A long awaited successor to the CyberDrain CTF came through a message in the #cipp-announcements Discord channel, it read: Hey everyone, We have a pretty big announcement to make, If you liked the CyberDrain CTF then this news is for you. Each year we used to do the CyberDrain CTF, and we had so many of you that loved every moment of it. It was challenging, it was creative and it struck a nerve with many; sometimes to the point where I got DM’s of people that had checked into the local sanitorium. ...

I was late registering for the Huntress CTF this year. I joined a week late when there were already thousands of participants across thousands of teams competing to solve cybersecurity challenges as quickly as possible to place in the leaderboards. The Huntress CTF categories this year were in reverse engineering, binary exploitation, malware analysis, OSINT, web, forensics and miscellaneous categories - all categories which I have spent far too much time working in. I played solo and after catching up, consistently placed within the top 10. By the end, I was able to defeat every challenge from every category and wound up winning a limited-edition CTF Huntress T-shirt. ...

I grew up playing capture the flag both outside with friends and in Unreal Tournament, but a CTF competition in cybersecurity was new to me until hearing about the CyberDrain CTF. CTF competitions are designed to test a variety of cybersecurity skills, in purposefully-vulnerable setups. Flags, which are just bits of text could be hidden in all sorts of places, buried deep in source code, disguised within an encrypted message or behind vulnerable web applications, maybe lost in a corrupt database we don’t have the password for. The concept reminded me of Hack This Site and other hacking wargame sites I spent too much time on 20 years ago. ...

It’s been nearly a decade since I last logged into Blogger, where I originally created this blog. It had a great landing page which linked to my Google+, and Twitter… needless to say, it was time to update the site, so why not the platform too. I was looking for an excuse to play with static site generators, so I decided to migrate this blog to one. I reviewed Astro, Eleventy, Gatsby, Hugo and Jekyll. Any of these would have worked and share many similarities, but I found myself drawn to Hugo. ...

The Lenovo ThinkServer Management Module features remote console capabilities which gives you full screen, keyboard and mouse control of the Lenovo server. It’s like sitting right in front of the server and allows you to do some fancy things like configure the BIOS or install an operating system remotely. While connected to a remote site via IPSec VPN, I was able to login to the web interface without a problem. I clicked the “Launch Java KVM Client” and downloaded the familiar JNLP file “viewer.jnlp(192.168.0.jnlp”. Opening the file displays the Java loading screen, and a prompt to tell me it’s downloading and starting the application - great. The “Connecting to KVM Server” prompt appears, but immediately after, a “Login failed” dialog box which ended the application. ...

Harvard or McDonald’s seems like a ridiculous proposition, but it’s been my experience that these are the sorts of poor options given to some high-school students by their parents or teachers. I believe that a vast majority of students are capable of starting careers and following alternative paths to satisfying, well paying jobs that they enjoy. Apprenticeships are an excellent place to start looking if you don’t think college is for you, but there are also a lot of non-trades careers where employers prefer work experience and talent over education. ...

For those who don’t know, a content management system (CMS) is a piece of software that allows publishing, content editing as well as maintenance for your website all from a central interface. Content management systems are often used to run news websites, blogs, and eCommerce websites, but can be used for any type of website. The most popular CMS today is WordPress. So, let’s go over the most common reasons why people will tell you that you need a CMS: ...

While installing a line of business application for a client who was upgrading from Windows XP (x86) to Windows 7 (x64), I was presented this dreadful error message: “The version of this file is not compatible with the version of Windows you’re running. Check your computer’s system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher.” After doing some troubleshooting, and of course, some Google’ing, I came across many people with a similar error trying to do the same thing: ...

Fortinet’s new Secure Remote Access Points allow a remote worker to simply plug in the FortiAP to any Internet connection and have a secure connection back to their office network without the need for any setup or software installed on their computer. You can read more about these devices here. Once configured, the devices work exactly as advertised, and I would highly recommend them. Unfortunately, there is no official documentation provided by Fortinet that explains how to configure these devices for remote use. ...

It’s been a while since I’ve been this excited to play a new game. I have become very familiar with the recycled game genres, and quite sick of them too. The MMORPG clones, all producing the same game play with a different title, stealing small parts from each other. The first-person shooters, each brings out slightly better graphics than the last, and a new set of weapons and maps. The real-time strategy games, which offer different units and buildings, and so on. ...