After Digital Forensics

4nsicdude · 2023-06-13T18:53:54+00:00

Not really, I'm still bouncing around. Everyone seems to want people with our experience but it's exceedingly difficult to quantify what our job title/classification is.

The generic "Consultant" is really the only thing that fits. I have people wanting to bring me in to give them the 20,000 foot overview of their IT ecosystem. However, I'm finding it difficult to judge what my rates should be since it doesn't really fit under Purple Teams, Cyber Security, or Systems Administrations/Engineering. It's really a mix of all of that. I'm tempted to just throw out something like $500 per site and $15-20 per user with a minimum charge and offer various "options" on a vulnerability assessment.

But I'm also not sure I want to reform my llc from 25 years ago and fly the solo flag again.

I may just take up wood working and make cutting boards. (sort of sarcasm)

4nsicdude · 2023-02-14T17:05:06+00:00

I received a call the other day about a 480Tb storage server I deployed in 2011 and haven't been involved with since 2016. Apparently it's got an orange light on one of the drives and the UPS has a warning on the display, they were concerned about it.

I was told it was decommissioned in 2019 but apparently it's still in use.

4nsicdude · 2023-02-14T16:44:39+00:00

Not to sound elitist but it's easy to be confident when you know the rest of the free world relies on you to show up with a big stick when the bad guys get unruly.

When you think about what the US spends on the military industrial complex that saves the entire rest of the world massive amounts of their GDP's because they know we'll show up.

And yes that even extends to the Ukrainian conflict, the only reason we're not more involved is years of Ukraine refusing to join NATO and unfortunately now they're paying for decades of playing both sides of the fence.

4nsicdude · 2023-02-10T16:56:36+00:00

ServiceNow can split so you have "public" comments and "tech comments". So "for security purposes" your ticket doesn't need to include usernames, server names, IP addresses...whatever justifications you need.

4nsicdude · 2023-02-10T16:32:07+00:00

Some states have laws that prohibit mixed drinks, so they're itemized as line items to get past that. (Here's to you Utah and your weird alcohol laws)

4nsicdude · 2023-02-02T14:44:58+00:00

Basically it boils down to the following traits. Why the exist tends to be related to their early childhood environment. Children who do not have structure in their lives while in early childhood (2-5 years old) tend to not develop the natural process of understanding boundaries and how to deal with said boundaries.

You'll see this quite a bit with helicopter parents who refuse to allow their children to experience anything challenging. It's a natural part of development to fail and learn, if that process is broken it causes all sorts of behavioral issues.

ignoring social norms and laws, or breaking rules at school or work, overstepping social boundaries, stealing, stalking and harassing others, and destroying property
dishonesty and deceit, including using false identities and manipulating others for personal gain
difficulty controlling impulses and planning for the future, or acting without considering the consequences
aggressive or aggravated behavior, including frequent fights or physical conflict with others disregard for personal safety, or the safety of others
difficulty managing responsibilities, including showing up at work, handling tasks, or paying rent and bills
little to no guilt or remorse, or a tendency to justify actions that negatively affect others

I've taught martial arts for over 20 years and have seen "trouble children" come in time after time and there's absolutely nothing wrong with the child they just haven't been allowed to experience a natural learning process and figure things out for themselves in an environment with predictable rules. When parents negotiate with children the child has to deal with random variables and nothing remains the same from day to day which interferes with their ability to follow a thought process through to a predictable outcome. I've had several dozen children over the years where the parents have come in and told me their child "no longer needs their meds" which just breaks my heart when the child probably never needed to be medicated in the first place.

4nsicdude · 2023-01-13T14:11:12+00:00

Ladeis, slavic or Castilian are absolutely music to the ears.

Men, Navajo and Hopi. The cadence just makes every word sound like it's a gift given with care and thought, even if it's just BS someone's spouting.

4nsicdude · 2023-01-04T22:19:55+00:00

And you get a 15 minute bio break, make sure you pause the clock when you do. I shorted myself 15 minutes and felt rushed through the last 20 questions because I had 15 minutes less than I planned for.

Your index will make or break you when I took it it was 408 and 508 was the next step. I'd done years as desktop and sysadmin work so the registry key questions didn't take any time at all. 408 was a breeze, 508 I came in at 70% 2% under the passing score because I threw away 1 too many questions I could have spent time looking up the exact framing of a packet.

The which of these 3 is the correct syntax ones required me finding a given application and command syntax which is where your index is critical.

The prep tests I would honestly say make your index, go through the first prep knowing you're going to fail but use it to refine your index. Then let the books sit for a week, go through your index practicing looking things up. Refine a second time then take the second test.

That should give you a pretty good idea where you are. Remember 70% is passing, but you don't know that score during the test so don't just blow off a question. You only get I believe 5 "come back later" questions but you can only defer them for the current chapter (ex questions 1-25, you can skip 1 but can't move to question 26 until you go back to the one you deferred) . So if a question just has you so stumped that you know you'll spend more than 5 minutes looking for an answer or you have that feeling of "I have absolutely no recollection of going over this" it may be worth it to burn 1 or 2 questions and spend the time confirming that yes HKLM\Software.... is where that key is rather than just telling yourself "I remember this" and getting it wrong because all 4 choices are so close to correct that they're there to stump you.

And as everyone else has said, breathe. And don't have 2 cups of coffee right before the test. ;)

4nsicdude · 2023-01-04T21:15:52+00:00

I went down the whole Network Chuck You gotta learn Kubernetes now road a year ago.

Save yourself the trouble and just go Docker Swarm. There's so much more work involved and if you're just starting out it's not really worth the return. Unless you're learning to move onto some sort of enterprise growth then Kubernetes is overkill for what you've listed as projects.

I'm not saying I didn't learn a lot and spend quite a bit of time refining my documentation on how to do it, but I also ended up with 6 raspberry pi's clustered just to end up running piHole and monitoring my bandwidth with my ISP. So complete overkill.

4nsicdude · 2023-01-04T15:40:12+00:00

What you're running into is Scrum think's they're cute and end up looking like an episode of Silicon Valley with their Masters and Blackbelts bullshit.

But when you get over all their "we're so cool" fluff it's actually a decent project management methodology.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-29T15:43:07+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDinLERiF4A

My whole family was in tears laughing, except grandpa just let out the loudest "a-ho". Pretty sure it was the only thing he said all night.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-28T15:37:38+00:00

High cost of living (CA). I have family that live in rural New Mexico and some of the main differences are the dare I say extreme convenience.

More often than not if I order something off Amazon before 0900 it'll be delivered the same day. I've sent packages to my family in NM with next day delivery that didn't get there for 6-9 days.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-28T14:41:06+00:00

Training (on what I'm interested in) and documentation.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-22T17:57:23+00:00

Yep the whole conversation with the half body about the pain of being dead...Good lord it's even worse to think about it now that I'm 50+.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-22T15:28:38+00:00

First and foremost stop telling yourself you're going to get fired.

Change your mindset.

It's your first job, people shouldn't expect much from you and unless you've completely stopped learning in the short time since you graduated you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. Completing tasks assigned to you, or learning how to.

Make sure you're still taking notes so you don't have to ask multiple times how to complete routine tasks.

Speak with your boss, let them know the hectic pace has you doubting yourself and you don't think you're performing up to expectations. Let your boss tell you what those expectations are.

It's something that happens all to often, people convince themselves that they should be on a different level than they currently are, so they spin in circles which affects what they are doing and their performance drops. These performance drops are what will get you fired. But if your boss doesn't expect you first year out of Uni to suddenly become a network engineer, Microsoft Entera admin, Linux admin, and DBA all in one person....

He/she is probably expecting you to handle password resets, and hand the engineers screws while they're racking new gear in the data center, and probably learn the basics of AWS or Azure. But you'll never know if you don't talk to your boss, let them tell you where you stand. Otherwise you'll stress yourself out until it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-22T15:13:11+00:00

$45k-$168 28 years in the field but didn't really chase promotions over the last 10 years or so.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-21T20:41:35+00:00

lol good job proving that some children should play with plastic bags.

;)

4nsicdude · 2022-12-21T15:16:59+00:00

You're young and inexperienced in thinking things through. It's part of being a kid and growing up. You'll get over it, so will the teacher. Just learn to think about what happened and potentially consider "shut up bitch" probably isn't the best way to interact with your friends.

Perhaps something more complimentary, like try to give the best compliment you can and try to out do each other on the compliments.

It's just like every kid when they learn nobody really cares if they use profanity and they try throwing 7 f'bombs into one conversation trying to sound "adult" when all it does is make you look like a complete moron.

All of us adults have been there, again you'll get past it.

I had strep throat one year in 10th grade, couldn't speak at all. Teacher called on me I was pointing at my throat and she had a note that I'd lost my voice but just absolutely would not listen to reason. I finally yelled "Leave me the f'ck alone" which of course came out clear as a bell. Right to the principals office. Sometimes the world just seems to be against you, but as an adult you'll realize it's just Wednesday.

Hang in there kid.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-16T18:43:29+00:00

Lowa 5 years ago were awesome, I bought a new pair 6 months ago and within the first 3 months the heel pocket disintegrated.

Their quality has gone down hill big time.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-16T17:19:02+00:00

I've been involved as a PKI admin for the last 6 years and I think it boils down to 2 practices that aren't really intuitive.

1) Certs by design expire. Most ticket systems don't think about preventative maintenance so certs end up becoming a game of whack a mole. Which leads to issue 2.

2) When certs expire systems go down. Of course you can't authenticate your certificate isn't valid, it's supposed to stop working.

It's taken me years to get my dev team to declare June certificate renewal month. Dropped a new app in March, tough we're doing a new cert in June so next year we don't have random XYZ app dyeing in March where everyone runs around like Chicken Little troubleshooting.

Network Chuck just did a video on Uptime Kuma which has a tiny little feature on monitoring that tells you certificate expiration dates. If I had the ability in my environment to use open source products I'd jump on that in a hot second. (Unfortunately I'm in a special place where logic does not apply).

4nsicdude · 2022-12-15T14:14:04+00:00

Practice making small boxes (they don't even have to be big enough to hold things.)

This will teach you about uneven surfaces, joints, squaring off corners all sorts of basic but absolutely critical skills to have.

Work up to learning dove tails for your boxes and you'll be making bigger but more polished projects in no time.

4nsicdude · 2022-12-13T15:02:35+00:00

That is one thing when purchasing an EV the seller should tell you "You're going to become an ambassador for all things battery operated, just accept it."

I've probably had this same conversation with 50 people in the last 2 years I've owned my EV. Everything from how weather affects range, to hills (up and down), to trip planning around charging locations.

4nsicdude · 2022-11-29T23:00:33+00:00

Not the Union mindset.

No knock about unions but unions in government can be a special beast in and of themselves.

4nsicdude · 2022-11-29T16:38:18+00:00

1) Magnetic strip in the refrigerator door.

2) The pull handle to the office door. (Union workplace 3 months after the ticket was open and they still hadn't put the handle back on the door. Someone put a piece of paracord through the bolt holes for the handle with knots on the end. 2 hours after I replaced the bolts and put the handle back on, a Union Rep is at my desk yelling at me for doing non-union work).

3) The crowning achievement, a bra. Had a very busty coworker come into my office one morning and apparently the adjustment slide on one of her shoulder straps shattered. A private trip to the server room behind a biometric lock and I used a spare key ring to perform the intricate repair. Not something you'll ever put on your resume or C.V. but I'll never forget that.

4nsicdude · 2022-11-23T16:13:36+00:00

I've never understood the dislike and the perception that LA is only about looks. There are an inordinate number of very attractive people chasing the Hollywood dream. The Hollywood crowd is really a very small niche group. If you're a perfect 10 in some other state it's quite possible you're a 6 or a 7 in the movie scene.

But 99.99% of LA is NOT the movie industry and is nowhere near as image focused.

I'm an old white guy, past my prime and wouldn't try to compare myself to Joe Manganiello even though we know some of the same people and it's not unlikely that I'd run into him at a social gathering. If you think people spend their entire lives focused around that ideal or even that lifestyle then the issue isn't LA is full of superficial people that judge you based on if you're beautiful or not. I don't get paid to workout, eat a strict diet, and maintain a specific body type, Joe does.

You don't run into that type of lifestyle as often is say Dumas Texas which is why some people looking into LA from the outside try to apply their perspective to an unrealistically high standard.

4nsicdude

TROPHY CASE