Where did I go?

Wow! I can’t believe it’s been more than a year since my last post. You’re probably wondering where I went…

2021 ended up being a very busy year, and it was full of a lot things that either could not be blogged about for confidentiality reasons or had to be embargoed for a certain period of time, or were just so time-sensitive that I could not take time away from working on them to write about working on them. In some cases, a combination of those factors.

First, around the time of my last post a benefactor with a spare Pro license to Pentesterlab in his pool gave me access. Knowing this would only last until new members of his team needed the license, I dove in and tried to do as many exercises as possible. Between February 24 and April 13 I ripped through 187 exercises (about half of what was available at that time) and completed 9 badges. Not surprisingly, the owners of these learning platforms tend to frown on people publishing write-ups of their exercises so there wasn’t much to say about it here.

The April - May time frame saw a lot of my time spent working on speaking engagements, but they were for internal audiences at work, so not much I could say about them here.

In May some of my current and former work colleagues got together to participate in the NorthSec CTF as well as the badge challenge. The NorthSec badge was pretty neat and there may well be a writeup of those challenges here in the near future. I did not write anything at the time because I wanted to wait so as not to post any unwanted spoilers for people who might be a little bit behind in working on the puzzles.

After that, several #badgelife things came down in rapid succession. In June the 2021 eChallengeCoin from Bradan Lane Studio arrived.

Again, I didn’t write this up immediately out of respect for not posting spoilers.

In July, the 2021Aerospace Village badge came in. While this badge had a few puzzle elements it’s more of a display piece, but what a beautiful display piece it is!

This began the lead-in Defcon with a whole bunch of #badgelife related action. The Hackerboxes SAO Showcase showed up in late July/early August, along with the Defcon badge and the 2021 and!XOR badge, so I spent a lot of time in July and August solving puzzles and soldering.

Unfortunately I was not able to attend Defcon in person but I followed along online a little bit.

That takes us to the middle of August. My team has training budget available for us and it was time for me to take advantage of that benefit and sign up for something. So I signed up for Offensive Security’s PEN-200/PWK/OSCP program. Between then and now, I set aside any “leisurely” hacking - hardware, badges, CTFs, HTB, etc, and focused solely on learning and practicing the OSCP material. Like the PentesterLab material, OffSec do not allow sharing of any of the course or lab material and of course sharing information about the exam challenges is completely off-limits. So there was just nothing that I could write about here.

Well, I passed the OSCP exam.

So now I’ve got a bit more time to focus on other things. At least until my next round of training funding comes up in the fall, and then I might fall silent again for another few months. But for now, when I’ve got something interesting to write about, you can be sure I’ll share it here. I also still have all of my notes and pics for my Roku project so I’ll try to get those up as well.

Thanks for reading!