Recent Posts
Running a Discord Ransomware Gang
Have you ever wanted to build your own ransomware? I hope not. I am however fortunate enough to have an opportunity to be a menace on the red team of the Cal Poly Pomona SWIFT club’s Red vs. Blue competition. It’s very similar to CCDC and we’ve held it for years for talented Cyber Patriot teams from local high schools. For the first time this year we’re bringing it to our own school and we’ve built our own malware to spice things up for the Blue Teams competing. When learning a new programming language, one usually starts with “Hello World”, however that ain’t no fun, so I decided to learn Go by making Ransomware and things got a little out of hand.
HTB Cyber Apocalypse 2021 - Web
I’ve done a few CTF’s over the years and HackTheBox’s Cyber Apocalypse 2021 definitely was my favorite. 4740 teams of up to 10 people from all over the globe were unleashed on a huge number of unique challenges and our undergraduate team placed in the top 200, putting us in the top 5% of competitors, which is very impressive considering that the competition wasn’t just undergraduate students, but also professionals with industry experience. I was captain for my team and I focused solely on my favorite category - Web.
Global Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition
The Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition is a one of a kind cybersecurity competition that trains students to be future consultants by letting them loose on a penetration testing engagement in a realistically simulated business environment. Teams of up to 6 students perform a penetration test against the fictitious business and document the findings in a penetration testing report.
TG:HACK CTF 2020 - Web
TG:HACK CTF 2020 has been very interesting and intellectually challenging. It made me bang my head on the desk repeatedly in the hopes of numbing the pain of not being able to solve some of the challenges. In the end, I managed to figure out all but the two of the hardest challenges. My writeups are intended to cover the whole process of solving a challenge, so if you don’t want a detailed explanation, just scroll to the payloads.
CySA+ Tips and Tricks (CS0-001)
Less than a year after passing the Security+, I can finally proudly say that I passed CySA+ as well. I set my sights on this exam the same day I passed the Security+ and I focused on studying for it extensively over the past two months. I passed it with 845 out of 900 and was really surprised at how well it went despite the fact that CompTIA recommends you to have 3-4 years of technical experience minimum. I’ve got 0. I have no IT or Security work experience, but what I do have is determination and the will to succeed. If such an underqualified 20 year old could pass this exam thanks to those two things, you can as well. The purpose of this blogpost is to share some of the things I found helpful during my studies for it. I explored a diverse range of study materials and I will tell you which ones worked for me and which ones didn’t.