Homelab: The OPNsense Gauntlet

- 16 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Introduction I don’t usually start these off with a disclaimer, but I definitely am this time. This post is an absolute doozy as we are configuring multiple services here on OPNsense. Each of these could be a separate post, but I decided to do this whole thing in one go. Now you are totally good to just skip to the sections you are interested in reading, in fact I encourage it.

Homelab: Setting Up Ollama and Open-WebUI

- 7 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Introduction Why hello there everyone and welcome back to what is essentially a bonus to the homelab series and also the start of a kind of a new one. Today we are going to be installing Ollama, pulling down a model from Hugging Face and then giving the model a web GUI with Open-WebUI. Now the reason this was not a part of the original homelab plan, is because this is actually also the beginning of my capstone research project and so is kind of its own thing.

Homelab: Deploying FleetMDM

- 10 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Introduction Hello everyone and welcome back to the continuation of our homelab series. If you happen to be reading these in order I wanna say welcome back, I know it’s been a bit. Been juggling a few different projects, but hoping to kinda do a big dump of posts here and then it might be a little bit before the next batch. And that’s cool and all, but you’re here to install and deploy FleetMDM with me so let’s get to that.
+++ Introduction Hello everyone and welcome back to the next post in our Detection Engineering series. In the last post, we started getting our feet wet with detection engineering by reading through a Cisco Talos report on Chaos ransomware’s msaRAT and creating a couple Sigma rules from the activity described in the report. We made one rule for the suspicious curl.exe command used to download the malware and another for Chrome or Edge launching in headless mode with the Chrome DevTools Protocol enabled.
Introduction Hello everyone and welcome back to another post from yours truly. Today we’re going to be doing something slightly different actually. I’ve been looking more into detection engineering recently and been wanting to get better at writing detection rules in different formats and whatnot. So today we’re going to be actually looking at a threat intelligence post from Cisco Talos covering some malware from the Chaos ransomware group. Specifically, their msaRAT malware that uses the browser for its C2 communications.

Delpoying Grafana, Prometheus and Uptime Kuma

- 7 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Deploying Grafana, Prometheus and Uptime Kuma Introduction So this entries going to be a bit of a doozy everyone. We’re going to be deploying all of our non-security monitoring tools. By that I mean tools that monitor uptime and system resource usage, good old’ fashioned sys admin things. To do this we will be deploying three different services. First off Grafana, a very popular data visualization tool which I cannot express just how much you can do with it.

Delpoying Nextcloud

- 4 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Introduction Hello everyone, and welcome back to the homelab series! Today, we’re deploying Nextcloud, a popular self-hosted cloud platform that probably needs no introduction. If you aren’t familiar with it, think of it as a self-hosted alternative to Google Drive with plenty of additional applications and features available. For now, we’re focusing on getting the core service running. We’ll cover hardening and remote access in a future post. Setting Up the Container Alright, first things first let’s make some directories to store some of our configurations and also the actual files we want to save.

Deploying Jellyfin

- 11 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Deploying Jellyfin Welcome! Hello and welcome to this installment of the homelab series. Today we’re deploying a very popular application called Jellyfin. Jellyfin is a media server that allows you to self-host your own streaming service! Plex is another popular option, but I’ve always wanted to do Jellyfin so that’s what I’m doing. This post is solely just deploying Jellyfin and getting it up and running, I won’t be really getting into the security best practices yet, I just wanna have something working here first.

Homelab Overview

- 5 mins read

Series: Homelab Series

Welcome to my Homelab! Hello everyone and welcome to my take on the obligatory building a cybersecurity lab series! Even though I do feel like this is a very common thing to constantly see from people there’s a good reason for it. Building a homelab is great practice for a ton of different basic IT skills and security engineering. One of the differences I hope to make apparent is that a lot of tutorials are (almost) all virtualized.
Writeup I’m not gonna lie to you, this one had me stumped for quite a few days, but as per the usual with these things the answer was kinda in my face if I just had dug a little deeper. So let’s go ahead and dig into CBC Task 2. Okay, so the disk image we were looking at last task definitely had some malware installed on the “endpoint” and that malware was generating some network traffic.