Category: Blog
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Home Lab Setup (2017)
In this post and video I give a quick run down of my Home Lab – everything from the rack itself, to the hardware and the basics of what everything is being used for. I started this project towards the end of 2012 with a single Dell PowerEdge 2950 GII and was hoping to teach…
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ELK Stack – Installing and Configuring Curator
In this post I am going to quickly cover what is needed to get Curator up and running on the ELK stack. In the last few posts about the ELK stack I covered everything needed to get it installed, configured and ingesting logs reliably. If you missed those posts, you can find them here: ELK…
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ELK Stack – Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting
This post is going to be a sort of a follow up to my ELK 5 on Ubuntu 16.04 series. I am going to cover some of the lessons I have learned over the last few months of maintaining a running ELK stack instance. I am also going to cover some one liners that can…
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Installing and Configuring VMware vCenter 6.5 (VCSA)
In this third and final part of my VMware series, I go over all of the basics of getting the VMware vCenter 6.5 Server Appliance up and running. Everything that I show in the video can be done with the evaluation version of vCenter, which gives you up to 2 months of time to play…
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Powershell scripts fail when deployed via Group Policy as Startup scripts with Event ID 1055 and 1130
I recently went to deploy a new Powershell based Startup script in my test environment, and while the majority of my Windows machines happily complied, 2 of my test servers that were running Remote Desktop Services did not like the new Startup policy. The script itself was pretty straight forward – it pulled some files…
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Exploiting Apache Struts – CVE-2017-9805
CVE-2017-9805 is yet another very legitimate vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework. In the video, I demonstrate how easy it is to run a simple public python script against a vulnerable remote server, ultimately resulting in a reverse shell back to the attacker. In this post, I will cover all the steps shown in the…
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Installing VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
In this video I go over all of the basics of getting up and running with my favorite hypervisor, VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5. Here is a quick run down of everything covered: Where to install ESXi, hard drive or USB drive? Creating a bootable USB drive with the VMware ESXi ISO image and Rufus Booting…
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What is VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter?
In this video I give a quick break down of some of the key features and differences between VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 and VMware vCenter 6.5. I also give a quick demonstration of what it looks like when both ESXi and the vCenter Server Appliance are fully booted and sitting at the console screen. Lastly,…
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ELK 5: Setting up a Grok filter for IIS Logs
In Pt. 3 of my setting up ELK 5 on Ubuntu 16.04 series, I showed how easy it was to ship IIS logs from a Windows Server 2012 R2 using Filebeat. One thing you may have noticed with that configuration is that the logs aren’t parsed out by Logstash, each line from the IIS log…
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ELK 5 on Ubuntu 16.04
In this series of posts I am going to cover everything needed to get Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) up and running on Ubuntu 16.04. In the videos I use the desktop version of Ubuntu, but the process should be the same on the server version. In addition to the ELK stack I will also…
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