7 Minute Security

Today we're dusting off the Securing Your Community mini-series for part 4! I recap parts 1-3 (Operation Metro Surge, locking down Signal notification previews, and a handy iPhone trick that forces PIN-only unlock). Then I catch you up on what's happened since: we moved from "rescue pack" food aid to an adopt-a-family program, and we got vetted as on-call election escorts in case anyone needed a safe ride to the polls. Fair warning, this one's a little (OK, a lot) political, so feel free to skip it. I close on why watching the midterm results with my boys meant so much to our family. For more on what Metro Surge looked like on the ground, check out this Rolling Stone article.

Today's tale of pentest pwnage is about a GPO escalation path I'd seen before but could never get working, until a bloodhoundcli update introduced me to GroupPolicyBackdoor. I'll cover how it let me target one specific server, how it cleans up after itself, and the little gotcha that confused me in the lab. Spoiler: all this hard work ended with a 2 a.m. domain admin victory dance and a well-earned mint hot cocoa.  Added bonus: I've got a short video about GroupPolicyBackdoor over at 7MinSec.club.

Hey friends, today I'm sharing something that might be obvious, but really helped save my bacon this week: Claude is very good at PowerPoint.  I was working on a presentation with my friends at Netwrix (go catch the replay!), and was suffering some creative designer's/writer's block.  Claude got my juices flowing by taking raw recordings of pentest attacks and then Frankenstein-ing them to look like they came from a completely different (and cool!) Halloween-themed domain called HALLOWEEN.LOCAL.  I think today's episode is a great example of how you can use AI to bring a vision to life while staying in charge of the project's overall vision and not letting AI do all the thinking and creative work for you.

This episode is a downer, but asks some important topics related to losing a loved one:
Do you know what their wishes are for their funeral, their money, cremation vs. burial vs. other?
Do you know all the places they do business so you can adjust/takeover/cancel services as necessary?
Do you know all the places the have checking/saving/investment accounts?
Can you access all the important accounts this person used to manage?

Hey friends! Today I'm mashing two of our mini-series — eating the security dog food and my new obsession with n8n — into one big automation sandwich. I'll walk you through how Claude and a bunch of JSON files helped me build a self-updating asset inventory in Notion, firewall rule reviews, patch-ticket automation, and a push-button external pentesting and OSINT sweep. Basically, imagine I've cornered you at a party and won't stop talking about n8n.