Offensive Security Wireless Professional (OSWP)

In April 2019, I took the Offensive Security Wireless Attacks (WiFu) course and the OSWP exam. (Along with PenTest+ and Microsoft 365 Fundamentials, this was my third exam in a month!) In brief, I enjoyed this. I thought the content was interesting, and the exam was actually fun (similar to an escape room). However, the …

PenTest+ (PT0-001)

In April 2019, I took CompTIA’s PenTest+ exam. Along with CySA+, this bridges the gap between Security+ and CASP. As the name suggests, it’s all about penetration testing. This is a relatively new exam, and it’s still on the first release (PT0-001). Because of that, it’s not very well known, so I haven’t seen any …

Security+ (SY0-401)

In November 2016, I took CompTIA’s Security+ exam. NB I did the SY0-401 syllabus; CompTIA replaced it with SY0-501 in October 2017, so some of the info in this blog post will now be a bit out of date. In brief, I think that this is a worthwhile certification. It emphasises breadth rather than depth, …

Active Directory lockouts

A lot of organisations set up security policies so that users will be locked out if they enter the wrong password too many times. The idea is to prevent brute force attacks, where an attacker could sit there all day running through the dictionary until they guess the correct password. The downside is that this …

Installing dd-wrt on a Linksys WRT320N wireless router

Back in 2011 I switched ISPs to A&A, primarily because they support native IPv6. Incidentally, 3 years on I see that you still can’t get IPv6 from Zen, so I made the right choice by switching. Windows has had IPv6 support included by default since 2006 (i.e. Vista onwards), so the missing piece of the …

Protecting passwords

When I created accounts with Facebook and LinkedIn, both websites asked me for my email password to help me find people I know. The idea is that they can log into my email account, go through my address book, then search their own database for people with matching email addresses. That would certainly be convenient, …