A list of common Windows processes and how they can be used maliciously by hackers — Microsoft Windows is the most used operating system in the world, used widely by large organizations as well as individuals for personal use and accounts for more than 60% of the devices. It is also used extensively as a server OS. Owing to it’s extensive use, it is often a…

A list of common Windows processes and how they can be used maliciously by hackers — We will be continuing our list of processes from Part 1 and discuss about a few more legitimate Windows processes and their malicious use cases along with some alternatives and processes that can aid in reconnaissance. vssadmin vssadmin is a built-in Windows utility that is used to manage volume shadow copies…

An OSINT CTF Challenge — This write-up is a walkthrough of the Intel101 challenge by CyberDefenders. The challenge can be found here. Challenge Details: “Open-source intelligence (OSINT) exercise to practice mining and analyzing public data to produce meaningful intel when investigating external threats.” Let’s dive straight into the questions and solve this challenge! Q1. Who is the Registrar for jameskainth.com?

Setting up Grafana & Enhancements — In Part 2, we successfully configured Pi-hole and Prometheus and also setup our exporter to feed metrics to Prometheus. In this final part, we’ll get our dashboard ready and talk about some enhancements as well as some disadvantages of Pi-hole and how to further harden security. Grafana — Installation & setup Now that we have…

Pi-hole & Prometheus Configuration — In Part 1, we discussed about the basic design and setup our VMs. At this point, you should have 2 virtual machines running the latest version of Ubuntu with static IP addresses accessible via SSH on your home network. Let’s start by installing Pi-hole on our first VM. Installing & configuring Pi-hole SSH to…

Tool discussion and initial setup — Do you have an old laptop lying around that is no longer being used but still works? Don’t let its remaining computing power go to waste! In this write up, we’ll talk about how you can host virtual machines on your old laptop using the hypervisor of your choice to…