April 2017

When I was visiting TROOPERS17 in Heidelberg, Germany, I had the chance to follow a 2-day training in Network Forensics by Erik Hjelmvik. I'm glad I did! In this post I want to describe a technique I learned there. This technique is a nice way to investigate captured network traffic to find suspicious or malicious traffic. Although I dislike the term 'threat hunting', this is actually a neat and fast way to hunt for the weird and interesting stuff in a large PCAP-file!

The workflow I want to describe could be called "Rinse and repeat". I like it because it is elegant: simple and flexible, but powerful if used right.

It's hard for system owners to keep their systems secure. Servers and devices are scanned, defaced, compromised by the minute, by newbies playing around with github scripts, nation state actors and everything in between. Lucky for us, a growing group of ethical hackers spends time hunting and reporting vulnerabilities.

It appears ‘bug bounty’ surpassed ‘vulnerability assessment’ in search volume and gaining on 'penetration testing.' pic.twitter.com/ftDkIaVMMx

— Jeremiah Grossman (@jeremiahg) 17 August 2016

Last month, I visited TROOPERS17, a conference in Heidelberg, Germany. It was the first infosec conference I've attended, so I didn't really know what to expect. The website showed photos of geeky people in hoodies, a soldering table, lots of club mate and weird LED badges. I figured I could fit right in, and when I saw the training program I was even more motivated to register.

In the two days before the conference, I followed a training about network forensics. Earlier this week I wrote about the Rinse and Repeat technique I learned there, which can help you find the interesting network activity in a large PCAP-file.

When I was in university, I didn't have a lot of money for traveling. Lucky for me, I had an adventurous friend who wasn't afraid of traveling on a budget. We had a lot of fun adventures together throughout Europe, buying the cheap train tickets and sleeping at CouchSurfing hosts to save money on accommodation. I found that the art of slow travel can give an extra dimension to traveling, which makes it a lot more enjoyable. This is what I learned during those trips.

Traveling light means you have more energy left to enjoy your travels. Also: checking in and out of airports becomes a matter of minutes.

As I was finishing the last chapters of my thesis in September 2015, preparing slides for my final presentation and fighting with a particular tricky LaTeX module, a voice in the back of my mind reminded me that I needed to find a job.

Part of me believed that a suitable PhD position would turn up. But the more time I spent doing research for my master thesis, the more I wanted to do something else for a while. Something not quite like research. But what?

These are the places I enjoyed when I was visiting Rotterdam. Note that this list is nowhere near complete, as it focuses on the things that I like (coffee, tacos, books).

New Fork (lunchroom)