Tag Archives: packet capture

Why I don’t have a lab

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An industry mailing list I’m on recently had a conversation that started asking about Master Degrees but had some hiring managers chip in. They said a question they tend to ask is to have the candidate tell about their home lab.

I’ve been asked this question a few times in the past, and I’ve asked people this question in job interviews. I know it’s to find out what kind of passion the candidate has for the job, but I think it’s starting to become a bad question to ask.

Here is why I don’t have a home lab.

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Reading Malware Traffic Analysis

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I’ve made it through the June and July 2013 posts on Malware Traffic Analysis. I’m starting to understand his process more, and partially how he came to follow that process.

Mainly from what I could tell, and was confirmed in the blog posts, and via twitter, The site explodes malware on systems and gets pcaps for those systems. Then looks to see what call outs are there. The exercises and blog posts, so far, have only shown 1 ip address. Which makes it easier than a full corporate network to find the traffic.

Something I noticed. While Malware Traffic Analysis says to configure Wireshark one way, the blog posts of late show it’s now configured a little differently.

It’s all about the pcaps baby

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So my android phone as an interesting problem, granted it’s an S4, running not the latest build so I don’t know if that problem still exists. Apparently the way the default mail application is set up, it can’t sync the mailboxes unless the Sync button is turned on. But that doesn’t stop that the mail application from trying to sync on a schedule.

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Designing a new home lab

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I used to have a home lab of 3 cisco routers, and 3 cisco switches. That was for my CCNA training. Problem was, they were so old, they were not worth it. The lab also had 2 Intel 32-bit PC towers and a Sun Ultra 10. The Sun box was to get the Sun certification, but never got around to it. That isn’t to say that the lab wasn’t used. Just not used for the reasons I originally bought the components for.

Now, since I graduated and I have money to spend on building a new lab, I’m looking at getting something new set up. After watching Johnny X(m4s) and Eve Adams recorded talk from Derbycon. I decided on the following design.

Lab Design v1

So this will be on a separate internet connection from my home network. That means getting a second line to the house, but it doesn’t have to be the fastest line in the world.

The hope is to have the PFSense box, the Security Onion Box, and the Vmware ESXi box all running on Micorservers. The price for the Lenovo ones are decent.

I want a Cisco 3560g switch for Gig out all the ports, plus the layer 2 / 3 routing. Again the price isn’t too bad, about the same as the Microsevers. Lastly if I decide to go for the CCNA again, it should be useful.

The wireless access point was chosen from the Offensive Security WiFu class hardware list. I could use my old Linksys WRT54GL with dd-rwt on it. But it cant’ do N. Granted it looks like the Off-Sec recommended ones are only half N.

Lastly, it would be nice to have a peg board with all my Raspberry Pi devices attached to it. Requires being easy to remove them, but not a big issue. This would give me a place to have them while working and store them when not in use. If I can get POE on the 3560g, that means I can get a POE splitter and adapter for each Raspberry Pi, and don’t have to worry about power there either.

The laptop would be as needed device. I could use my current one or buy one to dedicate to the lab. Mainly it’s there for user interface purposes than anything else.

The only downside, even though I’m not paying for college classes out of pocket any more, is that it will take a while to build this lab. I’m going to have to piece it together a little at a time.

Raspberry Pi projects

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Back in May and June, I did a project for school with 6 Raspberry Pis to build a WIDs. It went good. I wrote an article, I’m waiting to hear back if it’ll get published.

After the project, I had 6 Raspberry Pis kicking around. I have a project I want to work on, that could lead to another article. I just need to build my skills up to that first.

To get there, I wanted to build an Onion Pi. This will tie in to another project I’m working on. As some of you know I’m a fan of The Onion Router (TOR), especially when I’m doing Intelligence related research. The Onion Pi would be a good thing to have in the bag of tricks.

To get the Onion Pi working, I needed to go through the Adafruit Wifi Access Point. This is the second time I build an AP. This one is just a little different than last time. This time instead of an Edimax wireless card, I went with one of my TP Link TL-WN722Ns. I wanted the external antenna. I was using the 2014-09-09_wheezy_raspbian image.

Hostapd didn’t work right. It kept throwing errors on start about nl80211 not being a known driver. I had to build hostapd from source, which needed to have libssl-dev and libnl-1.1 installed, to get hostpad to build right. Then I needed to copy my built version into the right place.

I also had problems with isc-dhcp-server and tor starting. It looks like wlan0 isn’t starting properly. I’ll have to troubleshoot it more later. Adafruit has a comment about disabling wpa_supplicant. I don’t know if that will fix the problem though. I’ll follow up after.

knowing what your tools do

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When I changed my firewall rule policy, part the reason for doing it was because I was getting tired of seeing dovecot:auth failures in the logs. People around the world were brute forcing my mail server, and the rules were 100 lines long of just blocking. I had thought that they were coming from people hitting port 993 (IMAPS), and to a point there were. You can see below where it is dropping port 993 access attempts.

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