2024 Featured

2024 - The Year of Learning More and More

2024 marks 13 years in security, 10 in offensive security, and 11 of blogging. This year has been about growth, learning, and sharing knowledge. From leadership insights to career reflections, this "year in review" celebrates technical contributions, personal achievements, and key milestones.

homelab

(Re)Building the Ultimate Homelab NUC Cluster - Part 2

Welcome to part 2 of my NUC cluster; in the first part, I explained how to deploy a cluster using proxmox and walked through the hardware setup and the rest of the connectors. In this part, we'll dive into building your own Active Directory Lab environment and show

redteam

Adversarial SysAdmin - The Key to Effective Living off the Land

Introducing Living off the Land Searches (LOLSearches), using advanced search operators with SharePoint and Explorer to help in Red Teams.

homenetwork

(Re)Building the Ultimate Homelab NUC Cluster - Part 1

Explore my blog series on building a NUC cluster with Proxmox! Learn about connecting hosts, setting up tools, and avoiding pitfalls from my own build mistakes. Perfect for anyone keen on creating a home lab for testing attack paths and security tools. Dive in for practical insights!

Research Featured

Side-by-Side with HelloJackHunter: Unveiling the Mysteries of WinSxS

This post explores Windows Side-by-Side (WinSxS) and DLL hijacking, deep-diving some tooling I've written and some of the fun along the way.

privacy

BlackVue Dashcams - It's not a bug, it is a feature

Blackvue cloud connected dashcams leak your location and allow anyone to view your video feed with a free account. Sort it out folks!

leadership Featured

Failing Upwards: Put on your own mask before assisting others (Pt2)

Reflecting on my experiences with various leaders, managers, and bosses, I've gained insights into effective and ineffective leadership styles.

leadership Featured

Failing Upwards (or not) (Pt1)

If you find yourself on the path of leading a team, make sure you set critical baselines with your team. Always do what is best for your team and set them up for success.

ZTH

Security For Everyone - 2023 Update

This post will go through some of the steps you can take as an individual to secure the accounts that mean the most to you.

pentesting Featured

WebSockets are a Pain - A Journey in Learning and Leveraging

Before I dive in and show examples of implementations that worked, it is worth doing a quick explainer on what WebSockets are, how they work, what a typical request handshake looks like, and how to troubleshoot when things don't go the way you want them to.

project

Ticket Fraud Scammers - An Investigation

If you're reading this, it's a blog post that's not my regular write-up but more of an investigation and a hypothesis on the anatomy of a scam. I also put it together to raise awareness for those who read my blog and who might not be overtly technical-focused.

LTR102 - Published Finally!

Hello Everyone, This a short blog post to announce I have finally published my second book after several years of work. I have spent nearly five writing it; like my first one, it follows the path of getting into and progressing in the industry, while LTR101 was focused on bug

redteam Featured

BYODC - Bring Your Own Domain Controller

BYODC or bring your own domain controller is a post-exploitation technique and another option for performing a DCSync in a more opsec safe manner.

redteam

Multiple Paths to Compromise An Environment

Attack paths and compromising systems are something we, as attackers, thrive in. Many areas of system weakness can be attacked and leveraged to gain a foothold or an upper hand within an environment.

ZTH

ZTH-CH4: Hook & Sling - Phishing For Gold

To this date, phishing is one of the most prevalent first stages of entry to an organisation, a lot of threat actors

automation Featured

HoneyPoC is Dead - Long Live Disinformation

This short blog post explains what each tool does and overviews the use/reason for the release. Release of AutoPoC and SandboxSpy.

carhacking

Free Audi MMI Maps and Speedcams Update 2025

Update Audi Maps and Speedcams for free; files and steps are included for Maps 2022/2023/2024/2025. All without the need for OBDeleven or VCDS. This process will work for other VAG cars too not just Audi.

automation

Orchestrating deployment of @myexploit2600's hacklab with Ansible and Vagrant [REDUX]

Deploy your hacklab using Ansible and Vagrant for fast, repeatable results. Building on the work by @myexploit2600, we're going to use Ansible and Vagrant to automate the manual steps of constructing a domain and vulnerable users.

azure Featured

Azure Attack Paths: Common Findings and Fixes (Part 1)

This post will walk through various services within the Azure catalogue and look at potential attack paths.

redteam Featured

Understanding Cobalt Strike Profiles - Updated for Cobalt Strike 4.6

A deep dive into specifics around cobalt strike malleable c2 profiles and key information that is new in cobalt strike 4.6

redteam Featured

Chasing the Silver Petit Potam to Domain Admin

Exploiting Petit Potam in a different way to force some downgrade and protocol attacks.

A Minor Update - No Blog Posts for a While!

Readers of ZSEC and my Twitter feed, A quick message/explanation. I have published my last two blog posts for a while as I am working on my second book; LTR102 [https://leanpub.com/LTR102-Expanding-Your-Security-Horizons] which is almost complete but as I write a lot on a fortnightly basis there

2021 - Looking Back on a Great Year

I have made it somewhat of a tradition to look back at the previous 12 months in a blog post on the last day of the year or last week of the year. Both from a professional perspective and personal life. Acting as a timeline, look back at my technical

redteam Featured

Tunnelling For Offensive Security

One thing that comes up a lot when it comes to red teaming, penetration testing and breaching a network is being able to proxy traffic into multiple environments.

honeypoc Featured

AutoPoC - Validating the Lack of Validation in PoCs

HoneyPoC was a project to look at how popular CVE PoCs could be. AutoPoC took that concept and enabled the mass creation of disinformation. Also, Data is beautiful.