I Like Learning New Things

Upcoming topics: scripts to easily set up Bluetooth testing and research on your Linux machine and setup your Kali VM with a few more goodies than come installed.

--- below posted: November 21, 2015 ---

The Crypto Night hosted by the ACM chapter out at CSUS was fantastic! Started with great coverage of BitCoin and the Block Chain by Ted Krovitz, really nice details about Windows Forensics by Devin Cook, Dan Flores talked about the Lifecycle of a Cracker which covered the current methodology of today's attacks and included awesome demos and examples, he was followed by Ben Sadaghi that gave us an enlightening view into the world of bug bounties and web app testing. I was in between Devin and Dan and over all the audience seemed receptive to my message of thoughtful data sharing which was the result I hoped for. USB drives with TAILS preinstalled were passed out and a t-shirt will be arriving soon. The event was a completely packed house, the speakers and audience were great. Wonderful night!

--- below posted: November 20, 2015 ---

Long time no blog! Been really busy but wanted to note that I got invited back to do another presentation for the ACM chapter out at CSUS. I will post more after the event but wanted to get my slide deck up here for easy reference so here it is! You can download my slide show here as a pdf

--- below posted: November 23, 2014 ---

Did a presentation for the ACM.org CSU Sacramento student chapter last week. Had a blast! It was a Crypto Party themed event link here. Great mix of speakers and audience member. Got to hear about botnets, best practices, java security, and email encryption. I spoke about secure and anonymous browsing and chose to cover Tor , TAILS , Epic Browser , what data is shared while you browse, and an overview of why one should care about anonymous and private browsing. The audience covered the entire spectrum from college freshmen to security professionals. You can download my slide show here as a pdf, I tend to use slides as a start to the talking points but there are links and you can see the basic flow I adopted for the talk. Looking forward to more presentations soon. Here are 2 links of some interesting reading I found while researching for the talk. First is a write up from The//Intercept and the other is a paper by Micah Lee titled "Encryption Works"

  1. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secrets/
  2. https://freedom.press/sites/default/files/encryption_works.pdf

Graduation is in 4 weeks! I've had the opportunity to interview at quite a few agencies and companies and the future after graduation is looking really bright, exciting stuff!

--- below posted: September 30, 2014 [edit: link added 10/20/14] ---

I did a presentation on Network Monitoring for the Sacramento Linux User Group (SacLUG) last Thursday evening at HackerLab link here. There was a decent turnout of 10-15 people with a very vocal audience. Lots of questions plus comments and a very wide variety of experience levels from new Linux users to experienced admins running data centers. Here are some links to what was covered: Security Onion distro, debian packages, and Snort.

  1. http://blog.securityonion.net/p/securityonion.html
  2. https://code.google.com/p/security-onion/
  3. https://code.google.com/p/security-onion/wiki/Installation
  4. http://www.aboutdebian.com/monitor.htm
  5. http://www.aboutdebian.com/snort.htm
  6. https://www.snort.org/#get-started
  7. http://www.slideshare.net/maximillianx/network-monitoring-basics

--- below posted: September 11, 2014 ---

I spent this summer doing some great research on mobile device security and ended up focussing on Bluetooth as the protocol is intriguing to me.

I was able to use a great little piece of hardware called Ubertooth with it's software and discovered a bunch of other great tools available to explore the Bluetooth around me.

More details later.