I wanted to post a blog entry in a sort of journal format, just to talk about what I’ve been up to this week.

SPLUNK

Not too long ago, I installed Splunk on my local machine, because I thought it would be worthwhile to get some experience doing searches, as well as getting familiar with the interface.
I’ve decided to dedicate at least an hour a week to getting acquainted with Splunk. Since I can import logs from my system, as well as other systems, into Splunk, I can do some attack simulations and get some experience searching for incidents.

DVWA

A couple of weeks ago I started working with the DVWA (deliberately vulnerable web application). A while back, I started to get the impression that it’d be a good idea to become more educated in how web attacks are performed, and how to prevent them. While I was going to hold off on web hacking for a while, I think it makes sense to get up to speed on it now.
Exploring DVWA has already gotten me more used to working with tools like burpsuite as well as Hydra.

WIFI CRACKING

When I was in school, I remember we had to do lab that involved cracking WiFi. Now all I knew about wireless security, I picked up while I was studying for the Network+. I do remember watching an episode of Mr. Robot, and how Elliot commented on how a WPA2 password could take weeks to crack. Now maybe I should have been more in the know here, but up until this week, I just had this really superficial view of wireless security. I knew that you never used WEP, that you always used WPA2, and that it was really hard to crack. However, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t that big of a deal.
I watched a video where David Bombal went through the process of cracking the password of one of his home routers. After going through the steps laid out in the video, I was able to do the same thing with a simple password I set up on my home router.
So, I was pretty amazed, and had a lot of fun this.

TKTIMEINT

A couple of weeks ago I started writing a program in python that takes a start time and an end time, and then slices it up into whatever chunks you want (like 10 minutes or 13 minutes). I just wanted to write it so I could make it easier to do this thing where I write down a list of intervals of time that I can cross off while I’m at work. It also gives me an opportunity to do some more GUI programming.
I’m almost finished with it, I just have to work with the TkInter .grid() method to figure out how to place the widgets properly. After that, it’s just coding the underlying logic.
Once I write this program, I’m moving away from writing programs that have nothing to do with cybersecurity.