, click File > Import Appliance.

September 2, 2017

PHP Regex tutorial

Have you ever wondered how web applications do validation on forms? How does the app know when your input is really an email address? In most PHP applications, this is done using regular expressions (Regex). I’ve previously posted about how to defend against XSS and SQL injection. Checking strings with a white list of allowed characters is one of the easiest changes a developer can make. Regex makes this easy in most programming languages.

August 27, 2017

Do not waste your time with HPKP

This is my last post related to HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP). This is a post in response to Scott Helme’s latest post about him giving up on HPKP and how my blog is a perfect example of his concerns. In the past I’ve written three articles about the HPKP header: Testing HPKP headers Adding HPKP headers HPKP.. Public Key Pinning? The point of each of these articles are pretty well summed up in their titles.

August 22, 2017

TV B GONE

Ever sit at a bar with friends and try to have a conversation but the TVs behind the bar were too loud? If only there was a quick convenient way to turn them all off at once. This is where the TV B GONE remote comes in. A simple kit that sends over 100 “power off” signals to TVs within a 150 foot range at the push of a button.

May 25, 2017

Breaking My Blog with WPscan

One of the tools offered by default in Kali and many other hacking related distros is WPscan, a black box WordPress vulnerability scanner. I wanted to learn how to use this tool because it would help with recon on CTF challenges, practice boxes from vulnhub, and even trying to keep my own blog vulnerability free. Disclaimer Before I tell you more about the tool and how it can be used, I have to throw out the usual disclaimer.

May 17, 2017

Converge 2017

May 11-12th was the Converge conference. If you’re in Michigan and are curious about information security, then I suggest you look at attending next year. For those that missed this year, Irongeek recorded all the talks and posted them online for you! Watch some of the talks and then put an alert on your phone to buy tickets for next year. Converge is a great conference. I’ll admit I’m partial because it’s in my backyard.

May 4, 2017

Building a community

At the #misec meeting I attended in mid April there was a panel on building a infosec community… so I’m borrowing their title for a post and giving my two cents in order to spread the topic! I won’t give a huge synopsis of who said what like I did in my last post about a #misec panel. Instead, please watch #misec’s video on youtube if you’re interested in what was shared.

April 4, 2017

My experience setting up an Algo VPN

First off, I don’t know if you’ve been avoiding the political storm as much as I have but there’s one thing that’s been so retweeted, shared, and updated that I couldn’t avoid it. The discussion about the privacy of our internet content. The Problem ISPs are able to sell your data. While it is possible that similar data is already being collected and used by social media, applications, and other providers… It’s brought up an interesting conversation about how to secure ourselves while browsing the internet.

January 22, 2017

How I got to Shmoocon2017

Shmoocon is a hacker conference in Washington DC. I’ve been interested in going since 2015 but this is the first year I’ve been able to make it out. The conference was really hard to get into. Not because it’s expensive or that it’s hard to get to DC, but because the process to get my ticket was a unique challenge in itself. It required me to rely on good friends, new skills, and a whole lot of luck.