This Side of Paradise

I finally sold my MBP today, and it’s hard to say goodbye to my primary system that I’ve used over the last 7 years. The laptop is still in a superb condition and If only I could upgrade the internals, I would have kept it. Many fond memories with this one - I will miss you a lot. Loved the keyboard, trackpad and that touch of brushed aluminium when working on something. I guess that the only solace as of now, is that this money will go towards the new ipad. Hopefully, the experience will be as close to this as possible.

Managed to wake up early again today after a brief bout of sickness (seasonal flu), and configured / installed the new router. The home router is probably the most crucial (and the most under-rated) part of the computing environment at any home today. A good router is invisible, chugging away in the background and serving content at max speed to all of its connected clients - on the other hand, a lousy router makes its presence felt very obviously - bad Wi-Fi speeds, frequent disconnects and a generally miserable experience for the user (and even more so for the person maintaining the network).

I’ve spent a lot of time (and money of course) over computer hardware ever since I started my association with computing more than 20 years back. I’ve gone through lots of hardware, that I’m probably too old to remember (but I’ll try to write up a separate post on that sometime), but here’s what I’m using right now! Personally I use 4 devices primarily, and planning to go down to 3 with the next iteration

Testing out a small post to see if this works. If it does, then I can post, sync (via git) and update the blog on the go. This could be game changing! That’s how I started this post - and it works spectacularly. The gives me the capability to manage the blog on the go, even from my phone. This automation setup has enabled me to just focus on writing - publishing and version controlling is done automatically and I can go from writing to being live on the web in a couple of taps.

I am a huge fan of CTF’s and play them at every available opportunity to sharpen my skills and keep them up to date. One of the biggest challenges for playing a CTF is to ensure that the VM’s to be used during the event are always up to date and have all of the tools ready. I usually do this before a day, so it is a full day of running apt-get update and check for updates for a whole day before.

As always, forensics challenges draw my attention first - there’s a satisfying feeling that all of the answers are within what ever artefact you have with you. The “league of assassins” is a beginner challenge that requires analysis of a pcap file and is avaiable at this link. The challenge text says You are a field agent tailing a League of Assassins operative. The assassin just got the name of his target and needs to scope him based on available online information. So, he starts using free WiFi provided by Moonbucks coffee shop. The WiFi network is not using any security and is open to all. He is browsing the internet while enjoying his coffee while you are capturing the WiFi traffic. While you were busy with your sniffer set up, he took off. Now, the only way to stop the assassination is to find the target individual by analyzing the captured traffic and warning him in advance.

I promised a year back that things would get quite technical here on - well, here we go! A couple of weeks back, I tweeted Bfn hyper-v. I'll accept you are a child prodigy, bit I'll take a look when you're all grown up. Pathetic support for a Linux setup. — rvivek (@vivek_310) March 20, 2013 This was after a long and frustrating month long attempt to get my pentest lab running on my laptop.

After a gap of more than four and a half years, I’m back. Been quite busy these times - although I had dropped in occasionally to see what was happening. Life’s on its next, “more responsible” phase right now. It started off way back in 2002 when I started becoming interested in infosec - however, due to Goldman, I didn’t have the time (and the motivation) to pursue it seriously. However, now, I find myself torn apart between two worlds - the work of a project manager and the call of infosec! I’ve decided to eventually transition over. Have been working on lots of things for a while now, will start to post more regularly (Warning - some of the articles are going to be very technical going forward).

….I promise I’ll try and be more regular :)

….write this up now! Music was something I grew up on… I needed to have it when I was doing something, or just plain chilling out…! got my first walkman when I was still in school and then went on to build a decent enough cassette collection. The craze took off when I got into work, I indulged in a nice CD player and then went onto build a huge collection of audio CD’s ( still have a cupboard full of them)…however, something was still lacking. Yeah.. the stock headphones were crap! utter crap.