Show Notes
Hey friends! Today's episode has a new-to-me toy up front and some podcast housekeeping on the back half – all recorded with a raging case of the anxious parent giggidies, because my son Atticus had a big audition and I was minutes away from finding out whether we were doing tears of joy or tears of sadness. Baby's first Cloudflare Tunnel Not a sponsor, not an ad – just a thing I'd heard about for years and finally had a reason to use. Here's what we get into: The problem that sent me down this road: I wanted push-button status pages for clients that pull from one source of truth – not just "is the box up," but actual narrative on where a project is at Why the off-the-shelf status page tools weren't the right shape, and why "just stick it on a web server" was a non-starter for a scraper-and-AI-slop-crawler internet The auth paths I tried and abandoned before Cloudflare Tunnels entered the chat How Cloudflare Access one-time PINs put a guard out front – and what happens when [email protected] tries to log in My Chick-fil-A-order-tracker dreams for multi-phase assessments, and why I think it could kill a bunch of clogged-up email threads Why the code isn't public yet (it's public-facing infrastructure I haven't hardened, and I've got hunches about where the holes are) – but reach out if you want to build something similar and I'm happy to share privately Where tunnels fit generally: when something genuinely needs to be reachable, but you'd rather not hand it a public IP or expose RDP to the whole internet. It doesn't replace Twingate for me, but it fills a different slot nicely Bonus tangent: why Claude has become my long-drive road companion, and five enlightening minutes I spent learning how water towers work Housekeeping: a refreshed jingle and a brand new bumper A quick history of the 7MS jingle – from just me and an acoustic guitar, to a Fiverr band, to now Why "security is hard, so let's assume we're probably going to get pwned by noon" has aged frighteningly well (see also: AI agents teaching each other to find previously unknown vulns) Meet Jacob Davis, the guitar teacher the algorithm dropped in my lap, who recorded a gorgeous all-strings arrangement of the jingle and about 45 seconds of fingerpicking diddly goodness for our new outro bumper. Stick around to the end and give it a listen – and if you're in the market for internet guitar lessons, he rules And over on 7MinSec.club this week I show off VoiceInk, a private, local voice dictation utility for Mac that Paul the Unstoppable turned me on to. Lifetime license, no subscription, and it does a great job on live dictation or audio files you feed it. Catch the TuesdayTOOLSday over at 7MinSec.club Thanks for listening – to the security stuff, the tangents, or both. Come find us at 7MinSec.com, subscribe (free or paid) over at 7MinSec.club, and dig through our notes at 7MinSec.wiki. God bless you, and have a great week!
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").