Automating Digicert Certificates Into AWS ACM

Like most security professionals I am spending a large amount of time helping my company move securely to AWS. Certificate management in AWS is done with AWS Certificate Manager  and while they do offer *free* certificates, ACM generated certs are outside your direct control. You don’t get the keys which, at least for some things, should … Read more

My Security Summer Camp Talk List

Security summer camp is about a week away so I spent some time this afternoon trying to figure out what talks and events I want to make sure I attend. BSides Las Vegas: A Day in the Life of a Product Security Incident Response Manager From SOC to CSIRT Hadoop Safari : Hunting For Vulnerabilities … Read more

Quickly Building A Cloud Virtual Lab

Often while doing research I need temporary access to a bunch of different virtual machines. While it is possible to do this on my Macbook using VMWare Fusion or Virtualbox the overhead seems unnecessary for something I will delete in under a week. My goto solution is a virtualization stack of: 16GB DigitalOcean Droplet + Wok … Read more

Big Data’ing The Umbrella DNS Popularity List

Recently I started looking at the Umbrella DNS Popularity List and did a blog post about it here. The data seemed valuable and lacking at the same time so I spent my *limited* free time this week learning about R and RStudio. Protip:  If you want to play along at home there is an RStudio docker container so all … Read more

Exploring Cisco’s Top 1 Million Domains Data

Cisco offers a daily list of the million most queried domain names from Umbrella (OpenDNS) users.    I had some time this weekend so decided to spend some time playing around with the data to see what I could find so I spun up a lightsail server and got to work. Grabbing the file is as simple as: … Read more

Automating DigiCert Certificate Issuance

I am a big fan of DigiCert for TLS Certificates and CA/WebPKI services.   While they have amazing customer support and are an amazing company to work with, there are not a lot of automation scripts to interact with their API available. So over the weekend and with a lot of help from Clint Wilson I built a … Read more

Leadership Quotes From My Mentors Dad

An amazing mentor and leader I work with has been talking to me recently about what real leadership looks like and shared with me a list of quotes he keeps on his desk that his dad who had a leadership role in the military collected and gave to him.  He gave me a copy and said … Read more

A Threat Intelligence Thought Exercise

I was at dinner on Tuesday with 6 security professionals and I proposed this hypothetical situation and I thought it was worth writing up and sharing. Background: Six identical safes with $1,000,000 inside are being built into the side of a public building and are being randomly assigned to everyone at the dinner. At the … Read more

Digital Ocean Slack Bot

I had a coach whose favorite quote was “Pain is the best teacher.”  and that was the first thing that popped into my head this morning when I realized that I had left an $80 a month  Digital Ocean Droplet  running for an extra 3 weeks after I got done using it.   To be honest $60 … Read more

8 Security Predictions for 2017

  What will 2017 hold for the security industry?    I sat down and looked into my crystal ball and came up with these 8 security predictions for 2017.  A Fortune 500 Will Use “DDOS as a Service” To Attack A Competitor. A bored VP of Marketing with a paypal account, a six pack and … Read more