Cyber Security: An Offensive Mindset [Week 6

Page Title

Cyber Security: An Offensive Mindset [Week 6 - Portfolio]

Portfolio

Introduction

The "Cyber Security: An offensive Mindset" Summer Studio was an absolutely great experience, one that I thoroughly enjoyed. It kept me continuously progressing and evolving throughout its entirety, what surprised me most was my significant confidence boost towards Cyber Security. This new found confidence now matches the tremendous passion that I had towards this industry prior to commencing this studio. Prior to this Summer Studio I had conducted countless hours of research about how to get involved and push myself into this industry, but I was inundated with numerous of different perspectives on certifications to complete and what roles to do to gain experience. But I am forever grateful to my facilitators and mentors Larry, Max and Jason who truly made this learning experience an invaluable and extremely beneficial one.

The contents of this blog post contains my final portfolio, a collation of my reflections and how I've achieved the expected five Subject Learning Outcomes (SLO) that were set at the introduction to this studio. Thank you very much if you're reading this it is much appreciated that you've taken time out to acknowledge my work, so without further a-due enjoy my journey.

Final Reflection

SLO 1: Engage with Stakeholders to identify a problem

This Learning experience was like no other I've ever had experience to it was crucially centred around stakeholders. Over the course of only six weeks it this summer studio was jam packed with industry exposure, with our studio having the liberty of very qualified and experienced individuals presenting and answering a variety of different questions which I found was a tremendous experience. We also had facilitators who have industry experience bringing elements of their work life back to our Summer Studio. For example conducting stand ups each face to face session, holding one on ones with us to evaluate our performance and utilising communication methods like Microsoft Teams. I found that these integrated teaching methods incredible, they truly gave me a taste of industry and what life within the Cyber Security industry would entail.

Although over the course of my reflections during this studio my problem statement was constantly being redefined and evolving. However, I wasn't able to look past what our guest Robert Mitchell discussed which really resinated and hit home for myself.

"The internet was initially built on openness, access, availability and implicit trust. As it was previously an academic network, but now it is a commercial one with organisations at the forefront of cyber threats." - Robert Mitchell

The reason I have chosen this problem statement is for the pure fact that with the lightning speed of the internets evolution, it has left organisations stranded utilising it for its enormous potential and endless potential but with this comes great responsibility with a variety of forms of risk. From risk being technical, commercial, regulatory, operational or even reputational in nature. What truly fascinates me is in todays day and age, a significant cyber threat for an organisation today could be as simple as an oblivious employee clicking a link or attachment in a phishing or spear phishing email, which then gives an intruder access to the internal network or systems. Keep in mind this form of threat hasn't been invented recently this method of targeting organisations has been reinvented from virus' like "Melissa" (1999) the first attachment virus and "ILOVEYOU" (2000) an embedded script virus that relied on social engineering to get users to "click on the link".

Over the course of the Summer Studio the guests that we had the liberty to meet were as follows:

Matthew Brenna: Cyber Security Analyst at Indue (Week One).
Patrick L. Kelso: Cloud Enablement Lead at UTS (Week Two).
Robert Mitchell: Manager Strategic Lead at GitLab (Week Two).
Nathan Jones: Penetration Tester at Deloitte (Week 5).
Pieter Westein: Penetration Tester at Deloitte (Week 5).

From week two I had to opportunity to speak with Patrick, who had a wealth of knowledge especially in regards to the OS Linux. His talk really inspired me and opened my eyes to the endless possibility and opportunity that Linux holds.

Figure 1 - Patrick S. Kelso Business Card After I spoke with him

Below is from our guests Nathan and Westein from Deloitte, both very experienced and talented Penetration Testers within industry. They brought a vulnerable machine exercise with them to class which we had the opportunity to test and attempt to break into.

Figure 2 - Deloitte Industry Guests

As mentioned prior my facilitators Larry, Max and Jason were all instrumental in my learning experience, week in week out they provided me with a ongoing one on one help with anything at all. They also provided progressive and ongoing feedback which I felt kept me continuously striving to do better and learn as much as possible. I can safely say that without my facilitators I wouldn't have been able to get to the confidence level that I am now at. They've truly helped fuel the drive my future endeavours within the Cyber Security industry, without there subtle nudges to get me back on track I definitely wouldn't have learnt or achieved as much as I have during this studio.

Figure 3 - Jason Unpacking an Issue I was Struggling to Grasp

Figure 4 - Max Nudging Me whilst doing TryHackMe

SLO 2: Apply Design Thinking to Respond to a defined or Newly Identified Problem

From the beginning of the studio, I continuously built upon research surrounding design thinking through a variety of learning resources provided in this studio I developed a very useful way of thinking. This was almost a framework which I utilised across the six week studio which I prototyped and tested continuously, it was interesting to watch it evolve over the course of six weeks. I believe that Google was my best friend throughout this studio to find flaws and take advantage of them by thinking in a creative fashion. Stepping up to the challenge of HackTheBox was extremely though but what it taught me was how to be resourceful as well as how important it is to focus on trial and error. This is because sometimes you're so close to the answer and it may be that you're simply mistyping one character from breaking into a system (which I'm guilty of when misspelling a user password that I discovered).

During the studio we were introduced to the design thinking process involving enumeration, exploitation and privilege escalation. This did take time to understand completely what exactly each component consisted of and how I could implement it myself. However, progressively each week we were exposed to each of the three stages learning from a variety of online resources to understand what is involved in each of these stages. The stage that I found has the most emphasis upon it is enumeration which means asking questions of the system you're targeting, if you then uncover something you ask further questions until you've narrowed down, prototyped and tested. This then allows you to find and enforce an exploit or conduct a privilege escalation from a user to root which is the ultimate goal when conducting a penetration test in industry.

Figure 5 - Evidence of Design Thinking

Throughout the course of the summer studio we were exposed to a variety of useful tools and experimenting with how to use them to their full potential in my specific use case. One tool that was absolutely vital to beating both Open Admin and Traverxec boxes on the HackTheBox resource was Nmap, a network mapping tool that is required to gain preliminary insight about what is specifically running on the system we are targetting. Initially I struggled with this tool as I was extremely unfamiliar and it used to many variables (flags), it left me quite frustrated initially. But utilising the design thinking methodology I was testing as well as conducting trial and error, progressively sure enough I became familiar with the tool and flags as I conducted scans which reduced my wait times and allowed me to collect the necessary information I need to enumerate the system I was targeting. Below is a very useful cheatsheet which I discovered when researching about the tool and it assisted me greatly as I am a visual learner, it catered substantially to my needs of understanding how this would contribute to my arsenal of tools I required.

Figure 6 - Understanding Nmap Tool

SLO 3: Apply Technical Skills to Develop, Model and/or Evaluate Design

I found that my facilitators provided me with such a large variety of resources to develop my technical skills in an ongoing and progressive fashion. But initially the first deliverable to create our own blog was something I had been wanting to do for a long time, it was great to get down and dirty with plenty of issues but eventually creating my own blog hosted online and developing my technical skill level along the way. Initially in the summer studio I found myself put to the test, with plenty of time researching and a lot of trial and error to understand how different tools or technologies function.

A long the way I created my own analogy for why it is important to develop your technical skills when delving into the Cyber Security industry. This is because it is similar to taking a car apart and understanding how each component works, then putting the entire engine and car back together again the same way you found it. This is how technical skills are to be utilised to deconstruct and look under the hood at applications and systems to observe certain elements, understand how they work by researching then finding an issue or flaw that we can exploit (take advantage of).

To help understand and illustrate the journey that my technical skills have taken and been developed, I'd like to create a summarisation of how I undertook this learning journey. I hope that in the future this may provide insight and help others after me to also develop their technical skills.

Week One:

Creating a personal static webpage which would act as our blog, understanding and incorporating different tools to make this possible. This involved:

Getting a command from NameCheap.
Creating a local Hugo (Markdown language) Webpage and Github Repository.
Using Netlify to build the website to my domain name [ankywinning.me](http://ankywinning.me) each time a change was made to my Github Repository.

⚠️

Ankywinng.me domain is no longer active this has been migrated to dalmospots.com.

Week Two:

Setting up Kali Linux a Linux distribution prepackaged with useful tools that are extremely useful when conducting a penetration test, this was run using VMware Fusion (for mac).
Utilising resource OverTheWire: Bandit to learn basic Unix commands that will be useful when enumerating and navigating around a Linux system.
Researched the tool theHarvester and created a presentation with a group, to inform my peers of this useful open source reconnaissance tool.
Used resource PicoCTF, a capture the flag (challenges) created by security experts to help newbies get better at hacking.
TryHackMe: UltraTech resource provided an actual machine that we could run enumeration on and answer specific questions. This was useful because if you got stuck you could look up other peoples answers and explanations to understand the correct answer.

Week Three:

Learning how to use Burp Suite, a leading graphical tool for testing web application security created by PortSwigger.
OWASP Juice Shop resource (series of challenges) was used to better develop our web application testing skills, I found it extremely useful as this is a vital skill to add to your arsenal.
Made use of resource OverTheWire: Natas to further develop my understanding of web application testing which is vital.
Created a group presentation which focused Broken Access Control, an exploit that takes advantage of access controls that have or haven't been put in place properly.

Week Four:

Vulnhub: Basic Pentesting 1 was a vulnerable virtual machine downloaded and run which I was able to try and gain access to.
TryHackMe: Vulnversity this resource was revolutionary for me, this really assisted me going forward as it provided a step by step process and really helped me visually understand what was being asked of me.
TryHackMe: Boiler CTF was an intermediate machine which I was assigned to complete a full write up on how I was able to gain access to the system. I found by doing the previous boxes noted above helped me significantly with completing this write up.
Hack Invite Code: HackTheBox after completing my boiler CTF write up, in order to get a step ahead for the final two weeks I put myself to the test to utilising my web application skills, to hack an invite for HackTheBox. This was a tough challenge but this resource is invaluable and highly recognised by people in the security industry.

Week Five:

During this week the focus was utilising all the knowledge I have gained from the first four weeks to tackle my first box on HackTheBox: OpenAdmin. The TryHackMe and Vulnhub exercises that I had previously done proved to be extremely vital when doing this first box.
My Write up for this challenge can be found below (please note due to this resource not allowing public disclosure of solutions you will need the root flag to access this pdf).

Week Six:

In this final week we were challenged as a majority of my peers had already completed one box to complete another box on HackTheBox: Traverxec. This box was still quite challenging as it had its own elements which put me to the test, but having completed a previous box I was more experienced and up to the challenge. The write up for this box was the final deliverable for this week.
My Write up for this challenge can be found below (please note due to this resource not allowing public disclosure of solutions you will need the root flag to access this pdf).

It is extraordinary the looking back now how much work I was actually able to get through over the course of just six weeks. All of these learning resources and tasks that I've listed above in unison when I look back definitely aided me to develop the necessary skills I needed to complete the final deliverable for both week 5 and 6 which were Boxes on HackTheBox. I found developing my technical skills was tough, but so worth it I am still amazed by the amount of resources that are out there to learn from.

SLO 4: Demonstrate Effective Collaboration and Communication Skills

Over the course of the summer studio I believe that this was definitely the SLO that was my biggest strength, I believe the reasoning is because I pride myself on being a team player and working within a team environment is when I thrive the most. I have learnt the hard way that in the past that I need to bounce ideas and sometimes get clarification from either my peers or facilitators to ensure I am on the right track from the get go so I can give my absolute best to whatever I do. But I found this summer studio really pushed me out of my comfort zone forcing me to work with different individuals in each group exercise, it was really important for myself as I grew tremendously because of this. From my interpretation this was because each individual has a different way of doing things and you must work out a way that each of you in the team can fit together to work well to a common goal as a unit. I'm really glad that the studio focused on collaboration and group work, because I believe not just myself but all of my peers gained a lot from these exercises.

I found that a lot of the time during Wednesday non-class hours when Jason (facilitator) came in to university for extra face to face hours. That this was my most productive time of the week collaborating with my peers, as usually we all had similar issues and we were able to pass on their experience to me or vice versa. I found that outside of face to face communication Microsoft teams was a very useful way of communicating both with my peers and my facilitators over the course of the summer studio. This was because it was instant messages real time and I gained a response quite quickly when I had any issues especially from my facilitators Jason, Larry and Max.

Figure 7 - Evidence of Collaboration on Microsoft Teams

Figure 8 - Evidence of Communication with my Facilitator Jason

Whilst collaborating within my group for presentations I found that the pairing of both Microsoft Teams and the application Notion were great in unison. Notion is a great note taking tool but after some playing around during the semester I found it was really easy to use when collaborating with others. It was especially great at creating a group task board that all group members could edit simultaneously and move from "To do" to "Doing" and finally "Done". This allowed the group to function seamlessly knowing exactly where each of us were up to and allowed us to help each other out if someone was struggling.

Figure 9 - Evidence of Using Notion for Group Work and Collaboration

Finally, another interesting collaborative tool that one of my group and I utilised was Canva a presentation creation software. Which initially I thought was amazing as it was intuitive and the presentation itself looked great. But whilst using it for the entire group project I found it was quite frustrating to use, the reason is because only one user is able to edit the document at one time. This meant we'd need to take turns to make changes and view the document, which was definitely not a benefit when collaborating and I wouldn't use this tool again.

Figure 10 - Use of Canva for Creating a Group Presentation

Overall I believe my collaborative and communication skills have evolved a huge amount since doing this Summer Studio. Especially when presenting our final group deliverable at the Summer Studio Showcase on Thursday, presenting to a variety of different individuals gave me great exposure to explaining quite Technical Knowledge that I've gained into terms that an individual without a technical background could understand and interpret for themselves. I found this a great note to finish on show casing our hard work and it truly reflected what we learnt and experienced from the group presentations that we had throughout the summer studio to prepare us for that the occasion. From all of this experience I am definitely more confident and it has brought me one step closer to what the expectations are of individuals in industry.

SLO 5: Conduct Critical Self, Peer Review and Performance Evaluation

Throughout the journey of this Summer Studio this SLO was definitely the most constructive and pushed myself to progress further each week. Usually it would take me a long period to correct issues or problems that I am facing but I found this SLO specifically forced me to evaluate what was troubling me, flesh it out and just go with the possible solution for the upcoming week. This really gave me the nudge I needed to produce some amazing work and it truly is reflected when I look back now at the work that I completed how my work ethic was just on another level to what I've been able to achieve whilst being at university in other Subjects. It was almost as though I treated this critical self evaluation as a way to challenge myself each week to overcome my fears and lack of confidence at stages, throwing myself into everything and anything. For this reason I've gained a great attitude going forward to just give things a go and not put them off which I am usually quite guilty of doing.

I'm genuinely very proud of myself as I came into this Summer Studio with such a good attitude to learn and to better myself so I can do what I'm passionate about which is Cyber Security. Although I did have challenges along the way especially with my health and finding balance, these are definitely lessons learned going forward into my career. My work ethic and the work that I was able to produce has truly surprised me greatly, never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd be able to Hack an invite into HackTheBox let alone beat two boxes on the site in less than a week and a half. The ongoing reflections that were expected each week were also tremendous for my journey to evaluate my progress and set new goals for my future self to grow each week. Looking back at each reflection that I did proves to me how vital this element was, it also portrays to me how far I've come in just a matter of only six weeks.

Figure 11 - My Progress on HackTheBox

Final Deliverable

The final deliverable that was expected for the Summer Studio was as seen in Figure 11 to complete a second box "Traverxec" on HackTheBox. This was to be conducted individually and in a format professional format as if it was a report provided to an organisation after a Penetration Test conducted. It was to be readable by anyone so limited technical language and give a thorough explanation of how certain results were achieved. Due to HackTheBox not allowing any public disclosure of write ups for Active machines which Traverxec is, I have had to password encrypt the .pdf file which contains the write up.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am so ever grateful to my facilitators Larry, Jason and Max they've really provided such a good support network for this Summer Studio. They have provided so many learning resources and the experience was just amazing because they've been in my shoes before they can empathise with the challenges I was going through, which provided very useful. This course and its facilitators seriously made it so enjoyable and challenged me tremendously so much so that I am willing to say I have learnt more in this 6 weeks than I have in almost all of the subjects I have taken in my undergraduate degree at UTS. Finally, this summer studio really fed my curiosity and now when I take a step back I can see that because I was so curious I really did achieve A LOT of work. As Jason (facilitator) said on the first day if you want to learn we'll support you, and you'll learn a lot. I have also created some absolutely amazing friendships from part taking in this studio, friendships that I KNOW I will have for a life time.

If I can say one finally thing to resonate with you this Summer Studio taught me to learn how I Learn and for that I am greatly appreciative to my facilitators for that, and their unfaltering support.