Author: André Henriques

  • Day 29

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    The real fun started today with a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge by analyzing a .pcap file and hacking my way back into a compromised machine. The challenge began by loading a .pcap file into Wireshark. I started by browsing through the packets and quickly noticed a flood of SYN flags, a clear sign of…

  • Day 28

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    We got started by exploring the Cyber Kill Chain. In the afternoon, we shifted focus to hashes and password cracking. The Cyber Kill Chain is a military-inspired framework that outlines the stages of a cyberattack. This are the attack phases: Reconnaissance – Gathering information about the target (e.g., Nmap). Weaponization – Crafting a payload or…

  • Day 27

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    We kicked off with some reviewing today on the last challenge we did yesterday. I’m glad I wrote everything down because there were a lot of commands and different tools. After the review, we dove into an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) investigation. It started off pretty fun. I used exiftool to extract metadata from an…

  • Day 26

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    Ethical Hacking, Finally! Today was an awesome day, we dove into Web App Testing and Privilege Escalation challenges as part of our ethical hacking training. We kicked things off with an introduction to offensive security and ethical hacking, which is all about using hacker techniques for good: testing systems to find vulnerabilities before the bad…

  • Day 25

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    We kicked off the day with our regular news section, followed by an assessment on malware analysis. As a cohort, we scored 92%, another great result to add to the books! I missed just one question again. It was about PsExec, which I didn’t fully understand at first, but after some research and help from…

  • Day 24

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    Today we learned some Capa and got into an investigation to find out information of malware samples. We started with CAPA, a tool used to analyze malware samples. CAPA scans executable files and tells you what kinds of behaviours or capabilities the malware has. It’s especially useful because it maps its findings to well-known frameworks…

  • Day 23

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    Today we dove into some Windows internals theory. A few topics were tricky, especially virtual memory and private virtual address space but I started to get a better grasp on them. In simple terms, virtual memory is like giving each running program its own private sandbox to play in. Instead of letting programs write directly…

  • Day 22

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    Today was all about catching up on what I missed yesterday due to the power outage. I focused on finishing the labs, especially the ones related to Malware Analysis. It’s kind of like solving a puzzle, you have to dig into how a file behaves and figure out what it’s doing under the hood. There…

  • Day 21

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    I’m writing this post on Tuesday. Yesterday, I missed most of class because of a widespread power outage in Portugal and Spain. I lost electricity from 11:30 AM to 9:00 PM. I was a bit frustrated about missing class. Maybe I should consider buying a generator for my PC and router. Anyway, yesterday was our…

  • Day 20

    —

    by

    André Henriques

    Half of the bootcamp done! Time really flies. Today we took a deep dive into memory forensics, focusing on RAM dumps. RAM gives us a snapshot of what a system is doing right now, which can include: After lunch, we had an assessment covering the forensics concepts we’ve been learning – and we crushed it.…