Idiot IT

 So the move was a success. It was a grueling few days of entirely too much driving, too much running around and way too many boxes, but it went off pretty smoothly, and compared to my last few moves where the temperatures were in the high 90's, moving in the low 80's felt like a dream by comparison. I've finally managed to get all of my home network back up and running, managing to get my VM server successfully shoved into a closet corner and connected to the wifi without too much trouble. Since we're in a smaller apartment now, I genuinely wasn't sure if I was going to be able to find a place to set it up where it could run. Having had it sitting out in my office previously, it's not the ideal noise and heat generator you want constantly running in the place you work and play games. I'm still planning to get back to the Windows lab soon. Everything right now is a bit up in the air, as my workload at work may be changing, thought it's ultimately for the

This was an idea that if you're reading this blog and have looked at previous posts, you will see isn't new. It's a rehash of the thing I wanted to do when I started this blog. My goal here has been to post about things that I've had success with as a means to helping others, but also to force me to really understand and examine the concepts I'm posting about. The goal for these posts was to have a "real life" small scale pentest to show how you can enumerate and attack Windows hosts in an Active Directory network. When I first started in on this idea, I quickly realized the problem with my idea...I was trying to blog about something I was still learning, which makes for a very slow and tedious process. Now that I've completed the wonderful  TCM Security Practical Ethical Hacking course , along with the other Windows and Linux Privilege Escalation courses, I'm in the stage of going back and re-examining my knowledge and notes before taking the PNPT

In life, learning to study is a critical skill to have...something that I discovered sadly late in life. Throughout my life, I struggled with sorting out my ADHD and finding ways to learn that worked for me. Taking notes in class was rough, because taking my mind and eyes off of the board and teacher meant I would quickly lose my place in the lesson trying to keep notes on what was important. Sadly, when I was a kid, smart phones and computers weren't in the classrooms, so the ability to easily record things and take notes wasn't there for me. Fortunately, I don't have any such restrictions anymore, and I don't have to suffer to keep up anymore. But the difficulties of paying attention in Algebra have now been replaced with learning in the Infosec world, which at times feels like trying to use a waterfall to fill a Solo cup. And that's coming from someone who was absolutely awful in math class. For me, there have always been a few problems taking notes. I need some

In what seems to be a common refrain in my life, my dreams and aspirations for this blog may have been a bit loftier than I was capable of executing. That said, I do definitely still want to revisit this idea of the "Windows Pen Test" that was part of my learning experience. I think what I realized as I was studying was that my desire to work through the material and keep learning eventually getting to the point of sitting for a test was overwhelming my want to sit on the Windows topic for weeks to make the in-depth blog that I envisioned making. So what have I been up to since the summer where I last updated? I've been working at grinding away at my study resources since then, and hopefully  there will soon be a payoff for the work. As usual, there's a fair share of headaches in between. When I kicked this blog off, I had been plugging away at the  Practical Ethical Hacking  course from TCM. The course was great, as all of them have been so far, and I was really enjo

Enjoy a sunrise photo instead of hacking content. Naturally, once I got the lab built back up and everything would be when my server would die again. So for the past few days I've torn the server down to check everything, run all 8 drives through Hard Disk Sentinel to check the status and make sure the disks themselves weren't bad (all 8 disks scored 100%, despite all being used drives I picked up with the server years ago. I think they're from ~2014?) and then wiped all 8 drives just to be safe. I re-assembled everything, powered it back up and initialized the new Virtual Disk...annnnnnd another drive vanished.  At this point, I'm thinking the SAS Backplane that the drives actually directly plug into that sits directly behind the drive bays may be bad, but for the time being, I just popped out drive 3 which was throwing the error and made the extra 7th drive a hot-swappable drive. This means I'm down to roughly 2TB of space instead of the 3+ I had previously, which

Part 1 of the Active Directory series. Wilkommen, everyone! After a few hurdles with my homelab server throwing a fit and forcing me to frantically recover my VM's so I could get all of my files off of my file server and temporarily into the cloud, I'm back with a new setup. I've moved from Hyper-V to ESXi, which I always liked for the ease of the web interface, and I've finally been able to recreate my hacking lab as well as my Kali machine that I use to learn on. As I work towards a pen test certification, I've been using a handful of resources to learn and get hands-on time. First up has been the great Active Directory rooms at Try Hack Me . The other has been the great Complete Practical Ethical Hacking course from TCM. This lab will be setup similar to the lab in the PEH course, as it makes it a bit easier to follow along with Heath's videos. There's always Hack the Box to get some hands on time as well, but that's something better saved for anot