So, let's assume that you are in an international company and the first and only security person. What are your first steps and projects? It is like really vague, but I'd assume like a SIEM, inventory of the network and all devices, backup situation, maybe even honeypots?
What are your high-prio things that every company should have? Is there even a framework for it?
Feeling kinda lost and I hope you get some guidance in the right direction.
Set up new #FreshRSS instance for now. I want to read more and stay up to date on certain topics and I figured I could give RSS another chance. Stays invite-only for now, but feel free to hit me up if you want to have an account.
I am happy to share some Thoughts & Ideas about forum.ittavern.com in this article.
Feedback is welcome.
https://ittavern.com/forum.ittavern.com-thoughts-and-ideas/
Testing a few CTF platforms to learn more about pentesting. It is interesting, but the learning curve is quite steep.
Not gonna lie, wasn't that fun. Learned a lot, but felt lost multiple times. Probably gets better over time.
Doing some rooms on TryHackMe. Decided to create a write up of one room. Have to work on the format, but it should be fine for now.
Feedback is welcome!
I think I've never share one of my favorite articles with you.
Creating this was great and it has been a great resource ever since. I use SSH tunnel a lot in troubleshooting sessions and security demonstrations.
I am pleased to announce the launch of: forum.ittavern.com
More information can be found in this thread, but in short I miss the forum culture and want to create an open-minded and sustainable community.
I welcome you and look forward to great discussions.
I am happy to share with you the new design of my blog.
New logo, new thumbnails, lots of CSS changes and everything is now hosted in a German DC.
The goal was to create a clean design and reduce the loading time even further.
Feedback is welcome.
Encrypt and send files with a link that automatically expires to ensure your important documents don’t stay online forever.
Sending files over the internet. Been a pain in the past and I finally decided to host my own instance. It should be 'production' ready, but let me know if you encounter any problems.
Currently using HedgeDoc for taking notes, but it is lacking some features, so I am trying to find and host some alternatives and compare them. And I hope I can find some time to play with my Flipper Zero....
So, every network engineer knows it: everyone else will blame the network and you have to prove them wrong.
There are multiple reason:
- lack of knowledge
- ignorance
- passing on responsibility
- laziness
- ... There are more.
I am interested in how you react to 'The network is causing the problems' requests.
- do you request certain information?
- need an explanation?
- what are you first steps?
- do you have a runbook or some policy in place?
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Without getting into too much detail, I request some or all of the following information before I start looking:
- what are they trying to do? What is the desired outcome?
- what is the error message? *(pref a screenshot!) *+ timestamp (for logs)
- has it ever worked before?
- since when isn't it working?
- can you resolve domains?
- Source Host > Destination Host:Port
- Results of Ping + Powershell Test-NetConnection on Windows and Netcat on Linux (to test general connection, assuming TCP connection)
What I ask for and in what order depends on the person I am talking to. By the way, monitoring is my friend. If it says everything is fine, it usually is.
Side note Describing the actual proof that it is not the network depends heavily on the infrastructure and the problem, so this may be a discussion for another thread.
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What are your first steps?
A quick & dirty solution that is available on most Linux hosts.
ntfy lets you send push notifications via scripts from any computer or phone. Made with ❤ by Philipp C. Heckel, Apache License 2.0, source at https://heckel.io/ntfy.
I've decided to self-host yet another service. This time it is NTFY. Simple HTTP based push notifications for your devices.
https://ntfy.brrl.net/
Feel free to use it. Feedback is welcome.
I use it to notify me about successful logins on one of my servers, failed backups, results of cron jobs and so on. One simple HTTP request is all you need.
A free and open-source online collaborative drawing tool. Sketch new ideas together on WBO!
Sometimes I just need a simple whiteboard for troubleshooting or brainstorming sessions. I've decided to self-host a whiteboard with collaboration function. I am going to give whitebophir a try.
Feel free to use it too!
- free
- no ads
- no tracking
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Disclaimer: the data is not encrypted and I - as provider - could look into them.
Not optimal for permanent boards as I plan to reset it once a month (not sure yet).
Rsync is one of my most used tools and I am happy to share this guide with you. I've learned a lot doing the research and I hope to share some tipps with you.
Thanks to Jerry for bringing this community back to life. I'll be playing moderator for a while and may tweak the design a bit.
Enjoy!
I've added a status page with #uptimekuma. I want to get used to it for now. It is currently running on the same server as the rest of the services, which is not optimal. Additionally adding some more sensors at some point.
I want to get into Ansible and I am building a testing env for it - home lab with various switches and routers, Fortinet, Palo, and a proxmox host server and some remote VPS. One of my goals for Q1 '24. Today I am going to prep the switches.
Besides that, I want to host my own NFTY server and I hope that I can get it online within this week.
I am currently transitioning into a Security role at work. One question would be: what are the must-have tools for every blue team?
- Vuln-Scanner
- Logging/ SIEM-Server
- ...
Learning things about Wireguard and implement it to secure my internet facing servers.
The ISPs are slow to answer if there is no active outage. Will take some time anyway.
Packets are dropped in bot directions. I am currently looking through the pcaps and will do another stress test later - got another window. MTU/MSS is the prio today.
Good points and thank you for your input. What kind of TaskManager do you use? Any system, or just simple list?
Do you know https://logseq.com/ ? - I think it is considered an alternative to Obisidian. Had been using it for a while, was great, but it was almost too much work to organize everything.
Haven't found my perfect solution. The current goal is get everything together and see what I really need. Most likely a single .md file that I can encrypt and sync in my machines, but not sure yet.
I am currently trying to organize my notes. The old 'system' is a pain, and getting everything centralized makes it easier to find things. Notes, snippets, bookmarks, and so on.
Thank you for the AMA.
Do you regularly feel overwhelmed? - Keeping up with the sec news and patch accordingly, firewall/ips and endpoint alarms, logs, meetings, and more. It shouldn't be the case, but it seems that everything in security is prio 1.
EDIT: and being the party pooper and saying no to everything, bc people do not think about security.
Added the Update 2. Still some things to do, but we know a little bit more now. Feedback and questions are still welcome.
Ping - Update 2 Your numbers are are still missing since I havent had time to look into the pcaps yet. I hope I can get it done by the end of the week, but we are a little bit wiser.
I am hosting multiple services, but my application/web security knowledge is lacking. Is there a guide or framework to check for common or risky mistakes? Is there a list of things I should check every application for, or guide on how to harden hosted applications? That is a topic that I am going to tackle in the near future, and would appreciate some tips in advance.
