Honeyfiles from my SSHoneypots

My friends at DigitalOcean were nice enough to give me a generous amount of credit on their cloud platform to do some security research with so I decided to do the most reckless thing I could think of and run a full ssh honeypot on the internet. The build out is pretty simple, it is the … Read more

The Security Summer Camp Talks I Want To See…

I took some time tonight and read through the Security Summer Camp  (BSidesLV, Blackhat and Defcon) schedules and picked the talks from this year that I think will be the best and that I do not want to miss. I ended up with these 16 talks I am going to make a special point to see next week: BSidesLV … Read more

6 Technical Things To Do Before Security Summer Camp

We are two weeks away from Security Summer Camp (which is BSidesLV, Blackhat and Defcon)!   So it is time for everyone to write their annual blog posts about what you must do before you head out.  I want to be one of the cool kids so here is my list of 6 things to … Read more

My First 10 Seconds On A Server

While doing security research it is not uncommon for me to build and destroy between 20 and 25 cloud servers a week on Digital Ocean. While there are great guides like: My First 10 Minutes On a Server – Primer for Securing Ubuntu My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux … Read more

The VPN You Should Be Using

There has been a lot of talk about why you should use a VPN on public networks and why it shouldn’t be a commercial one. I am a huge fan of  the Streisand privacy stack because it includes and  L2TP/IPsec VPN, OpenConnect, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, sslh, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge all in one amazing package. The problem … Read more

Top 1000 Websites Blocking VPN & TOR Users

One of the tips that security professionals love to give is to use a VPN on public wifi networks.   This is great advice and  (I personally like PrivateInternetAccess and NordVPN). Recently I noticed nike.com blocks traffic from TOR and VPN providers: That got me wondering what other websites were  blocking traffic from these sources so I decided to … Read more

Installing Kali on a Dell ChromeBook 11

I had a 2014 Dell Chromebook 11 I was not doing anything so I decided to turn it into a stand alone Kali box using the Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment. The installation steps are pretty simple: Add a l33t hacker sticker:  Enable Developer Mode (this will wipe the device).  Login and download the latest crouton.  Access … Read more

Why to Zuckerberg Your WebCam

A picture started floating around the internet of  Mark Zuckerberg holding an Instagram cutout: People almost instantly started to notice that his webcam and mic were taped over.   While Mark Zuckerberg isnt exactly known for having great security practices,  all his social media passwords were Dadada. This started a discussion in the office if someone … Read more

Emoji’s in Domain and Hostnames

While rebuilding my iPad this weekend I noticed that I could name it an emoji.  So I named my iPad 📱(U+1F4F1):   While  I don’t have any problem using the iPad it basically makes it unreachable on the network via hostname. From there I renamed all of my lab machines emojis.  Mostly  variations of 💩 (U+1F4A9) because I … Read more

Hijacking Common Windows Shortcuts with Powershell

Earlier today I ran across this blog post on hijacking windows .lnk file so  I decided to build out and test a full POC for it using Windows 8.1.    To reproduce this just copy these 7 lines into powershell and  ctrl+c now runs calc.exe instead of copying your text: https://gist.github.com/jgamblin/4aa897a2cca6912eeea96a12d73d8cd6 For extra jerkiness this will shutdown a windows … Read more