Cyber-Plumbing

The Coolest Hacker Trick I’ve ever learned When I was just a pitiful script-kiddie, I spent hours watching Hak5 episodes. There was something so welcoming about Darren and Shannon explaining basic Linux skills. In this hak5 technolust episode, Darren does something that blew my mind. In the link in the last sentence, watch between 3:46 and 7:10 of the video. He describes a scenario where one of the client devices (in this case, a Lan Turtle) that connects to his vpn server is designated as a “vpn gateway” for all the other devices. ...

A Confession So, in my last job, I was banned from using SSH. I’m only kind of joking when I say that. I was something of a network duct-taper. We had networks in different clouds with bastion servers, and weird firewalls and other restrictions that would come out later in testing. My Boss was a badass, constantly developing scripts and tools as fast as he could to answer weird edge cases that some big-wig wanted immediately. The problem is that in this environment of “Move Fast and Break Things”, setting up a proper network architecture was tricky. We needed proof of concepts that could bridge resources from multiple networks. There were official routers that we were given access to, but with things shifting from one cloud to another so fast, and with the routers being more complex than I could mess with without risking a breach, I would often cheat. ...

Productivity log: I’m not going to make this a running thing, but I do need to test out netlify’s automated build pipeline and it would be nice to have something in the blogpost other than “TEST” or something remarkably boring like that. I intended to launch the blog on January first, but I wanted to do so from a fresh Ubuntu machine. I had been meaning to switch for a while from my battered and beaten kali instance. In my view, the following are the only distros I would use: ...