The Ghost Operator's Signal
Posts archive till up to December 2025.
Ansible, an open-source automation tool, helps system administrators and DevOps teams to efficiently manage infrastructure and streamline complex tasks. One of Ansible’s powerful features is the use of templates, which allows for the dynamic generation of configuration files and other resources. Here we will go through a real-world network configuration of a small lab environment.
If you have been doing the TryHackMe Simple CTF challenge recently, you may have ran into the problem that the original exploit is written in Python 2 for Ubuntu 18.04. The script can be converted or rewritten to Python 3, but my Debian Bookworm attack box had issues running it and showing the result. I came up with a quick solution using docker.io.
Continue reading “TryHackMe | Simple CTF – Modern Solution (2023) Working Exploit With Docker.io”In today’s rapidly evolving world of containerization and micro services, Docker has emerged as a powerhouse, providing tools to simplify the deployment and management of applications. Among its arsenal are Docker Compose and Docker Swarm, two distinct tools that address different aspects of container orchestration. In this article, we’ll dive into the nuances of Docker Compose and Docker Swarm, highlighting their features, use cases, and how to make the right choice for your deployment needs.
Continue reading “Docker Compose vs. Docker Swarm: Choosing the Right Orchestration Tool”Docker has revolutionized the way applications are deployed, offering portability and scalability like never before. One crucial aspect of Docker is volume management, which ensures data persistence and sharing between containers. In this article, we’ll dive a bit into the world of Docker volumes, explore their types, and I will provide practical examples of how to effectively manage them.
Continue reading “Mastering Docker Volume Management: A Comprehensive Guide with a Handful of Examples”Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a method of requiring more than one credential to prove your identity. It adds an extra layer of security to your system by requiring users to provide more than one piece of information to authenticate successfully to an account or Linux host. The additional information may be a one-time password (OTP) sent to your cell phone via SMS or credentials from an app like Google Authenticator, Twilio Authy, or FreeOTP .
Continue reading “How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication with Google Authenticator on a Debian Linux Desktop”Kali Linux, a powerful penetration testing and security auditing platform, is widely used by professionals in the field of cybersecurity. To ensure a secure and reliable environment, it is essential to harden Kali Linux, fortifying it against potential vulnerabilities and attacks. In this blog post, we will discuss effective techniques and best practices to harden Kali Linux for advanced penetration testing and cyber security work.
Open source software has been on the rise in recent years, with practically every industry now utilizing it in some form or another. With the continuing rise of open source projects, we can expect to see further collaboration and collaboration spaces evolving to facilitate them in the coming years.
Nessus is a popular and widely used vulnerability assessment tool that works for both web and mobile applications and can be deployed on-premises or in a cloud environment. It scans and detects malware of embedded devices, configurations auditing, compliance checks among many other functions.
Small companies face a growing risk of cyber attacks in the digital age, as they often lack the resources and expertise to secure their networks and data. One way to improve their security is to perform regular security checks using a vulnerability scanner. Tenable Nessus Essentials is a powerful tool that can help small companies scan their systems for vulnerabilities and remediate them before they are exploited.
Ansible’s real strengths are the fast speed of learning the basics and its simplicity. We all keep some configuration in a GIT service like my dot config files in Github. It is very quick and easy to automate the check out of a repository, and to distribute files from it with the built in Ansible modules.
Nessus is a widely used cyber security tool developed by Tenable Network Security, a well-known cyber security company. Nessus is a vulnerability scanner that is designed to identify and assess vulnerabilities in computer systems, networks, and applications. Tenable maintains a Docker image that helps us to create a temporary, disposable Nessus server anytime we need one.
In this blog post, we will explore some of the steps we can take to harden our Debian desktop for more secure daily work and enhanced privacy. Hardening is the process of reducing the attack surface and increasing the resilience of a system by applying security measures and best practices. By hardening our Debian desktop, we can protect our data, identity, and communication from malicious actors and unwanted surveillance.
The OWASP Top 10 is a widely recognized list of the most critical security risks for web applications. It is updated every few years based on data analysis and community feedback. The latest version, released in 2021, introduces some new categories and changes some existing ones to reflect the current threat landscape.
As developers, we should be aware of these risks and take steps to prevent them in our applications. In this blog post, we will briefly review each of the OWASP Top 10 categories and provide some best practices and resources to help us secure our code.
Hydra is a powerful tool that can help you perform penetration testing on various network services. Hydra can brute-force passwords for more than 50 protocols, such as telnet, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMB, and databases. Hydra was developed by the hacker group “The Hacker’s Choice” and released in 2000 as a proof of concept tool. Hydra is also a parallelized login cracker, which means it can make multiple connections at the same time and reduce the time required to crack a password.
This blog post is intended to provide an educational introduction about a penetration testing tool. The tool is designed to help security professionals and ethical hackers identify and exploit vulnerabilities in web applications. The author does not condone or encourage any illegal or malicious use of the tool. The readers are solely responsible for their own actions and the consequences of using the tool.
ProtonVPN is a popular and reliable VPN service that offers high-speed connections, strong encryption, and a no-logs policy. It also has features like Secure Core, Tor over VPN, and P2P support. ProtonVPN is compatible with various platforms, including Linux. I will show you how to install ProtonVPN on Debian/Ubuntu Linux and how to use it to enhance your online security and privacy.
If you are a penetration tester, you might need to crack passwords on Linux systems as part of your engagements. One of the tools you can use for this purpose is John the Ripper (JtR), an open source password cracker that supports many encryption and hashing algorithms.
This blog post is intended to provide an educational introduction about a penetration testing tool. The tool is designed to help security professionals and ethical hackers identify and exploit vulnerabilities in applications. The author does not condone or encourage any illegal or malicious use of the tool. The readers are solely responsible for their own actions and the consequences of using the tool.
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