What I've Been Learning

It’s been a while since I posted here, so I thought I’d give an update as to what I’ve been studying. Unfortunately, my schedule hasn’t quite worked itself out to the point where I can start buckling down and study for the CCNA, but I have been really diving into TryHackMe and to a lesser extent HackTheBox. I have found that being even slightly more goal oriented in my studying has led me to be much more motivated and productive so I’ve just been slowly working through the Complete Beginner path. There’s a lot of good info on this path, some of which has been a little repetitive (looking at you Linux Fundamentals section), but other sections have been a great learning experience like the Web Hacking Fundamentals and the Cryptography section. Earlier today, I think I did one of the best beginner rooms in TryHackMe, the Upload Vulnerabilities room.

While some of the room was a little repetitive for me, Task 6 onward is a great way to learn about filtering. During CTFs and I would imagine penetration testing, especially for web applications, you can sometimes encounter filters that prevent you from uploading a shell that grants you a foothold onto the server. When I first started down the rabbit hole that is infosec, this was one of the most frustrating things to try and figure out. I would try and try to upload a web shell with no luck. This room was exactly what I needed. It talks about extension validation (making sure the file ends in the proper file type), MIME validation (which is sent through the http(s) request), and my personal favorite Magic Bytes validation (which involves reading the first few bytes of a file), among other types of filters. the challenge at the end of the room has multiple steps, and to be frank I think you can break it if you upload too many of the wrong file type. Anyway I just thought I’d post quick about what I’m learning, file upload filtering. I hope to post sometime this week about a neat little PowerShell script that I helped write at work to automate some stuff, but in the meantime check out that THM room.