Slow but steady…

For those you who know me I recently landed my first IT job in a help desk position. I was very excited to finally start gaining on the job experience. I had obtained security clearance and was at one of the top IT companies. Long story short I had been through a lot and just didn’t feel like the job was the right fit for my first IT position.

I took a few months to kind of recenter myself and after being encouraged by a close friend, I am trying to find my way back into the field.

I have my A+ and Security+ certs cut I refuse to keep learning through theory only. I recently subscribed to TryHackMe, HackTheBox, and HackTheBox Academy. I am currently working through linux fundamentals on both THM and HTB. I plan on starting to work on starting point boxes on HTB perhaps when I have made it to the pentesting path on THM, we shall see. Soon I will be including Python in my studies.

I am working on my note taking and refining my development path so I can start figuring out where I truly want to be in IT.

My current path looks something like this:

• THM/HTBA > Theory and POC
• HTB > Hands On (Starting Point>Retired Boxes)
• THM PT1 (originally wanted SAL1, not sure when I will look at blue/how I will approach rounding out my skills (an entry SOC role could be good)
• PNPT to expand from PT1 internal pentest to external pentest + more formal report process. (still unsure if needed, but I have tried TCM material and it is solid + highly recommended. I can tell there are a lot of tricks you learn from the years of instructor experience.)
  • Not sure if necessary but could be a good way to bridge the path b/w PT1 and CPTS.
• CPTS as my capstone. At this point I would consider myself a hacker, someone who knows enough to learn the art. OSCP is the obvious next step for most people but I think the current IT cert landscape is changing a lot with such traditional certs as CEH/OSCP/etc falling out of good graces with the IT crowd in favor of more hands on certs like PNPT/CPTS/CDSA/CBBH/EJPT/BTL1/SAL1/PT1/etc

I will continue to post as I progress.

I don’t want to sign off without any actual tech talk. On one of the machines I was hacking into I had to enumerate the # of packages installed on the target system.

Failed attempts: apt –installed | wc -l dpkg -l | wc -l *several versions of the above I cannot remember Successful attempt: apt-mark showauto 2>/dev/null | wc -l apt-mark showmanual 2>/dev/null | wc -l The combined results from the apt-mark commands gave me the correct amount of total installed packages on the system. I am trying to refine it into one command but curious what advice others would have to give.

Found a one liner for it that works: apt-mark showauto > count.txt && apt-mark showmanual >> count.txt && cat count.txt | wc -l

I need to change something on my discord so I can post it here for everyone to join and meet like minded IT/Security enthusiasts. Until next time!

P.S.

I worked through the vimtutor yesterday and I plan to do it again! Quite useful.