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Kali is a great learning tool for learning cybersecurity, especially the red-attacking side of it. For the longest time, I had trouble running the Kali VM on my rather old Thinkpad X1 Carbon, as the image consumes quite a few resources. There is a way to use most of Kali’s tools with little resource consumption: ssh into the image via your distro terminal. It turns out it’s quite easy to set this up in VirtualBox, as described in this article: ...

There are a few customisations I have come to love on the personal Debian install. This blog post is meant to describe the steps for my ideal (at this point) Debian 12 post-installation cleanup and provide a few security applications for everyday use and a few programs for light security work. Download and Install Debian 12 Download the DVD version for 64-bit PC architecture from here: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/ Installation-wise, I chose to install the Gnome and nothing else: ...

After spending days trying to optimise my setup and thinking about the perfect use of my current hardware and also trying to get rid of stuff I don’t use, I came to the conclusion I need more hardware. This is kinda concerning, considering the initial problem I had before all this was that I have too much stuff around. This might have been influenced by watching The Minimalists – Less is Now or John Hammond’s video for his one laptop setup for teaching cybersecurity. ...

Ingredients: Raspberry pi 4 – I used one with 8Gb of RAM with whatever case is available 1 or 2 external hard disk drives (HDDs) – if 2 are used, a powered USB hub is required, as the pi does not provide enough power for more than 1 HDD of note also, no RAID configurations are possible with external, USB connected HDDs USB microSD card adaptor for installing Raspberry Pi OS raspberry pi power plug cables: USB for HDDs, internet cable with RJ45 plugs Ingredients Step 1: Install Raspberry Pi OS Download the Raspberry Pi imager from https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ and select the image to be installed on the Pi. ...

After some looking about and being sick of running Windows 10 just for doing some Scratch-like programming for uni, I have decided to update my system to full a Linux pc with, if needed Win10 and Kali VMs for all my HackTheBox and TryHackMe needs. Because I still don’t have proper internet and using phone internet sharing, installing arch without some cable internet is a bit of a stretch. After seeing some Debian-Titus work in progress during ChrisTitusTech stream, I definitely want to give AwesomeWM a try. What’s not to like about a small, quick and efficient window manager. ...

Cryptography is as old as the desire of humans to communicate secretly. A famous example is that of the so-called Caesar cypher, named after Julius Caesar. He used to encrypt his correspondence by shifting the letters of the alphabet to the right or left an agreed-upon number of spaces. Cypher disc Image Credit: Cypher disc By Hubert Berberich (HubiB) – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php ...

Computers have a very particular way of communicating with each other. For example, before widespread computer networks and the internet, people shared files by “sneakernet”: wearing a comfortable pair of sneakers and putting the info on the storage media and travelling to the destination computer to copy the data. This is not a very effective way to share files, and large companies soon realised this was a huge market and started developing various network protocols. The problem was that many of these protocols were proprietary and incompatible with each other. ...

I have some peculiarities for my desktop setup that I use every time I reinstall a new OS. So instead of researching how to do the setup all over every time I reinstall an OS, dual boot, or distro hop, I will throw them all in a blog post and save some keystrokes and a bit of time. On my main computer, an old Dell Optiplex, with an NVIDIA GTX1650, I am dual-booting Kubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10. ...

This is a tutorial for installing Pi-hole on your home network. As the devs on the pi-hole.net put it, it is a “network-wide ad blocking” solution. The app acts as a DNS (domain name system) server. More info on this wiki. It basically sends ad queries that you generate when you visit a website to nowhere (hence the cosmic flavor of the app name). Ingredients A few elements are needed for the setup. In this tutorial, I will use a pi zero computer, but the setup can be done on a slew of devices and there is also a docker install. ...

It has been a long time coming. I have delayed it and procrastinate around it for a few months, but I finally finished it with 100% completion. The journey for me started on the 12th of May 2020 and finished yesterday, the 7th May 2021. Sal and his team truly deserve the most generous praise and all the donations we can spare, because this is a remarkable project, and the lessons are concise and the explanations easy to follow. ...