After a few weeks of using my new standing desk, it was clear that I needed something to protect my feet and joints from the hard (and cold) wooden floor. I asked for recommendations for standing mats and got lots of good (and expensive!) suggestions. My colleague Jamie suggested the Ergodriven Topo. It looked pretty swish - but cost about £200 to import it to the UK. Luckily, global IP laws being what they are, someone has made a better, cheaper version which is "heavily inspired" by the …
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This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Verdicts Some of the lab tasks were impossible without looking at the cheat sheet. I got stuck on one because the question told me to go to one URl, but I had to guess the one which was vulnerable. Felt like a bit of a "gotcha" moment. Perhaps in a proper lab environment it might have made more sense - but…
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This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! The penultimate day. Try not to worry about the upcoming exam! Today was lots of HTTP, TLS, and other low-ish level stuff like that. But mostly focussed on common website attacks. Verdict Bit of a repeat of yesterday's Windows session to make up for the broken labs. The exam requires 50% right answers to…
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This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Day 3 - the day I was dreading most of all… Windows! I've been avoiding M$ WinDoze (LOL!!!) since long before it was fashionable. Even at my earliest jobs, I'd find a way to convince the IT department to let me run Linux on their kit. I'm penguin-powered, baby! So, what can an Ubuntu toting geek learn about …
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This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Day 1 was all about password cracking and metasploit. Today? Linux Hacking! Sadly, we aren't learning anything to do with distributing 1337 cracks for warez (so 1998!). One point to note is that the questions we're set are extremely vague. Here's a sample: Exploit the HeartBleed vulnerability on…
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As part of my MSc, I have to take three "Professional Practice" courses. The course provider, QA.com, let me choose anything from their online catalogue. The first I'm doing is Certified in The Art of Hacking. As regular readers will know, I'm pretty reasonable at hacking. I have received bug bounties from Google, Twitter, Samsung, and a bunch of others. I don't claim to be an expert - and I doubt I'll be on any top-10 lists - but I have a reasonable, albeit informal, background. It's that…
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