I’ve spent the last year dealing with burnout, and really shut down overall on tech, which is part of the reason the blog hasn’t had much done on it, even though I have several blog ideas (projects and results, or industry trends I’m seeing and want to comment on) that are in the wings. Like the last couple of honeypot series posts, “Does Cyberchef call home or leakdata”, some stuff on pihole, and some things on Android Wi-Fi.

Instead, I’ve been doing things working with my hands, mostly gardening and woodworking. Occasionally, I’ll get to go hiking; although, does short rail-to-trail hiking really count? Also, hills don’t care how many rail-to-trail miles you have recently.

Lastly, my current day job doesn’t have many techies on the team. Most of them come to work, do the job, and go home. I think there are three of us who have “home labs”, and we don’t see each other in the office much, which prevents the good tech build discussions.

However, the last few weeks I’ve been doing a little more tech work. I had to get the AWS Cloud Practitioner Foundational certification for work. I’ve had to update Duo Security’s MFA software, and I made some changes to my mail server to prep for migrating to Dovecot 2.4, which I should have done already, but I’ve been dealing with burnout.

Today has been fun, though. I’ve built a new VM to redo the Duo MFA installs and to blog about the issues. I’ve had. I had to create the Debian VM several times, and I’m still trying to get Guest Additions to work right. It’s been so long since I set up a VM that I’ve forgotten many of the tweaks I used to memorize. I also managed to mess up my Debian install from when I built my PC several years ago. The updates seemed to break something. I’ll probably have to reinstall if updating the BIOS (based on errors in the logs) doesn’t fix it.

For those that don’t know, Duo Security has been sending out emails since at least the end of August about their CA certificate bundle expiring on February 2nd, 2026. The main point was to upgrade your system so you can keep using Duo Security’s MFA on ssh, web servers, etc.

The last time I installed Duo’s MFA tool, I built it from source. The upgrade, which includes the new certs, appears to have been successful, but it took about 6 hours to get it working.

I say it appears to be successful because before the upgrade to the current version, every login would generate an email and log entry in the Duo unsupported (can’t get an update to the CA bundle) log panel on the admin site.

I haven’t seen any new entries or received any new emails since the upgrade, but it was an adventure to get it working. I’ll share a more thorough write-up before February 2nd, in case anyone else gets stuck.

Using FAIR with CTI – Some key definitions

This post won’t cover all the Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) definitions. It will provide the ones I think are vital for using FAIR with Threat Intelligence (TI) and Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). I’m paraphrasing several sources, but it’s the way I understand the definitions I learned over the years. If you want in-depth/exact definitions from my sources, for FAIR, lookup: Measuring and Managing Information’s Risk, The Open Group’s Open FAIR Risk Taxonomy and Risk Analysis whitepapers, the RiskLens FAIR study guide (provided as part of the course). For Threat Intelligence, lookup: Effective Threat Intelligence, and Intelligence Analysis 6th edition.

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So my current reading list had changed 3 times in the last 3 weeks or so since the Fall class ended. I had started with:

• Wireless Reconnaissance in Penetration Testing (Amazon affiliate link)
• Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard (Amazon affiliate link)
• Investigating Internet Crimes (Amazon affiliate link)

Then it was going to be some Social Media Intelligence books:

• Using Social Media for Global Security (Amazon affiliate link)
• Social Media Investigations for Law Enforcement (Amazon affiliate link)

Now it’s Counterhack Reloaded (Amazon affiliate link), which I’m using as my only study materials before the GCIH exam in a couple of months.

Can someone tell me again, why I try to make plans since I always seem to get pulled in many directions at once and not study what I want?

* Update 2024-10-01: changed to Amazon Affiliate Link, which I earn a commission from qualifying purchases.

The worst part of my job, is not being able to talk about some of the stuff I do at work that I think is really cool.