IAM is the AWS control plane. Almost every public AWS breach traces back to an IAM misconfiguration — over-permissive roles, leaked access keys, or trust policies that accidentally trust the entire internet. This is the modern playbook. The Foundation Lock the Root Account The root user has powers no other principal can have (closing the account, modifying the support plan). Treat it like nuclear codes: ...
Recon is the single highest-leverage activity in bug bounty hunting — but most beginners do it wrong. They run every tool, collect 200,000 subdomains, and then stare at the wall. This is the recon pipeline used by hunters who consistently hit the leaderboard. ...
OSINT — open-source intelligence — is the systematic collection of public data to answer a specific question. Done well, it’s the single highest-leverage skill in incident response, threat intel, due diligence, and bug bounty recon. Done poorly, it’s hours of dead Google links. ...
The OSCP exam changed substantially in 2024 — three Active Directory machines worth 40 points and three standalone hosts worth 60. Pass mark stayed at 70/100. This roadmap reflects the current exam, not the legacy one your YouTube favorites prepared for. ...
Most SIEMs fail not because the technology can’t keep up but because the detection content is bad. This guide walks through how a detection engineer actually thinks about a rule, from data onboarding to deployment. The Lifecycle Threat → Hypothesis → Data → Query → Tuning → Deploy → Measure → Retire Skip any step and you produce noise. ...
The OWASP Top 10 isn’t just a checklist — it’s a snapshot of how real-world breaches happen. The 2021 revision reorganized the previous list around root causes rather than symptoms, which makes it a much better map for both developers and security engineers. This guide walks through each category with reproducible examples, fixes, and detections. ...
Crypto categories in CTFs intimidate more newcomers than any other. The barrier isn’t math — it’s pattern recognition. Almost every CTF crypto challenge is a known weakness applied to slightly different parameters. The First Pass — Identify the Family When a challenge drops, classify it in under 30 seconds: ...
Platform Hack The Box Difficulty Easy OS Windows Points 20 Release 2020-02-22 Tags AD, AS-REP Roasting, DCSync Sauna is a deceptively rich Active Directory box. Despite its Easy rating, it walks you through three classic AD attack primitives — AS-REP Roasting, credential reuse via AutoLogon, and DCSync — making it one of the best beginner boxes for anyone preparing for OSCP, CRTP, or AD-heavy red team interviews. ...
The Windows privilege escalation surface has narrowed since the days of unquoted-service-path goldmines, but it hasn’t disappeared. Token abuse, misconfigured services, and overlooked AutoLogon registry entries still net SYSTEM on a meaningful percentage of corporate hosts. Step 0: Baseline whoami /all systeminfo | findstr /B /C:"OS Name" /C:"OS Version" /C:"System Type" hostname whoami /all is the single most informative command. Look at: ...
Kerberoasting remains the highest-ROI Active Directory attack: any authenticated domain user can request a service ticket for any account with a Service Principal Name (SPN), and crack that ticket offline. No special privileges. No exploits. Just Kerberos working as designed. ...