Latest Posts
Quick Hit: windows-exploit-suggester.py Won’t Read .xlsx Database
Problem windows-exploit-suggester.py isn’t reading the database file generated from the –update. It claims it doesn’t support xlsx files even though I ran pip install xlrd. Solution I don’t really know exactly *why* this doesn’t work and maybe will come back later to figure it out but I’m working on an…
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AutoRecon Broke!
Problem “I used Tib3rius’s AutoRecon successfully, like, a week ago but now it’s broken!” Chances are that you also recently ran an apt update && apt upgrade during the intervening period and now your trusty sudo $(which autorecon) commands are complaining about not knowing what autorecon is. See “Related Errors”…
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VMware Workstation: “‘MonitorLoop’ power on failed.”
Are you trying to power on a virtual machine on your ESXi host and VMware Workstation is telling you, “Unable to change virtual machine power state: Module ‘MonitorLoop’ power on failed.” There are two reasons you’d be seeing this. Your datastore is running out of disk space You recently experienced…
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A Belated Review of “SEC573: Automating Information Security With Python”
Over the 20 or so years I’ve been writing code I’d never taken a class in a language. As a web developer (PHP), software engineer (Perl), or SysAdmin (bash, Python), I’d simply Googled my way to competency. My personal journey into IT was through the U.S. Army when the Army…
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A Tale of Two PoCs or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Honeypot
Direct calls to my mobile from the branch chief, Jim, were recent occurrences, as COVID-19 teleworking efforts dragged into their 6th week and day-to-day operations at my cyber defense employer continued to transform around a remote workforce. The phone call was about an e-mail sent 20 minutes earlier from the…
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“Cards Against Humanity” Remotely
I am typing this for my friends who have responded to my call on social media for a good old fashioned game of (socially distant) Cards Against Humanity. What follows are the requirements to get everyone up on a knock-off game. Requirements: Proficiency with Zoom (only the host needs a…
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Steam Crashes When Launching in Linux Mint
I recently tried to launch Steam on my Linux Mint daily driver to experience a Dungeons & Dragons throwback with Baldur’s Gate. A window popped up to check for updates and seemed to progress normally until it crashed. There was no feedback received, save from unhelpful errors inside /var/log/syslog. Solution…
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Trick certbot into auto-configuring Amazon Linux 2
I use Let’s Encrypt to enable SSL/TLS encryption on all my websites. It’s brain-dead simple to configure with the EFF’s companion certbot tool and has gone a long way into the massive increase in HTTPS-by-default across the web. Unfortunately, certbot is not as familiar with the distant relative of the…
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PHP Warning: require_once(Mail.php): failed to open stream
This one is pretty simple but sometimes frustrating to troubleshoot because the error below has you hunting for a file called Mail.php somewhere in your document root. Spoiler alert: it’s totally not there and never will be. Maybe this is the first PHP mail form you’ve built on this server…
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How to Copy a Lot of Files With rsync
In order to add a new drive to my Linux desktop for a new /home partition, I needed to copy a lot of files to an external USB drive. The directory was large and had over a decade’s worth of content. cp -rp wasn’t going to work. I wanted speed,…
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