Another quick walk-through from ACSC5. This problem is called whats_my_password.
Problem
What is that administrator’s password? Note: enter the flag in the format acsc2017{}
find_the_stack2
The is a follow-on to the first find_the_stack problem from ACSC5. This was originally supposed to be the third one in a series of challenges based on this problem but I had some problems with number two so this became number two.
find_the_stack
This is the first of what will hopefully be many walk-throughs from various CTF competitions I’ve competed/worked on. This first challenge is a simple one that I created for the 5th annual Army Cyber Skills Challenge.
Cyber Direct Commisioning
This morning, I was going through the Army Times early bird and came across an article called Army offers direct commissions to boost cyber force. Talk about this came out initially a few months ago. Like many ideas, I think it’s a good idea but probably not one that is fully thought out.
November Warrant Officer Selection Results
So I know it’s a few days late (what can I say, I was getting ready for a turkey comma) but I wanted to take a minute to congratulate the Army’s newest cyber warrant officers (ya I’m still signal but I play cyber during the day). So with that being said congrats to:
Capture the Flags
Many of us remember playing capture the flag (CTF) back when we were kids. The idea was to divide into teams, try to sneak to the other teams side and capture their flag. Years later, this idea was expanded on when Playstation and XBox started putting together multiplayer games that had the same general idea. More recently, the idea has morphed once again with hacking and computer security related CTF competitions. Perhaps the most famous CTF is the annual Defcon CTF where participants from around the world work to qualify to take part in the event at the conference itself, but this is just one of countless CTF competitions that take place on nearly a daily basis.
Splunk .conf Day 2 and 3
So when I last left you guys I was attending Splunk .conf. My plan was to write each day but I quickly realized how long the day was when you included 9 hours of conference, plus commuting to and from DC each day so screw that.
Splunk .conf2017 Day 1
So today was day one of Splunk .conf2017. This being my first time at .conf, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The morning started off with the keynote address by the CEO of Splunk, Doug Merritt. A couple of interesting numbers to start with. 7,187 people were regestered to attend .conf this year from 65 countries who traveled a combined 65 million miles to get to Washington DC (enough miles to go to and from the moon over 100 times).
Splunk .conf
Today was the first (well sort of) day of the 8th annual Splunk .conf convention here in DC. .conf covers a range of topics, is three days (well really 2.5) long, has over 200 technical sessions, and includes over 6,000 participants. In short, its a bit of a data science nerd orgie.
Keeping Time Without a Source
A while back I wrote about the importance of using a standardized time source. Keeping accurate time across devices is essential so that you can easily correlate events within logs across the network. But what do you do when you’re operating on a closed network and there is no time source that you can pull from?