This Side of Paradise

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.

…lots more to come :)

One of the first things I was thinking as soon as I got the TV was to get an xbox 360. I was really in two minds of moving to a new gaming platform. The final push came to me on my birthday, in the form of a Halo 3 special edition DVD. So headed out to music world a few days later to grab the elite edition of the 360 - for two particular reasons - HDMI output and a huge 120 GB hard disk attached.

…when all of my devices choose to go down at the very same time. It’s as if they’ve all been conspiring together and chose the last couple of days to conk off one after another. It started off with the 19’ monitor of the desktop, would totally refuse to display anything above 640 * 480. The display would blank out and would show an error saying that the optimal resolution of the monitor was 1280*1024. Heck… that was what I was trying to drill into its digital brains.

…whole lotta leaving goin’ on…! first my bike, and now it’s quits to Fortune 9. That’s where office moved in Dec 2005 from our good ol’ office… after almost two years of struggling with the place, we call it quits from here tonight. We’re moving to a swank new mall (.. yeah.. mall) on road no.1, banjara hills…! never quite liked the place, and I’m sure it was vice versa too. Office life was never too good out here in terms of career and professional life. Had been to the new office on the 15th and for some reason, felt really comfortable at there, loved my new desk :)