Getting The Ball Rolling

Hello everyone!

I have outlined a couple of study areas for myself in order to get a wide scope of learning cybersecurity. The target areas are as follows:

1. Learning Platforms

2. Certification Preparation

3. Homelab & Projects

By dedicating time to each of these tools, I will learn from both book and hands on activities. My future updates will refer to these categories as to track the progress that I am making in them (as well as any others that may pop up along the journey).

---

Learning Platforms

To start the day off, I continued completing modules in the HackTheBox Operating System Fundamentals learning path. Specifically, the Filter Contents and Regular Expressions modules. The main focus of these modules is to better your understanding of the built in UNIX command palette for text editing and filtering. Utilizing commands like grep, cat, cut, tr, awk, and more, the goal is to be able to extract important information quickly from files without leaving the terminal.

One practice problem asks for us to search through the /etc/passwd file of a virtual machine and extract the username cry0l1t3, their UID, and the set shell, all separated by a comma. The solution(s) I came to are shown below.

cat /etc/passwd | grep cry0l1t3 | cut -d":" -f1,3,7 | tr ":" ","
OR
cat /etc/passwd | grep cry0l1t3 | tr ":" "," | cut -d"," -f1,3,7

While I have experience with using these commands before, it was helpful to gain some more practice and polish my skills through good training exercises.

The latter module included some of the same problems, but now utilizing regex to come to a final solution. I have spent some time recently learning regex, so this was great practice.

---

Certification Preparation

After hunting for some budget certifications, I decided to pursue achieving the ISC2 CC certification. The ISC2 CC covers a lot of fundamental concepts of cybersecurity, privacy, security, and network security. While I have touched on many of these before in my undergraduate, I believe it will be good to gain a deeper understanding while studying for the certification.

Today, I was able to complete the onboarding process and pre-course exam to set a standard for my knowledge before I begin studying. Some of the questions were very familiar to me and some were very much not. Overall, I am excited to continue pursuing this and will continue updating with my progress as the days go by.

---

Homelabs & Projects

As I have never set up a homelab before, I decided to rip the bandaid off and begin researching how to set one up. Almost immediately, I stumbled upon ProjectSecurity by Grant Collins. ProjectSecurity is an online course that not only guides you through setting up a homelab to mimic an enterprise network, but helps you stage multiple exercises within the homelab. For me just starting out, this is an invaluable resource.

I was able to get through most of the onboarding of the course today and to get familiar with what the rest of the course will offer. Unfortunately, this is all that I was able to accomplish today as download the .ISO files ate up a lot of time (and storage space). Below is a graph of what the virtual environment will look like after startup.

Credit: https://docs.projectsecurity.io/e101/vmhypervisors/virtualbox/

---

This is the first of many updates and I am excited to share more as I continue to learn!

Ethan Durnell