Hi all, a quick update as I know I haven’t posted in a little while.

Currently revising for my CYSA+, unfortunately life has gotten in the way and haven’t been able to do as much as I would like but I’m making steady progress on this one. One particular topic I have been finding interesting is URL Analysis and hope to write a more detailed post about this shortly.

Hoping to take the exam in July or perhaps August but may slip further, especially if I dedicate more time to practical experience.

On a further note I have now successfully formatted an old laptop and installed the open-source firewall pfsense. Ideally I wanted to use a netgate router, however at the current time I’m struggling to justify the £200+ for it when I can recycle an existing device.

Installation was quite tricky and I ran into a range of issues from issues accessing the BIOS to change the boot order, secure boot, the machine stubbornly trying to boot off the SSD cache (yes the machines one of them.. and then a refusal of pfsense to work on the LAN. Turns out it was the powerline not syncing properly but ah well, it’s now up and running.

I have a few ideas of what I want to try with it and I’m especially eager to get some logging done and hooked up to a SIEM (perhaps Elastic ELK or QRadar?)

That’s it for now!