Category: Uncategorized

I have my first CTF competition of 2020 coming up and I’m super excited! This one is an OSINT CTF for missing persons sponsored by TraceLabs. I don’t know much about OSINT which is why I’m really excited for it. During the last couple of days, I have been just pouring over information, finding popular tools to use, reading and learning about what other people do, and just getting familiar with the whole aspect of sneaking around the internet trying to find information about people. I had an idea for a python script which might automate some of the searching so I might have to warm up my coding fingers! I have no idea what to expect for this kind of CTF since the flags are not pre-hidden so it should be interesting! I’ll have to write up an after action report about how I feel about it.

While I don’t believe you should start making changes to your life simply because it is the beginning of the year, I do get hyped up every January. I get excited because I find so much potential in the year ahead. There is so much potential for success and happiness in the months ahead and I believe everyone should capitalize on it in their own way. 2020 (and every other year) is going to be my year, and there is going to be a lot of personal development happening. Some of my top goals this year in no particular order are:

-Read at least 20 books: This should be an easy one. It’s January 2nd, and I’ve already finished one
– Be conversational in Spanish: I’ve been studying Spanish off and on over the last year and I think I’m close enough to be conversational. It would be nice if my Spanish tutor would practice with me more though. (I hope she sees this)
– Have a better faith life: I’m cradle Catholic, but my faith has been weak so I need to step it up.
– Setup a home lab: I’ve always wanted to do this and I finally have the money and enough knowledge to put something together. I attended a really cool talk on building a SOC using only open source tools and it inspired me to build a home lab. The talk was purely conceptual, but I am interested in actually implementing something like that.

I hope everyone has a great 2020 and an even better decade. 2020 is the year of vision and I hope everyone tries to maximize their potential.

Recently, I have been receiving messages from several people on LinkedIn who have reached out to me looking for career advice or have told me they were taking my course on Cybrary and wanted to connect and give feedback. This outreach has left me at a loss for words. I love giving back to the cyber security community, and I’m so incredibly happy to learn that others have been benefiting from my work. These strangers have inspired me more than they know and it encourages me to continue to put out content in the hopes of helping others. You know who you are. Thank you for inspiring me.

It’s been awhile since I’ve felt this way from reading a book, but I believe The 4-Hour Workweek was written for me to read. I connected to this book on a personal level and I enjoyed every page. One of the most meaningful quotes of this book is, “Focus on being productive instead of busy”, and it was this quote which really made me question myself. When reading this book, I was in a time-consuming cybersecurity project said I “don’t have time to do anything else”. but I ended up reading this book in three days. So how busy was I? There are many things I’m planning on implementing in my life in the coming months.

Favorite Quote: The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals.

I don’t know a thing about blogging, and I don’t know a thing about writing. This is the reason for starting a blog: I need to get better at writing. As of the time of this post, I can’t think of any negatives which would result from becoming a better writer. Some of the positive things I can think of are conveying ideas, better self-management, and creating good content for others. Time to see where this goes…