This Week’s Recap

I ended up working a stupid amount of hours this week. Probably going to lay low next week and just go over some GDSA material so I can (finally) get on with other things. I’ve had so much going on and 0 time to spend studying for it.

8/22/2022

• Started day 1 of the GCED class. Today covered defensible security architecture from a 10,000 foot view. Interesting stuff but not nearly as in depth as the GDSA material.
• Finished up creating tabs for each chapter of my GDSA books. I will be taking the exam for this class soon!
• Spent some time trying to iron out some bugs in a python tool I’m working on to help manage this site.

8/23/2022

• Day 2 of the GCED class which covered the basics of pentesting. Not a ton of new info here but did have some interesting discussions.
• Started looking into how to learn more about ansible which seems to fit a lot of my needs for automating tasks for my Linux servers.
  • Ansible also seems to be one of those tools that will be incredibly useful to know no matter what I’m doing. Its certainly on my list of things I really want to learn
  • Watched this quick overview of running ansible playbooks
• Read the very interesting story about Mudge’s claims about twitter.

8/24/2022

• Solidified something pretty cool that I will be posting about on Monday :)
• Finished day 3 of GCED which was the intrusion analysis day. This day was basically a 1 day overview of the entire GCIA class I took not too long ago.
• Began going through the GDSA books and taking notes. My typical workflow for completing the masters classes is:
  1. Watch the on demand classes (without taking notes, just paying attention)
  2. Go through each book and take through notes on topics that I don’t know 100% OR notes on topics that could be useful to me in the future.
  3. Take practice test #1
  4. Review videos/notes on sections I scored low on in the practice test #1.
  5. Take second practice test
  6. Review videos/notes on sections I scored low on in the practice test #2.
  7. Take certification exam.

8/25/2022

• Went through the first half of the first GDSA book and took notes.
  • I typically don’t use my notes on the exam(I generally just use the physical books) but taking notes really helps me solidify the knowledge as well as have a good way to quickly remember the important information about a topic so I try to do it before I take my exam when I still have the motivation to get through all the content.

8/26/2022

• Filmed two youtube videos that will be going up this week.
  • Trying to get over the mental block of “Well there are people who are much better at this than me so I should let them make videos on it”

8/27/2022

• Finished first place in the GCED Capture the flag.
• Had major FOMO missing out on BSIDES ATLANTA :(
• Posted a youtube video rating all the security certifications I’ve gotten

8/28/2022

• Spent most of the day doing a private CTF.
• Spent some time finally fixing all the issues that arose from moving my server around. Mostly fixing a lot of DNS entries that were messed up when I (purposefully but unnecessarily) factory reset my DHCP server.
  • Currently I’m using pihole for my DNS server. Do you use something else that you like? Let me know, I’m looking into other options just to give them a try.
• Published this blog :)
• Be sure to check my twitter tomorrow for a cool announcement

Have any questions

Do you have any questions? Feel free to reach out to me on twitter. See you next Sunday. :)