While the initial experiment focused upon productivity, the main goal of this series is to improve my work/life balance. Getting more productive should just allow me to switch from work to leisure earlier. Currently I have access to my university office, so I have a nice geographical separation between Work/“The Office” and “Everything Else”. So basically I want to keep work at the Office and leisure (mostly) outside of it: getting out of the office to recover while keeping distractions out of the office to let me get out of it faster. This is primarily about the office space, my coworkers are actually part of my recovery activities such as climbing. If I wouldn’t have access to the university office anymore I would have to get some shared office space. ...

Last winter I was lucky to enroll in the so-far best lecture of my PhD studies: From Surviving to Thriving: Crafting your good personal Life by the great Geraldine Fitzpatrick. The course was about stress, mindfullnes, crafting, productivity.. nothing mind-blowing nor rocket science but comprehensive, accessible, and charmingly presented. Recently I read Do Nothing which I thoroughly enjoyed. Maybe it’s time to experiment with my time (or rather life) management.. My Background Just to give a bit of context: I am 41 and by now am back in Academia doing a PhD about the intersection of computer security and machine learning while I freelance as pen-tester and doing commercial security training workshops/talks, mostly about secure development and/or web security. ...

TL;DR WSL2 seems to be one big lolbin when it comes to EDR Scenario/Background During a recent assumed-breach pen-test assignment I was stranded as a low-level user on a fully-updated Windows 10 Enterprise system (10.0.19045) including a deployed CrowdStrike Falcon EDR suite (6.49.16303.0). As I respect CrowdStrike I did not want to execute any malicious scripts on the host, so what to do? WSL2 to the rescue! Installation was done quite comfortable through the company’s Software Center, no local administrative rights required. ...

During a recent assumed-breach pen-test assignment I ran into a problem: the customer had an up to date Windows Active Directory environment, CrowdStrike was rolled out as an EDR and a dedicated Incident Response Team was monitoring for alerts.. and I needed some Active Directory Enumeration to be done before I was planning out my next steps. I assumed, which later proved correctly, that just starting BloodHound or GetUserSPN.py would trigger defenders and defences. ...

During a recent security assignment I came upon a projects folder stored on a Microsoft Active Directory server and accessible thought the network (SMB/CIFS). It had the commonly used layout of a single subdirectory per project, users should only be able to access their corresponding projects and this is configured through ACLs. Initial tests did indicate that the access rights were given away sloppily as I was able to access some of those subdirectories. ...

So a customer of mine thought about ordering a Red Team Assessment and wanted me to go through their local network beforehands — no need to make it too easy for the red teamers. The customer’s network was a typical windows network, dated but kept up to date by two admins. Microsoft Defender was rolled out at all clients, and on some servers. A laptop with Kali Linux was connected to the local network, this was my starting point. ...

So I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 4b+ together with a WaveShare LTE Modem as 4G router/access-point for my home network setup. I do like my hardware to be quiet and thus fan-less, alas the Raspberry Pi 4b+ gets a tad on the warm side. So this was a perfect opportunitiy to play around with an older Raspberry Pi 3b+ which should use approx. 20-25% less power (both, during idle and load) and with “new” software. ...

AppSec includes all tasks that (hopefully) introduce a secure software development life cycle to development teams. Its final goal is to improve security practices and, through that, to find, fix and preferably prevent security issues within applications. It encompasses the whole application life cycle from requirements analysis, design, implementation, verification as well as maintenance. To contrast AppSec with a traditional penetration-test: the latter tries to find vulnerabilities within an already existing application while AppSec focuses upon preventing vulnerabilities from entering the application code in the first place. Penetration Tests are also part of AppSec but they are used rather late in the project runtime to verify the security quality of the application and as input for how the development process can be augmented to prevent similar vulnerabilities from subsequently entering the application. ...

Recently I had a couple of customers that needed some guidance about secure software development. I assume that this happens because I am a developer gone pen-tester so I’ve seen both side of the “problem”. Of course, suggestions differ between software stacks and the overall customer professionalism level, but there is a common starting ground that should be suitable for any professional software project. Without those, anything more advanced would be built upon shaky grounds. Please note, that those are just the starting ground and should not be a limiting set for further improvements. ...

During a recent presentation on HTTP Header Security I was asked for a “simple” flow chart with directions which headers can be used without too many problems. The result was this: What was the reasoning? Initially, basic headers that unify browser behavior are set. They control behavior that is already set when using modern browsers (e.g., Referrer-Policy) or unify non-standard behavior (e.g, X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff). The basic idea behind those headers is, that web developers need to make sure that their website works with those anyway (otherwise people using modern browsers might complain) so it makes sense to take care of those situations during development. ...