Joshua McDill

Hafnium APT Lab

Hello, world. I've been working towards my Certified Cyber Defenders certification the past few months, which has been a pretty brutal stretch for me if I'm being honest. My plan is to document some of my efforts for others to benefit from now that I'

Home SIEM environment - Part 1

Introduction I've been wanting to try out Wazuh for a while, given its low complexity setup and reputation for being a solid, opensource, SIEM. My last trial was with a Security Onion instance, which was very painful due to limited physical resources. Not so with Wuzah! The minimal

Archiving the Archives...

Hello! As you can probably tell I haven't written in a while. There are many reasons for this, ranging from competing obligations to faith, family, and community, to being involved in technical work I really can't talk much about in detail. Honestly this makes me sad.

Mitigating risk...with soup cans!

Recently my wife and I were discussing what I'd do if I wasn't building and maintaining security systems all day. We both came to the same conclusion...I'd probably end up building and maintaining security systems all day. There has always been something about

Port-scanning with OpenSSH

As a systems engineer with a hacker brain, I'm always excited to find and share creative ways to use/misuse tools at hand when the ideal isn't available. What follows is a product of that propensity. When testing network connectivity between systems, most of the audience

What you learn when testing fails...

The internet is full of sites dedicated to educating the public. This is especially true in the technology sector where bloggers and researchers spend hours crafting clean and clever projects to share with the community in hopes others can learn from their accomplishments. I've written (or tried to

It's always a networking problem...unless it's not...

Troubleshooting unencrypted, encrypted, and proxied network connections

My first ITSEC job...

I've spent the past few weeks crafting this post because I want it to serve several purposes: 1. Giving God the glory. He's known me since before I was born and has been with me through every stumbling step. 2. Encourage anyone struggling towards a career

Contemplation of circuits and society

I was recently privileged with an opportunity to troubleshoot a system outside my computer lab; my car. What follows is a little walk through on how I fixed the issue as well as some philosophical musing that occurred to me while working it. Full disclosure, I'm no shade-

Cooking with Flask...

Cooking up some code with Flask to demonstrate Apache load-balancing.