MonkeHacks #56

I rested a lot this week. I got home from Bremen (via Hamburg Airport; getting to the airport was a pain) and I spent a day in my apartment in Edinburgh, before getting a flight the next day back to Ireland to see my family. I had to rest a lot this week because the upcoming weeks are absolutely jam-packed with hacking and other things, so I need to catch my breaks where I have the time to take them. So, I read a lot of my books, spent some time with my friends, and did some planning/admin work. I watched Man Utd vs Real Sociedad with my best friend back in Cork (which Man Utd unexpectedly won; that was nice). I went bouldering as well.

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

• I finished reading No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer. I also read the entirety of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The book is mostly set in WW2 and in Dresden, so it felt like the right time to read it while I was in Germany. Now I’m back to reading Snow Crash, a longtime hacker favourite, as well as The Laundromat, a book about corruption and the Panama Papers. Reading is such an essential skill to have in life, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

• At rez0’s recommendation I listened to How I Write by David Perrell; specifically the episodes with Tyler Cowen and Alex Hormozi. They were both really good!

• Google paid me a $1k bounty - this is my second Google finding, and wow. What an amazing team. Seriously good motivation to lock in and hack more on them.

• I added logging to my automation using Grafana and Grafana Loki. It’s good to collect data on things like throughput of various tools, error logging, service health checks and so on. It didn’t take too long to do but it’s great to have. If you have no data on your scans, you’re firing bullets into the dark.

• I’ll be in Japan this time next month, and I want to get a hacker-themed tattoo (my third tattoo; I get one tattoo a year). I’m not sure what design to get yet, though - I’ve thought about getting a fork bomb as a tattoo - I think it would be a cool design to have. But again, not sure. I like what I have right now, so it’ll have to fit aesthetically.

• That’s pretty much it for this week. I have more workdays set aside next week, so I’ll hopefully have more to write about.

Resources

• KalmarCTF: Spooky Action At A Distance: I have no words for this CTF challenge. This is a masterpiece of hacking and the skillset you would need to solve this, let alone create it, is insane. If you’re going to read anything this week, read this.

• PowerShell for Hackers: An excellent resource for people doing Powershell, for example, in red teaming.

• Google VRP: 2024 in Review: A nice review of Google’s program statistics in 2024.

• Awesome Google VRP Writeups: An excellent resource with published Google findings.