While job seeking I’ve been reading the LinkedIn Daily Rundown; I’m not normally one for business news, but it tends to be a good quick thing to catch up on. Today’s instalment was particularly dystopian.

Like your job? Sadly it could be automated sooner than you think, according to a new Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report.

Not surprising, really - there’s a lot of process work and drivers out there.

A great writeup on how Bansky handles authentication of his artworks.

So Banksy created a not-for-profit company, Pest Control, to sell and authenticate his works. The process is fiendishly clever, as Will Ellsworth-Jones writes in his book ‘Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall’:

Now, for £65 you can get your Banksy print authenticated. And just to keep the whole thing as jokey as possible, the authentication certificate has stapled to it half a ‘Di faced tenner’, a £10 note faked by Banksy with Lady Diana’s face on it. The tenner has a handwritten ID number on it which can be matched to the number on the other half of the of the note held by Pest Control.

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A friend asked me for help with this one. I hadn’t planned on doing the Plaid CTF but I’m easily dragged into a neat programming challenge.

can you guess me

Misc (100 pts)

Here’s the source to a guessing game: here

You can access the server at nc canyouguessme.pwni.ng 12349

Nothing ridiculously simple here, the solution’s obviously in the code… here’s the code that was provided:

#! /usr/bin/env python3

from sys import exit
from secret import secret_value_for_password, flag, exec

print(r"")
print(r"")
print(r"  ____         __   __           ____                     __  __       ")
print(r" / ___|__ _ _ _\ \ / /__  _   _ / ___|_   _  ___  ___ ___|  \/  | ___  ")
print(r"| |   / _` | '_ \ V / _ \| | | | |  _| | | |/ _ \/ __/ __| |\/| |/ _ \ ")
print(r"| |__| (_| | | | | | (_) | |_| | |_| | |_| |  __/\__ \__ \ |  | |  __/ ")
print(r" \____\__,_|_| |_|_|\___/ \__,_|\____|\__,_|\___||___/___/_|  |_|\___| ")
print(r"                                                                       ")
print(r"")
print(r"")

try:
    val = 0
    inp = input("Input value: ")
    count_digits = len(set(inp))
    if count_digits <= 10:          # Make sure it is a number
    val = eval(inp)
    else:
    raise

    if val == secret_value_for_password:
    print(flag)
    else:
    print("Nope. Better luck next time.")
except:
    print("Nope. No hacking.")
    exit(1)

Pretty simple so far, it’s got a few imports, allows you to type something in, does a bit of a check and if you do things right, it’ll show you the flag.

This was the challenge:

The flag is contained in the following attached file. You know how QR codes work right? Flag is in format “word”. (So no flag bit on this one) Challenge by Garry.

Attached was a 1.2MB, 20,000 line file which looked like this:

I’ve been around a while and the =’s at the end of the lines made me think of base64, so I copied it out into CyberChef and got my first indication I was on the right path:

Velociraptor is a cool name for a dinosaur, let alone a software package. I did a course today with one of the developers, and it looks like a great FOSS solution to EDR and threat hunting.

First, download the package from the releases page. It’s a very small, self contained file.

Here’s my notes from the day.

To configure the client

rem make the install dir
mkdir "c:\Program Files\Velociraptor\"
rem make the config file
velociraptor.exe --config velo_client.yaml config client > velo_client.yaml
rem connect the client
velociraptor.exe --config velo_client.yaml client -v

To run the server

I couldn’t find an easy list when I went looking for these, so I made a list.

View Window

Keyboard

I’ve been playing around with stackstorm for a little while now, and wanted to get back into it after a bit of distraction on other things. The idea of automating a lot of my daily repetetive tasks really appeals to me, so I started work on another module today.

The end result of today’s head-desking was st2-whois, a pack that does basic whois calls and saves me from having to find the website that works just right for it, or open a shell from a box with the right access.

This article on Naked Security is a little bit calmer than some of the other coverage I’ve seen. If I was doing physical/staff security for a large organisation with a global platform I’d totally be using any intel sources I could find to help improve my results. This has to be the least creepy thing they do with thier data.

What’s unique about Facebook’s approach to BOLOs is that it doesn’t just disseminate a list of names to security staff. Facebook also mines its platform for threatening posts. Sometimes, Facebook goes so far as to use its apps to discern the whereabouts of people whom it finds threatening, to determine whether they pose a credible threat.

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I really like this idea from a longer post about the ethics of blogging by Brett Terpstra

I sometimes wish that job résumés and Tinder profiles required an appendix of all of the comments a person has left on other’s work in the last year. You can learn a lot about a person from how they approach offering criticism when it’s not face to face.

Anonymity’s a mess, I’m thankful I seem to live on a nicer part of the internet most of the time, more through lack of exposure.

I was trying to install TheHive and ran into some issues with configuration.

When trying to log in for the first time, I was getting “Elasticsearch cluster is not available” as a little red popup on the login screen.

When checking the log /opt/thehive/logs/application.log I found the following line:

2019-01-28 21:22:34,494 [WARN] from org.elasticsearch.client.transport.TransportClientNodesService in main - node {#transport#-1}{1eyCBCV1Rs-oVwFIHuQ7cw}{127.0.0.1}{127.0.0.1:9300} not part of the cluster Cluster [Cluster], ignoring...

This means the cluster name doesn’t match between TheHive and elasticsearch - mainly it is probably not set in elasticsearch - because that’s the default on install. The following two lines need to have matching outputs: