2018-04-29 -  The life of a SOC analyst – as is the case with many other jobs – can involve a lot of repetitive tasks, including the process of writing tens of similar emails each day. But what if this could be automated, saving time and reducing the potential for error? The...

2018-04-08 -  Part of my time at the SANS Cyber Retraining Academy covered the incident response methodology and how to identify what’s wrong and how to fix it. But theory is quite different to the real thing, so I thought it would be useful to make a cheat sheet with a few...

2018-01-20 -  It’s almost a year to the day that I left my journalism job and started at the SANS Cyber Retraining Academy, and I’ve written a lot of blog posts about how much I enjoyed the experience and how valuable and life-changing it was. But now I’ve been in the industry...

2017-11-18 -  I won’t just remember 2017 as the year I made the jump into the cyber security industry – I’ll also remember it as the year I properly welcomed podcasts into my life. I now listen to a wide range of shows, from daft comedies like My Brother, My Brother and Me...

2017-11-11 -  A lot has happened since April. In case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t blogged about it, so I wanted to give an update. Also, I was tired of seeing Rick and Morty at the top of my website and needed to publish something new to push that down the homepage...

2017-04-03 -  Rick and Morty returned this weekend, and the third season premiere unexpectedly showcased just how devastating a successful command injection attack can be. Held prisoner in a simulation of his own memories, sometimes-great, always-mad scientist Rick Sanchez is forced to relive the moment he created his portal gun so his...

2017-03-27 -  The SANS Cyber Retraining Academy concludes this week, but before graduation there was time for students to take one last GIAC examination to assess our incident handling skills. I’d already passed the GIAC Security Essentials (GSEC) exam with 94 per cent a few weeks ago, but I was more nervous...

2017-03-24 -  This week was all about hacking at the SANS Cyber Retraining Academy, as students attempted to take control of a drone before embarking on a two-day Netwars capture the flag marathon. The challenges spanned a huge range of skills – we found ourselves doing everything from setting up backdoors and...

2017-03-18 -  I used to swear by macOS, but in recent years I found performance dropping and frustration growing. Luckily, my eyes were opened to what a great alternative Linux has become. Since 2009, I’ve been a pretty consistent user of macOS – or OS X, as it was called until recently....

2017-03-09 -  We shouldn’t be surprised that organisations like the CIA are using technology to monitor people of interest to them, but the weaknesses they knowingly leave behind are a big concern. This week, along with other students at the SANS Cyber Retraining Academy, I completed two capture the flag challenges. I...