This Side of Paradise

So, after more than 6 years, I finally retired my research laptop - ‘Arena’. This was literally an arena for me as a test lab and was the start of a long and frustrating road to learn many things. Over the last 1.5 years, I started thinking of replacing this with something that matched my current requirements: something with thunderbolt - the one cable connectivity to a monitor is just too awesome. traditional laptop form factor - A good amount of usage currently is without the use of a table/chair, and with me sitting on the ground sometimes. The surface was impossible to use when not seated on a table. a better display - the surface display was smaller, reflective, and (OMG) the bezels! better computing horsepower - needed a much better CPU than a ‘U’ series processor and a lot more than 16 GB RAM. Repairability - I tend to keep these devices for a long time (definitely more than 6 years), so the ability to perform repairs and upgrades is very important. Impossible to do on the Surface. With that said, the choices boiled down to a few contenders:

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).

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.