Show Notes
Hey friends! Still your grieving pal over here, but also your happy hacking host — because today we're diving into baby's first Dracarys! (Yes, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. Yes, I'm going to keep saying it anyway.) Quick housekeeping: A few days ago I published a mini-series episode from our How to Secure Your Family During and After a Disaster series, where I shared the news that my dad passed away last Friday. So many of you reached out with condolences — thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'll share a little life update at the end of this episode. But first — Dracarys! I didn't know it existed until recently. If you knew about it and didn't tell me, I'm mad at you. But we made up. We're friends forever. Here's what we cover: What is Dracarys? It's a smaller, CTF-style Active Directory pentesting lab from the same crew that brought us Game of Active Directory (GOAD), GOAD-SCCM, GOAD-Light, and Ninja Hacker Academy. Where GOAD holds your hand through the vulnerabilities, Dracarys and Ninja Hacker Academy take more of a "here's your starting point, now figure it out" approach — which I love. The lab setup: One Linux VM, a Windows domain controller, and a Windows application server. Your only hint? Start with the Linux box. That's it. Good luck! TuesdayTOOLSday preview: Over on 7MinSec.club, I did a TuesdayTOOLSday episode walking through initial setup — getting your hosts file configured, running a NetExec sweep to map out the attack surface, and doing some light enumeration on that Linux box. No big spoilers, just enough to get your Kali box ready to rock. What I've learned since: After the TuesdayTOOLSday recording, I kept digging. My methodology has been: nmap to identify open ports and service versions, then research whether any of those versions have known exploits. Once I spotted an interesting web service, AI pointed me toward FeroxBuster for directory and file enumeration — a tool I hadn't used before but am now a huge fan of. It's fast, configurable, and once I got my scan tuned properly… I found a jewel. That jewel feels like the next step deeper into this lab. More on that in future TuesdayTOOLSday episodes! Shameless plug: All of this walkthrough content lives at 7MinSec.club. Subscriptions are free, and subscribing just means you get an email when I publish new content. No spam, no sales pitches — just hacking stuff. (And if you want to financially support the show, there's a paid tier too. Just sayin'.) Life update: We've moved into funeral planning mode. My dad, thankfully, had already mapped out his whole service — the pastor, the verses, everything — which has made things a little easier. We're picking photos for a tribute slideshow and I've been asked to share some words and sing a song. The song I chose is "Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me" — which my dad once described as "that song about Jesus flying airplanes." (He wasn't wrong. Sort of.) I've been practicing it all week and can barely make it through verse two. Prayers, good vibes, and a large supply of Kleenex would be appreciated. Again, you can find the Dracarys lab here. And if you're not already on 7MinSec.club, come hang out — that's where the deeper dives live.
More from 7 Minute Security
This episode is a downer, but asks some important topics related to losing a loved one: Do you know what their wishes are for their funeral, their money, cremation vs. burial vs. other? Do you know all the places they do business so you can adjust/takeover/cancel services as necessary? Do you know all the places the have checking/saving/investment accounts? Can you access all the important accounts this person used to manage?
Hey friends! Today I'm mashing two of our mini-series — eating the security dog food and my new obsession with n8n — into one big automation sandwich. I'll walk you through how Claude and a bunch of JSON files helped me build a self-updating asset inventory in Notion, firewall rule reviews, patch-ticket automation, and a push-button external pentesting and OSINT sweep. Basically, imagine I've cornered you at a party and won't stop talking about n8n.
Hey friends, it has been a long time since we talked about eating our own security dog food. However, I couldn't be more excited about some big ways we've moved the 7MinSec security program forward, including the release of our shiny new trust center. Enjoy!
Hey friends! I've got some personal and work travel this week, so I'm skipping the tangents (mostly) and jumping straight into something I'm nerdily excited about: Baby's First n8n. If you're not familiar, n8n is a platform for chaining together and automating just about anything your heart desires – and naturally, my heart desires automating away the boring parts of pentesting. In this episode I cover how I finally got hip to n8n (late to the party, as always), the Black Hills webcast that nudged me into it, how I fed Claude my Frankenstein "Swiss Army" pentest script and asked it to turn push-lots-of-buttons into push-one-button, the clever workaround for firing nmap, EyeWitness, and other tools like it (plus the safety gate I built so my automation can't go rogue and get me in trouble), a full OSINT recon fork powered by Project Discovery Neo that lands report-ready in SysReptor, and the many minutes of my life I get back from each OSINT run – and why that's the whole point. By the way, n8n is not a sponsor or partner – just something I like in case you like it too. Got cool n8n workflows of your own? I'd love to hear 'em!
Hey friends! Today's tale of pentest pwnage is brought to you by four hours of sleep, a large mint hot cocoa, and unhealthy levels of giggity. There's a very good reason for all three, but you'll have to hang out to the end of the episode to hear it. First, let's talk about an escalation path I've never walked before: A really tight network is a beautiful and terrible thing — this client went from a C-minus-ish environment in past years to one where I could find basically nothing. No local admin creds laying around, no poisonable protocols, no juicy file shares. Straight into "well, try harder" mode I went. Two new-to-me tools join the arsenal — one that gives you a second opinion on a big pile of pilfered files (Titus), and a one-shot PowerShell command (GPOZaurr) that hands you a report card for everything that's wrong with your GPOs (plus how to fix it). The finding I almost walked right past — an ADCS issue where only a tiny handful of objects could enroll. I said "all right, I'll move on." Then I came back to it, and saw I had missed the (kind of) obvious attack path. A certificate I couldn't authenticate with — and the 0xdf write-up that rescued me from my own gap in knowledge. Machine account quota was set to zero — so of course I tried to add a computer object anyway. Spoiler: it worked like a dirty shirt. The scheduled task trick rides again — my favorite "this is not going to get fixed" Windows behavior. I had a client push back on this one hard: "You had to know the password of the DA you abused, right? You stole the TGT, right?" Nope and nope. How to actually defend against all of this — some ADCS tightening, a checkbox on your high-privilege accounts that a lot of folks don't have ticked, and my new mantra: RDP with purpose. And then it's personal time — my oldest son Cam passed his national paramedic exam, and I am busting my buttons. Stick around for the whole story, including the 4 a.m. potty break that changed everything, the two health care professionals I'd like to hand a party invitation to in person (and why my wife says "I don't know about that, dude").