For those of you unfamiliar with picoCTF, it’s a free online program with a series of miniature CTF challenges available for people to practice their skills. You can find my introductory writeup here. For this article, I’ll be discussing my solutions to some of the Reverse Engineering challenges. The first…

The second page has the remaining 7 challenges on it. The first of these, Bases, provides an alphanumeric string, bDNhcm5fdGgzX3IwcDM1, which it hints should be viewed in a different base. It contains a Z in it, so if it is a number, it would have to be in base 36…

I’ve recently been accepted into a university’s M.S. program, and since I’m getting the opportunity to return to studying cybersecurity full-time, I figured I should get involved with some of the university’s hacking organizations, something I missed out on while getting my bachelor’s. Some digging revealed a fairly active CTF…

Before going through the labs, we’ll skim the chapter and download any of the tools it mentions. I’d forgotten just how many there were in this book — going through this process reminded me of populating fresh virtual machines with these tools in college. …

In this article, I’ll be writing about the setting up a blank virtual machine for running exercises from Practical Malware Analysis, a foundational book in the field of reverse engineering. PMA was published in 2012, 2 years before Microsoft stopped support for the aging Windows XP OS, and it was…

After another few months of studies, I’ve managed to pass the CompTIA Net+ certification exam — on my first try, fortunately. I certainly found the study material for networking to be much drier than that for security — there were quite a lot of different numbers and standards to keep…

A few days ago I took the first steps in acquiring my cybersecurity credentials by passing the CompTIA Sec+ exam. I’d studied Jason Dion’s videos for about two months and Professor Messer’s for about one, as well as trying a variety of free apps to make studying something I could…