Now that I’ve finally delivered my PhD thesis (awaiting public defense), and after sharing for more than 3 years my tools, strategies, and tips for surviving in the academic world by word of mouth, I have finally got the time — and energy — to put this in a written form.
Radio communications always had my curiosity, but little to no focus. Recently I bought a Software-defined Radio (SDR) and started doing some experiments… and now I’m building my own antennas for receiving satellite images. These are some field notes on radio waves and others.
Yet another month, yet another ØxＯＰＯＳɆＣ meetup. This is a write-up on the 0xF09F8EA3 edition Microsoft Active Directory challenge. Since it is my first challenge dealing with AD and domain controllers, some field notes and introductory notes are also presented.
Those who are hardware tinkers and hackers know how easy it is to accumulate hardware thingies: single-board computers, microcontrollers, sensors and so on. One of those are Raspberry Pi’s of different version that lay around accomulating dust. It was time to give some usage to those idle computing resources in the form of a cluster for doing some experiments with networking, distributed computing, automation, etc.
There are places over Portugal where fibre connections are still a mirage, and all we’ve got are DSL connections, more specifically Asymmetric DSL (ADSL). The ISP modem + router combo has been updated through the years, and some old ones have been left behind. One of those was a D-Link DVA-G3170i from 2011, which seemed a good practice target for some hardware reversing.
“Based in Porto, the ØxＯＰＯＳɆＣ group was started by g33ks who are passionate about security. The meetup primary mission is to discuss and tackle upsurging security issues by leveraging the expertise and know-how of members of the group.” This year edition of the Summer Challenge consisted of 13 challenges belonging to 4 different categories, namely: Misc (3), Crypto (3), Web (3) and Trivia (4).
This year the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the RCTS – The Science, Technology and Society Network – also known as NREN (National Research and Education Network), part of the FCCN (Foundation for National Scientific Computing) of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), organized for the first time a Capture The Flag competition targetting students from Portugal at different scholar degrees. The competition consisted of 21 challenges belonging to 7 different categories, namely: Reverse (5), Steganography (3), Web (3), Crypto (3), Forensics (4), Misc (2) and Wifi (1).
My long-term laptop, which accompanied me for some years, died some time ago while proceeding a BIOS update. Why update the BIOS since it’s a process well-known for bricking computers? Well, because of Intel and their wonderful speculative execution vulnerabilities. So, after the update, the PC did not turn on again (with only the fans and the keyboard backlight turning on). As you can imagine doing the typical BIOS reset procedures did not work. So here’s the story of bringing it back from the dead.