Wylie Bayes

Red Teaming vs. Penetration Testing: Understanding the Nuances

In the cybersecurity industry, the terms "Penetration Testing" and "Red Teaming" are frequently used interchangeably. Marketing departments love to sell "Red Team Assessments" that are, in reality, just glorified vulnerability scans. While both disciplines involve highly skilled professionals attempting to hack into a network,

Writing Penetration Test Reports That Execs Actually Read

Let’s face a hard truth: popping a domain controller, bypassing an EDR, and writing a custom exploit are all incredibly fun. Writing the report about how you did it is not. However, the report is the only tangible product your client is paying for. If you spend two weeks

Physical Security Assessments: Testing the Human Element

The most sophisticated Next-Generation Firewalls, Zero Trust architectures, and EDR solutions money can buy are entirely rendered useless if an attacker can simply walk through the front door, sit down at an unlocked terminal, and plug a rogue device directly into the corporate LAN. While network penetration testing focuses

Bypassing Modern Antivirus and EDR: A Primer

Ten years ago, evading Antivirus (AV) was relatively straightforward. Traditional AV relied heavily on static signatures—comparing the hash or the byte sequence of a file against a database of known malware. If you changed a few bytes of a malicious payload or packed it with a simple crypter, the

The Anatomy of an Active Directory Exploitation Attack

In the vast majority of enterprise environments, Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the central nervous system. It manages user identities, enforces security policies, and dictates which accounts have access to which resources. Consequently, it is the ultimate prize for an attacker. The adage in the red teaming community is simple:

Linux Privilege Escalation: Exploiting SUID Binaries and Misconfigurations

In the lifecycle of a penetration test, gaining initial access is a massive victory, but it's rarely the end of the engagement. When you successfully exploit a web application vulnerability and catch a reverse shell, you almost always land as a low-privileged service account—such as www-

Wireless Hacking: Cracking WPA3 and Enterprise Networks

Wireless networks represent a unique perimeter challenge for organizations. Unlike a wired network where an attacker must physically plug a cable into a switch, a wireless network bleeds out of the building. Anyone sitting in the parking lot with a high-gain antenna and a laptop can attempt to compromise

API Penetration Testing: Finding Flaws in the Digital Glue

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the digital glue that holds the modern web together. Whether you are ordering food on a mobile app, interacting with a cloud dashboard, or streaming a movie on your smart TV, APIs are working frantically behind the scenes to shuttle data between clients and servers.

Unleashing the Power of the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE)

If you ask any cybersecurity professional to name a port scanner, the answer is almost always Nmap. It is the gold standard for discovering hosts and identifying open ports on a network. But treating Nmap as just a port scanner is like using a smartphone only to make phone calls.

Automating Reconnaissance with Custom Python Scripts

In the world of penetration testing and red teaming, reconnaissance is arguably the most critical phase of an engagement. The more you know about your target's external footprint—their subdomains, open ports, exposed APIs, and technology stack—the higher your chances of finding a vulnerable entry point. However,

The Top 10 OWASP Web Vulnerabilities to Watch for This Year

For over two decades, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has been the guiding star for application security. Their flagship release, the OWASP Top 10, represents a broad consensus on the most critical security risks to web applications. As a penetration tester, this list is your roadmap. As a

Firewall Rule Optimization: Cleaning Up the Clutter

Firewalls are the undisputed workhorses of network security. They sit at the edge of the network, silently processing millions of packets and making split-second decisions based on the rules we define. However, as organizations grow, personnel change, and new applications are deployed, the firewall rulebase often becomes a chaotic,

Fine-Tuning Your IDS/IPS to Reduce Alert Fatigue

The deployment of an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is often seen as a major milestone in maturing a cybersecurity program. The appliance is racked, the span ports are configured, the power is flipped on, and immediately... the Security Operations Center (SOC) is drowned in a

The Hidden Security Challenges of IPv6 Migration

The depletion of IPv4 addresses is no longer a looming threat; it is a historical reality. To accommodate the explosive growth of the internet, mobile devices, and IoT ecosystems, the world is slowly but surely transitioning to IPv6. With its massive 128-bit address space, IPv6 promises infinite scalability. However,

Detecting and Preventing DNS Tunneling Attacks

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phonebook of the internet. It translates human-readable domain names (like www.example.com) into the IP addresses that computers use to identify each other. Because DNS is so fundamental to internet connectivity, virtually every firewall allows DNS traffic (UDP/TCP port 53)

DDoS Mitigation Strategies for High-Availability Networks

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is the digital equivalent of a massive traffic jam deliberately caused to block access to a specific building. By overwhelming a target network, service, or application with a flood of malicious internet traffic, attackers can take critical infrastructure offline, causing significant financial and

Network Access Control (NAC): Best Practices for Modern Enterprises

Imagine a physical office building with armed guards, retina scanners, and metal detectors at the front door. Now imagine that once inside, any visitor can just plug a rogue laptop into an open Ethernet port in a conference room and instantly access the corporate database. This scenario is exactly what

VPNs vs. SD-WAN: Which is Better for Enterprise Security?

The traditional enterprise network perimeter has vanished. Ten years ago, securing a company meant building a strong perimeter around a central headquarters and routing all remote traffic back through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Today, with the massive shift towards remote work and cloud-based applications (SaaS, IaaS), routing everything

A Beginner's Guide to Network Traffic Analysis with Wireshark

Wireshark is the undisputed king of network protocol analyzers. It allows you to see what's happening on your network at a microscopic level. For cybersecurity professionals, it's an indispensable tool for incident response, malware analysis, and network troubleshooting. If the network is the crime scene, Wireshark

Securing BGP: Protecting the Internet's Routing Infrastructure

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is often described as the duct tape that holds the internet together. It is the postal service of the digital world, responsible for determining the most efficient paths for data packets to travel across the thousands of interconnected networks—known as Autonomous Systems (AS)—that

Demystifying Zero Trust: From Buzzword to Implementation

If you’ve spent more than five minutes in the cybersecurity space recently, you’ve heard the term "Zero Trust." It’s slapped on marketing materials, pitched by vendors as a silver bullet, and tossed around in boardroom meetings. But beyond the hype, what does Zero Trust actually

OpenBSD and Security, a breakdown.

OpenBSD is a free and open-source operating system that is known for its robust security features. In fact, OpenBSD is often considered to be one of the most secure operating systems available. In this blog post, we will explore why OpenBSD is more secure than other operating systems. 1.

The Dangers of AI Technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize how humans interact and work with the environment. From automated driving cars to voice-controlled home devices, AI is slowly but surely transforming the way we move about our everyday lives. But with the enormous potential, AI also carries with it the

EDR Evasion, the ethical way!

As technology continues to advance and cybersecurity becomes increasingly important, it is essential for security researchers to stay up to date with new techniques to bypass EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response). However, it is also crucial that this research is conducted in an ethical manner that prioritizes the security and

NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 - First Thoughts

NIST 800-53 is a set of security controls and guidelines developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to help federal agencies and contractors manage and secure their information systems. The latest version of NIST 800-53 is revision 5, which was released in September 2020. In