This one might be a bit too specific, since every country has its own CV and interview culture. For example in the US you don’t add a picture of yourself, in Germany this is very common. There should be much more differences, so please don’t take everything here for granted in the area or county where you want to get a job. I try to be as general as possible here.
From my previous post Softskills: Networking for your Career you should be aware that it is good to get a job over a personal network and could be the most promising option.
CV& Job Application
A couple of points for the CV & job application:
be honest, when people found out you lied or made things up you are out
don’t go into details that don’t have something to do with the job you are applying to, unless it seems necessary
everything else write detailed, I like to have much information, but other people might have a different opinion
take a clean and easy to read format
write a great motivation letter for your application
proof facts, for example if you write you have a certification add a copy or scan of it to the application
check for grammar and spelling
if possible let somebody read your application who can give good feedback
Job Interview
I was on both sides of the table, conducting interviews and also of course being the candidate.
know your CV well, you should be able to explain everything without looking it up
if you have a bad feeling you normaly should not take the job, unless it is a huge chance for you or you can use it for jumping to a better job
prepare for the interview, think about what questions might be asked
try to prepare for standart questions like
what was your biggest mistake
where do you see yourself in five years
what is your biggest weakness
what do you expect from your employer
and so on
prepare for technical questions
there is nothing worse for example when you say for example you know XSS but could not explain the difference between a stored and a reflected XSS
have a look at the Daniel Miessler interview questions (see also below)
if you have weak spots in your CV you can try to handle this pro-actively, if not prepare for critical questions
prepare questions that you want to ask, for me an interview always has to go into both directions
Whether looking for a new job, enhancing your knowlege or finding like-minded people, networking is important for your career.
Social Networks
When I looked for my first job as a pentester I wrote to CEOs and company owners from smaller companies that I found interesting on Xing (which is manily active in Germany) and later I also used LinkedIn. I got invitations to interviews and found a job.
Further I use twitter, but not as much as I did 2-3 years ago. But you can still get information very quick when you follow the right people. For example when a PoC for an exploit is available it is posted fast here, but be careful and check the information.
On all networks you can use direct mail for contacting people when you have questions, in my experience most people are happy to help.
But how to start? First follow and add people you know. Search for people who might be interesting for you and also add/follow them. When contacting the first time, just say a few words about yourself. Share posts you find interesting and maybe start sending your own post, maybe a link to an interesting blog post you found interesting or a short course review.
You can also be successful without social media accounts, but for me it was a booster. It is also useful to stay in contact with people you meet at…
Conferences& Meet-ups
Another great place for networking is conferences and local meetings. At local meetings (I visited the OWASP meeting Cologne for some time) it is easy to get into touch with people in the area you live, you have presentations and can learn.
At conferences it depends strongly for me what you expect. For networking it might be better to go to smaller conferences, especialy if you don’t know anybody. Bigger conferences are also good, but maybe a bit overwhelming first.
You can get more contacts when participating actively, for example by giving a presentation or as a volunteer.
Or, when you are in the industry for a longer time, just meet with people you know.
And guess what? I got in touch with one of my employers at a conference.
For some people Red Teaming seems to be something like the holy grail and many people want to do it. In my opinion a Red Teamer should have experience in Penetration Testing before starting. Some experience in DFIR might also be useful, or at least you should have some understanding of this topic.
For me (I am planning and leading internal Red Team engagements since about two years now), Red Teaming is very different from pentesting, although experience here is important.
“Penetration testers have this problem where they frequently can’t see past the end of their Kali USB. They establish the false equivalence of: “China hacked $X; I can hack $X; therefore, I am an APT and an APT is like me.” An APT is literally the instantiation of a nation state’s will. It is not a toolchain.” https://medium.com/@thegrugq/cyber-ignorethe-penetration-testers-900e76a49500
This sums up my experience. Some pentesters think: OK, let’s just use bloodhound, mimikatz and empire and and start firing, when I am domain admin it is red teaming. Well, maybe kind of.
But do real attackers think that way? Think more about WHY a malicious actor is trying to hack you, and then how. What are attackers looking for? That might define the scope of your engagement. You should read threat intel and incident reports for being up to date regarding TTPs and scope. When doing Red Teaming you should start thinking more into this direction.
I also tend to go through single scenarios, and not only full blown attack simulations, like: • Account compromisation • Exfiltration if possible • APT traffic simulation for testing and enhancing capabilities of the blue team • Phishing • Water Holing • Malware Simulation
This is also a good starting point for enhancing a penetration tester career, since usually you are not able to start with full blown Red Team engagments.
I can recommend “The Hacker Playbook” series, review for the third issue here. Further the book “Advanced Penetration Testing” is a good read.
Writing good reports is in my opinion one of the most import tasks for people who work in security, no matter if pentesting, forensics or other topics. The report is the final product of your work, it is leaving an impression even after some time and it represents your company, your department and yourself. Unfortunately some people underestimate this topic.
Course Syllabus: * Module 1: Telling a Story * Module 2: Writing Penetration Testing Reports * Module 3: Forensic Writing * Module 4: Most Common Writing Mistakes
The price is pretty fair, 97$ at the time of this writing. Even folks who don’t like to write reports gave me great feedback, and for myself I can highly recommend it. It takes about 6-8h for going through, you have access to forums and in the end you get a certificate of completion. Although writing lot’s of reports over the past years I got some great new ideas for imrovement.
So it is not possible to review all of it, this post is just meant to give a rough overview and some examples.
Pentester Academy
As said before, in the courses sections are 40+ courses available. The topics include for example (all from a security perspective, but some are also from a defenders viewpoint): Python, ADS, shellcoding (I made SLAE 2015, helped me also with my OSCE certification), Javascript, web app pentesting, some forensics topics, WiFi and network pentesting, exploitation and much more.
Currently I started the course Traffic Analysis: Tshark unleashed, so this is the short example for this post.
Screenshot from the Tshark course.
What comes really handy is that you can just start the labs in the AttackDefense labs, so you don’t need to setup own VMs only for following the courses:
Screenshot from one of the Traffic Analysis: Tshark unleashed course
What is also great, you can download the videos, so you can also watch them later.
As far as I can say, all the videos are suitable more or less for beginners.
AttackDefense Labs
The labs include a huge amount of topics, including: Webapps, MSF, Pivilege Escalation, Eploiting, Wi-Fi, Forensincs, Reversing, Cracking, Python and so on. Some labs include a small task, but others include for example full blown webapps like juiceshop.
Some examples from the Wab Apps labs.
In this case there was a small issue (for me), the labs are timing out after some time, which might be a bit annoying when having a full web app. For the smaller labs I never had problems.
As advanced labs there are also some CTF style labs available.
Verifiable Badges
With verifiable badges it is possible to verfiy your knowlege to an external source, as I did here:
Network Scanning Basics – Daniel Sauder : Accredible : Certificates, Badges and Blockchain. https://t.co/4R5R5ruN49
“The holder of this badge has successfully completed the Network Pentesting challenge exercises in Pentester Academy’s AttackDefense labs. These challenge exercises test a practical understanding of how to perform remote network reconnaissance of various infrastructure components.” (https://www.credential.net/b5050be1-05c9-41fa-93a9-ea0b5cd8825f#.Xg8KBMQX5XM.twitter)
As far as I could see all badges have three small challenges where you have to find flags (like a small CTF), badges are available for lot’s of topics (19 badges are available at the time of this writing) and most of them can be done after you viewed and worked through the courses.
Yes, the machine itself is called writeup. My first step was running nmap:
# nmap 10.10.10.138
Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2019-07-03 21:54 CEST
Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.138
Host is up (0.021s latency).
Not shown: 998 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
80/tcp open http
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.74 seconds
# nmap -A -p 22,80 10.10.10.138
Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2019-07-03 22:06 CEST
Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.138
Host is up (0.022s latency).
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh OpenSSH 7.4p1 Debian 10+deb9u6 (protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey:
| 2048 dd:53:10:70:0b:d0:47:0a:e2:7e:4a:b6:42:98:23:c7 (RSA)
| 256 37:2e:14:68:ae:b9:c2:34:2b:6e:d9:92:bc:bf:bd:28 (ECDSA)
|_ 256 93:ea:a8:40:42:c1:a8:33:85:b3:56:00:62:1c:a0:ab (ED25519)
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2.4.25 ((Debian))
| http-robots.txt: 1 disallowed entry
|_/writeup/
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
|_http-title: Nothing here yet.
Warning: OSScan results may be unreliable because we could not find at least 1 open and 1 closed port
Aggressive OS guesses: Linux 3.10 - 4.11 (92%), Linux 3.12 (92%), Linux 3.13 (92%), Linux 3.13 or 4.2 (92%), Linux 3.16 (92%), Linux 3.16 - 4.6 (92%), Linux 3.18 (92%), Linux 3.2 - 4.9 (92%), Linux 3.8 - 3.11 (92%), Linux 4.2 (92%)
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
Network Distance: 2 hops
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel
TRACEROUTE (using port 22/tcp)
HOP RTT ADDRESS
1 20.28 ms 10.10.12.1
2 20.47 ms 10.10.10.138
OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 13.40 seconds
Login to cms is protected with a .htaccess file, creds are not valid here. Good that there is a thing called password re-use.
User flag
But ssh worked with the creds:
# ssh jkr@10.10.10.138
jkr@10.10.10.138's password:
Linux writeup 4.9.0-8-amd64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
The programs included with the Devuan GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Devuan GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Thu Jul 4 14:51:59 2019 from 10.10.12.57
jkr@writeup:~$
jkr@writeup:~$ ls
pspy64s user.txt
jkr@writeup:~$ cat user.txt
d4e493fd4068afc9eb1aa6a55319f978
So user flag was done…
Root flag
For escalating to root I first used exploit suggester and tried the exploits, but without success.
So I did some research and came across a tool called pyspy. For transfering the file I used apache and wget.
So here is just a very short one. Always when I have to set up a new pentest machine, I have to look it up again, so here is a small list of browser addons that are usefull for webapp pentesting (using Firefox):
One of the good things about Defcon is that there is a No Starch Press store at the vendors area.
So I bought it for the flight, but it took a bit longer until I was through the book.
The book has 20 chapters, starting with Bug Bounty Basics. The next 17 chapters go through different classes of vulnerabitlites like XSS, SQLi, memory corruption, CSRF and so on.
After an explanation of the vulnerabilty itself, real reports are also included with further hints. At the end of each chapter the reader can find useful takeaways.
The last two chapters are not about bugs, one is about finding bugs in general, including some descriptions for tactics and tools. The last chapter is about writing a good report, communication to the companies and how to deal with the different programmes, which seems very useful to me.
Real-World Bug Hunting is helping to maximaize payouts and finding more bugs. It shows up lots of attack vectors and creative way for exploing them.
Real-World Bug Hunting: A Field Guide to Web Hacking Author: Peter Yaworski Content: A very practical guide to bug hunting and bug bounties Career: Penetration Tester, Bug Bounty Level: Beginner, Intermediate
End of August I travelled from Germany to far away Kathmandu in Nepal for visiting threatcon and the browser security workshop by Mario Heiderich and the beautiful country. Here is a short review.
Browser Security Workshop
With the conference I booked the 2 days workshop Offensive HTML, SVG, CSS & Other Browser-Evil. The covered topics:
History of browser security and the browser market
Defense 101
XSS
URL obfuscation
Unicode, character sets
Breaking Filters (WAF)
IE/Edge compatibility modes
mXSS
The presentation includes 255 slides, so in 2 days it was not possible to cover everything, also there was no time for the hands-on parts. XSS is not the big topic anymore, but I was happy I can fresh up my knowlege and also learned some new stuff.
The Conference
The conference was one day with a single track, so contrary to Blackhat & Defcon everything was clearly arranged. On the speaker list were Mario Heiderich, Jim Manico, Georgia Weidman, Vignesh, Yogesh Ojha, Aniruddha Dolas and Prashant Tilekar, you may see some familiar names here.
Between the presentations there was lot of time for networking and discussions, with the business pass I also joint the evening event which came with great drinks & food.
For me the best at conferences, of course, is the networking part. It was a great pleasure to meet and connect with new people and friends.
When you are new to IT security I highly recommend to visit smaller and local conferences if possible, it is much easier to connect and to visit.
Thanks to the organizers of threatcon for a great event.
Visiting Nepal
After the conference I took four days for traveling and sightseeing, this is just a very small impression (I made >1000 shots). I travel a lot, and this was one of the most impressive experiences I’ve had.
We learn Security! 