The thinkpad t460p I bought a while back has suffered from persistent battery issues. Namely, the latch that fits the battery wiggles from side to side. And once it's loose, it can't go back. Instead of buying a whole new laptop, I've temporarily taped the battery in place so the laptop doesn't die everytime it's moved. But it's not a perfect solution, so at some point I'll just have to go for a new laptop (but for parts off Ebay), which is much cheaper.
Thursday, May 09, 2019
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Unfortunately fewer posts
Something about the first few months of the year, along with a re-assessment of desires or priorities, made for a drop off in posting. Probably also bad practice. I should practice writing daily.
Currently I'm working on a mini project to see how easily wireless handshakes can be captured at high speed for offline-cracking. There's a lot of little hitches involved, not least the long tasklist of work-related items and demands for different people that interfere.
The other project of course is reading, finding some time to get out of the house and go read in a cafe somewhere. Also buying some new dress pants, going to IKEA for new apartment lighting, and getting a haircut. All in advance of a trip to Pittsburgh next week (if it doesn't get pushed off again).
Currently I'm finding that my music tastes are slowly switching away from ambient towards synthwave/chillwave.
Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iZTNUnrh0k
Currently I'm working on a mini project to see how easily wireless handshakes can be captured at high speed for offline-cracking. There's a lot of little hitches involved, not least the long tasklist of work-related items and demands for different people that interfere.
The other project of course is reading, finding some time to get out of the house and go read in a cafe somewhere. Also buying some new dress pants, going to IKEA for new apartment lighting, and getting a haircut. All in advance of a trip to Pittsburgh next week (if it doesn't get pushed off again).
Currently I'm finding that my music tastes are slowly switching away from ambient towards synthwave/chillwave.
Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iZTNUnrh0k
 |
| Yellow banana peppers finally being produced on this one of two plants. Not the hybrid variety, just the regular one. Two different potting soils to try out. At the right you can catch a glimpse of the bare surface of another pot that housed some dill, first successful attempt, until this morning, when I threw it out due to an intense invasion of white mildew of some sort. Planted some belated garlic instead. |
Sunday, November 25, 2018
Projects to-do
Pi Bakery - standardized build for default PIs on home network
Pi build instructions for full-on wifi testing tool, including a reproducible build of my current hacking box.
Pi dropbox for 802.1x NAC bypass
Pi dropbox for ssh outbound access
Twitter bot on Pi - ideally one that will receive requests from only me to download specific youtube URLs to the Plex bot, from anywhere. So that I can immediately download music to my Plex server at home.
OpenVAS docker image. Or Bloodhound+Neo4j on docker image.
Learn/play with Kubernetes, Terraform.
Hashcat script - hashcat post.
Re-install everything on my other laptop.
Pi build instructions for full-on wifi testing tool, including a reproducible build of my current hacking box.
Pi dropbox for 802.1x NAC bypass
Pi dropbox for ssh outbound access
Twitter bot on Pi - ideally one that will receive requests from only me to download specific youtube URLs to the Plex bot, from anywhere. So that I can immediately download music to my Plex server at home.
OpenVAS docker image. Or Bloodhound+Neo4j on docker image.
Learn/play with Kubernetes, Terraform.
Hashcat script - hashcat post.
Re-install everything on my other laptop.
Pi Bakery
As you can see, my posting rate has dramatically dropped off. Part of this is because of a general disenchantment with doing limited-scope pentests against which networks are increasingly protected. What's the point, say I, of doing a pentest that doesn't permit access to physical workstations or emailing/phishing as part of the assessment? What benefit does a company receive of sitting me down at a network port, me failing to get on due to NAC, or even if I do get on, finding that everything is locked down and random ports aren't open, other than being able to check-off that they've done their yearly pentest?
In one (or rarely two) week, how do you expect me to assess anything else other than a point-in-time assessment? Am I testing how you look right now? or do you rather care what happens over time? Will someone slip up? Are effective policies and training in place to prevent mistakes?
Even worse are tests of targets directly, without permitting access to the network on which they sit. The only entry of attack is finding, or more likely writing, exploits of minor items and chaining them up. In which case you're only proving why something that the company considers only a medium risk, should be elevated higher and fixed. What a load of wasted effort.
Now, since it was pentests that made me do side research, not doing pentests naturally led to flagging research. Other events aside, lead me to understand that relying on work to make me happy or to drive side research and learning, is not the right path. So now I'm working on separating work and hobbies, general self-improvement, etc, and learning some new things.
Recently I found out the power of a Docker container running OpenVAS, which was super easy to install and run on Kali Linux without having to worry about dependencies. Afterwards I read "The Phoenix Project" and am almost done with the book on which the former was based, namely "The Goal". I've also started reading the DevOps Handbook to get a better grasp on SecDevOps and how to manage/drive change in an organization.
Today I've spent most of a day playing with Pi Bakery to create a standardized Pi image install. Pretty darn useful.
The plan is to eventually create an RPi dropbox for pentests, much later down the line, which should be able to do wifi stuff and/or bypass 802.1x network access level protections.
Update: Here is a standard Pi Bakery recipe in case you want to play with it. It performs the following actions:
1. Add noatime to all the partitions in /etc/fstab to avoid writing to SD Card (prolongs life of SD card)
2. apt-get update
3. install nmap git screen irssi dnsutils vnstat cifsutils
4. remove swap - also prolongs life of card
5. adds one alias command to ~/.bashrc
6. changes timezone to Central
7. Generates locales to US UTF-8 like raspi-config does
8. reboots.
Password will be raspberry123, make sure to change it, and also do a full upgrade
UPDATE 2: Item 7 above is not working, still working out hijinks.
In one (or rarely two) week, how do you expect me to assess anything else other than a point-in-time assessment? Am I testing how you look right now? or do you rather care what happens over time? Will someone slip up? Are effective policies and training in place to prevent mistakes?
Even worse are tests of targets directly, without permitting access to the network on which they sit. The only entry of attack is finding, or more likely writing, exploits of minor items and chaining them up. In which case you're only proving why something that the company considers only a medium risk, should be elevated higher and fixed. What a load of wasted effort.
Now, since it was pentests that made me do side research, not doing pentests naturally led to flagging research. Other events aside, lead me to understand that relying on work to make me happy or to drive side research and learning, is not the right path. So now I'm working on separating work and hobbies, general self-improvement, etc, and learning some new things.
Recently I found out the power of a Docker container running OpenVAS, which was super easy to install and run on Kali Linux without having to worry about dependencies. Afterwards I read "The Phoenix Project" and am almost done with the book on which the former was based, namely "The Goal". I've also started reading the DevOps Handbook to get a better grasp on SecDevOps and how to manage/drive change in an organization.
Today I've spent most of a day playing with Pi Bakery to create a standardized Pi image install. Pretty darn useful.
The plan is to eventually create an RPi dropbox for pentests, much later down the line, which should be able to do wifi stuff and/or bypass 802.1x network access level protections.
Update: Here is a standard Pi Bakery recipe in case you want to play with it. It performs the following actions:
1. Add noatime to all the partitions in /etc/fstab to avoid writing to SD Card (prolongs life of SD card)
2. apt-get update
3. install nmap git screen irssi dnsutils vnstat cifsutils
4. remove swap - also prolongs life of card
5. adds one alias command to ~/.bashrc
6. changes timezone to Central
7. Generates locales to US UTF-8 like raspi-config does
8. reboots.
Password will be raspberry123, make sure to change it, and also do a full upgrade
UPDATE 2: Item 7 above is not working, still working out hijinks.
Wednesday, October 03, 2018
Live Build a Custom Kali ISO
During May and June of 2018, I worked on a really difficult project, namely attempting to create a custom Kali Linux ISO for unattended installation (and Live if necessary). While strictly speaking this is a work-related project, the paucity of working, current guides on the internet lead me to believe that people will benefit from a full run-down of how I got an unattended install to work.
Please note - This is a work in progress. As such, there's a lot of things commented out or left in because I worked on an incremental basis. Since this project was several months ago, some of the detailed explanations are unlikely to be completed.
Prelude: I was tasked with creating a custom ISO build of Kali Linux, such that it can be installed on a laptop (presumably using a live USB), or installed on a Virtual Machine. The idea is that you plug in the USB and boot from it, select “Automated Install” for instance, and have a complete install be performed on your behalf with the least amount of interaction possible.
I was directed to a link such as this one: https://docs.kali.org/development/live-build-a-custom-kali-iso. As you can see, a custom script and folder structure can be obtained for a live build from git://git.kali.org/live-build-config.git. It’s based on Debian’s own Live Build command, but makes things comparatively simpler for the end-user, e.g. all you, the user, needs to do is run “./build.sh –verbose”.
However, all of the documentation I found on using the Kali Live Build script was outdated, incomplete, or simply wrong, and wasted many hours of my time. Most of Debian’s documentation is only helpful for minutiae.
Examples:
https://docs.kali.org/development/live-build-a-custom-kali-iso - Cursory information, no details
https://docs.kali.org/kali-dojo/02-mastering-live-build - the one line about adding a preseed file to an arbitrary “debian-installer” folder that is not used anywhere within the build script threw me way off. Even if you follow this guide you won’t get a working unattended install.
https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/kali-rolling-iso-of-doom/ - the preseed has errors and will not perform an unattended install.
https://kali.training/topic/building-custom-kali-live-iso-images/ - Most useful, but still not enough information about how to create a valid preseed file or what live build hooks really do.
So, through many hours of trial and error, I came up with a build process that reliably works for VMware. This may not work for Virtualbox.
Google Docs Link here
Maybe later I will upload a ready-to-go live build version to my site and provide a link.
Please note - This is a work in progress. As such, there's a lot of things commented out or left in because I worked on an incremental basis. Since this project was several months ago, some of the detailed explanations are unlikely to be completed.
Prelude: I was tasked with creating a custom ISO build of Kali Linux, such that it can be installed on a laptop (presumably using a live USB), or installed on a Virtual Machine. The idea is that you plug in the USB and boot from it, select “Automated Install” for instance, and have a complete install be performed on your behalf with the least amount of interaction possible.
I was directed to a link such as this one: https://docs.kali.org/development/live-build-a-custom-kali-iso. As you can see, a custom script and folder structure can be obtained for a live build from git://git.kali.org/live-build-config.git. It’s based on Debian’s own Live Build command, but makes things comparatively simpler for the end-user, e.g. all you, the user, needs to do is run “./build.sh –verbose”.
However, all of the documentation I found on using the Kali Live Build script was outdated, incomplete, or simply wrong, and wasted many hours of my time. Most of Debian’s documentation is only helpful for minutiae.
Examples:
https://docs.kali.org/development/live-build-a-custom-kali-iso - Cursory information, no details
https://docs.kali.org/kali-dojo/02-mastering-live-build - the one line about adding a preseed file to an arbitrary “debian-installer” folder that is not used anywhere within the build script threw me way off. Even if you follow this guide you won’t get a working unattended install.
https://www.offensive-security.com/kali-linux/kali-rolling-iso-of-doom/ - the preseed has errors and will not perform an unattended install.
https://kali.training/topic/building-custom-kali-live-iso-images/ - Most useful, but still not enough information about how to create a valid preseed file or what live build hooks really do.
So, through many hours of trial and error, I came up with a build process that reliably works for VMware. This may not work for Virtualbox.
Google Docs Link here
Maybe later I will upload a ready-to-go live build version to my site and provide a link.
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