whats_my_password

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

stacks

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.

Net Neutrality

Earlier this week, the FCC, “lead” by Ajit Pai voted to repeal its policy of Net Neutrality.  The policy was put into place in Feb 2015 after the FCC (at the time under the Obama administration) made the decision to classify ISPs as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act.  For a lot of people (myself included for a while), this doesn’t make a lot of sense what any of this means so let me try to take a few minutes to explain (at least my understanding of it).

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

Warrant 99th Birthday

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

TACLANE Encrypted Tunnel

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 .conf2017 Day 1

Splunk

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).