June 27, 2025

Blogging from my phone

I started this blog a decade ago. A college project continued into a professional portfolio and passion project. Everything has changed from the website name and design to the writing style and content. One thing that remained the same was the struggle to consistently post relevant content. The problem A lot has changed in the last 10 years, while I am still interested in hacking, I find myself split among other priorities.

April 12, 2025

Spring cleaning starts with servers

When you start seeing Spring Cleaning posts on socials, why not take a day to start “cleaning” with your devices at home? I took the day to review my home lab server and validate it could still run the projects I wanted it to. Below is all the steps I went through while knocking off the cobwebs.. the server has not been online since October of 2024. The problem Outdated server, lab was running Ubuntu 20.

August 20, 2024

Proving Grounds Scrutiny Writeup

Full disclosure: This is my notes from watching Plantplants, a student mentor at OffSec, on a Twitch live stream. The video will be reposted to OffSec’s youtube soon. Setup After launching the targe machine on the OffSec portal, set a local zsh environment variable to the target IP export IP=10.0.0.2 The variable can then be used in future commands. Recon Plantplants mentioned he liked to do manual enumeration while the all port scan ran in the background.

September 15, 2023

We launched a discord server

This website started out as a college project in 2015 to learn about content creation, SEO, and websites. The domain has changed a few times and so has the layout, but the core purpose has always been the same. It is important to be able to articulate, summarize, and present while learning a new topic. Blogging has allowed me to share about my professional development and community involvement. As a decade approaches, my focus is shifting to include guest authors, cross posts, and more in order to bring in those with a similar passion.

May 29, 2023

Python for Everyone! py4e Overview

If you work in any technical field, there is some level of programming knowledge required. Developers program code day in and day out, but even penetration testers, IT helpdesk, or SOC analysts benefit from automating mundane tasks to improve efficiency. If programing is a skill set that you want to improve, how best do you learn? Playing with redstone in minecraft will teach you about some basic logic. Youtube videos can show how to create basic discord bots to roll dice for your DND games.

April 1, 2023

Customizing a hackbook pro

To develop in cybersecurity, it is vastly important to keep a growth mindset. Always be learning. In order to allow that, it helps to have the right tools available. One important tool is a dedicated computer for hacking activities such as participating in training labs, testing tools, or learning new methodologies. I reset a Macbook Pro, keeping the intending macOS and installed VMware fusion for running virtual machines (VM) including Kali linux.

March 30, 2023

Wazuh - An open-source security platform

A friend and mentor in the field introduced me to Wazuh. An open source, free to use tool for security. He was looking at the tool to understand some of it’s inner functionality for his own projects, but when I was reviewing it with him I was impressed by it’s feature set. First off, being open source means that Wazuh has source code published online that anyone can use, review, or extend.

March 19, 2023

Attending Bsides Harrisburg

Bsides Harrisburg was on March 11, 2023. This was the first conference for two attendees and below are their own stories. I hope this inspires you to check out a local conference or consider traveling for a Bsides event. Ron I am a Cloud Network Engineer, and part of my responsibility is to ensure the cloud environment I help manage is secure and follows recent cloud security best practices. Before working in the cloud, I was a route/switch guy.

March 18, 2023

Organizing Bsides Harrisburg

Bsides Harrisburg was on March 11, 2023. Our first post-covid Bsides conference in central Pennsylvania under new organizers. A small team of local security professionals gathered together to collect funding, invite speakers, and attract attendees. I was privileged to be one of the organizers and act as a treasurer, ensuring that we had the required funding to cover what we wanted to include. Here is my summary of planning the event and how I thought the event went.

February 19, 2023

Intro to Cloudflare Zero Trust

Cloudflare offers some amazing, and free, products to secure personal use, self-hosted applications and devices. Last week, I set up a server at home running docker containers. By using Cloudflare I can securely make those docker containers internet accessible. Previously in order to do that, I’d have to open a port through my home router and accept any traffic from the internet on that port. This is visible and allows a home IP to appear in use to anyone who scans it.