Opening Remarks

Once again, GrrCon has come and gone. GrrCon is the largest convention I have attended, and it still has a community feel. My first year I went alone. The second year I attended with the #MISec community. This year I spent most of my time walking the halls and talking with people I know from #MISec meetups, past GrrCons, and from Discord, LinkedIn, and Infosec.Exchange. I don’t think I’ve spoken to as many people at any previous convention as I did this year. Below I cover how things went.

Just a quick post for Labor Day.

Back in August, I decided to challenge myself and take the Comptia PenTest Plus exam. It was something I always wanted to do and it was a way to help improve my vulerability management skills. The test itself was a challenge and like most Comptia exams, it involved a lot of memorization. I used a combination of Dion Training and TryHackMe to get through the exam. I did find the exam valuable but what it does lack is any practical portion. Its great on methodology and learning the process, but you won’t know how to PenTest afterwards. You will know the tooling, the overall business process, tactics, and the why, but not the how.

Where it started.

I have tried to use Linux off and on since, the late 90’s. I remember finding a copy of Linux on Windows from the Mandrake Linux team at my local big box store. Only to later discover these things, called WinModems. Seriously, why, why come up with something like this? Anyway if it wasn’t crazy drivers or the fact I was stuck on dial-up Internet until 2007, I stuck with Windows. It played my games, ran applications, and relatively had little friction and stayed out of my way.

Once again, it is the time of the year to travel to Grand Rapids to partake in one of the best cybersecurity conferences in the Midwest, GrrCon. Last year was my first time attending and I had a blast. From last year’s convention, I joined the MISec group. Through meeting an old compatriot from my CCDC days,I got with individuals from across the state via a very active Discord server and their monthly local meetings.

Normally on the 4th of July, I would prefer to sit out in a boat or by the lake, trying my hand at fishing.

Let me tell you about something super important in my line of work: having a solid plan. Having a plan just for minor tasks has helped out and reduced the amount of time I spent trying to either troubleshoot an issue or resolve an incident. Let me walk you through a few recent situations that really drove this point home:

Thought I would go though something I did recently. Since I switched to Linux in 2021, I have learned a lot of things. I’ve gone though countless distributions (currently on Manjaro and PopOS), expanded my knowledge into Docker, came to enjoy two great text editors (Doom Emacs and VIM), and was able to take that knowledge to help others.

Introduction

In my continuous pursuit of knowledge and professional growth, I have been actively engaged in various cybersecurity endeavors over the past few weeks. In this article, I will provide a brief overview of my experiences and highlight the key aspects of each undertaking.

Well, let’s see. The last time I updated things was 8 months ago. Hmm, it’s probably time for a little update.

Now that I have finished the CISSP, I thought I would review my traffic analysis skills. I have been using Hack the Box Academy just to reaclimate my skills. Today I wanted to go back over TCPDump.

Well, this post has been a long time coming. I have been wanting to take the CISSP exam for quite a while. I had tried off and on beforehand but never really sat down to study it. What finally motivated me was seeing an advertisement for the FRSecure Training Course that was offered free. I saw that back in January, it started in March. So in reality, I spent since February 2022 to this point studying for the exam. It has been a ride.

Wanna just skip to the steps? Here You Go

Something my mentors drilled into me (as they have a background in programming and software sales) is to make sure you have a way to get out of a bad situation when doing an implementation. My goal when doing implementations is to make sure they are efficient, as non-disruptive to major operations as possible, and do not cause extended downtime.

So I ran into an interesting issue using VSCodium. Since the start I have had some odd issue with Code Spell Checker from Street Side Software. It’s great for when I write these blog posts and my CISSP notes. The problem I was having was it would load an older version of it in VSCodium. This wasn’t a problem as you only lost the ability to right-click on the work to open the suggestions.

The Setup

Jekyll Now out of the box does look good. It’s simple, and looks good. However, it is bright, like very bright. When I was testing themes and Github pages, one of the themes I came across was the ./ Hacker theme. I really liked its design and how it was easy on the eyes to read. Looking at its style.css sheets (stored in the _sass folder), I figured I could go in and change the code for my site.

So here is a late post and one right after my one from yesterday. I’ve always been a big fan of VSCode from Microsoft. It still boggles my mind that Microsoft not only released a program that runs on Linux (along with Powershell and Microsoft Edge) but made it open source. However, these still do get a lot of criticism, especially those who are proponents of free and open source software. I firmly follow the belief of using what works. For me, VS Code works. I did flirt with the idea of updating this blog in Emacs or VIM, but honestly, I find myself coming back to VS Code. Throw on a spell checker and the VIM addon and it just works for me.

At the begining of the year, I had decided to try out Linux Mint on my laptop (A Lenovo Yoga 730). I have used Linux in the past, especially on Raspberry Pi’s but running it as a daily driver had been hit or miss. The program I was last holding out on I no longer need to use, so I was free to switch.
Since January I have swapped over all my major systems to Linux Mint. I did spend some time over the summer playing with other distributions (Kubuntu, Manjaro, and KDE Neon) but Linux Mint was the the one that stuck. I’ll do another post later on my reasons for switching to Linux at home.

So I actually had two articles for today but I decided to go with just one and post the other one at a later date. Something I noticed on other blogs is a copyright (not copywrite as I am prone to type) notice. I figured it might be a good idea to add one in. Honestly I am ok with someone linking back to my blog and if it helps someone out with a project, I am all for that. This blog is learning experience for me and allows me to share my projects with others.

Welcome to my web site. My name is Zac and I’ve been in IT for over 15 years. I have a degree in Information Technology and Security along with a Masters of Business Administration.