7 Minute Security

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 sponso

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 b

Hey friends! We've been on a bit of a Tales of Pentest Pwnage bender lately, so let's keep it rolling with Part 90. (And Mom, relax — this is not one pentest story chopped into 90 parts.) Today is less of an A-to-Z story and more a pile of tips and tricks pulled from a recent string of SCCM-flavored internals — plus a tangent about a video game and a little robot Claude and I built to get my life back. Multi-tier SCCM is having a moment — I've never administered SCCM a day in my life, but 2026 keeps dropping me into these split-role environments. Here's where I go to figure out my attack surface when all I've got is a low-priv cred. SMB signing on? Cool, I'll go around it — relaying from one SCCM box to the one with SQL on it, and the easy-button tool that vacuums the good stuff out of the database once you're there. (NAA creds, clear-text local admin passwords, install scripts with creds baked in…yes please.) Then relay the other direction — when the loot came back stale, a nudge from a Slack channel had me

Hey friends! Today is a tale of pentest pwnage episode, and this one features a path to escalation I have never seen before – one I could only find few references on the entire Internet. It happened completely by accident, but during the report readout I'm absolutely going to say it was intentional and that I totally meant to do that. Here's what we cover: A client that's actually doing the things – year two or three of testing this environment, and they had buttoned up so much that I had to dig deep. Great for them, freaking frustrating for me. Why my Kerberoasting success rate has fallen off a cliff – Microsoft pushed an encryption change earlier this year, and cracking those hashes is a whole different ballgame now. Selective poisoning vs. poison-all-the-things – a nod to Pretender, which I covered in a TuesdayTOOLSday video over at 7MinSec.club. It doesn't get nearly enough love in blogs and videos. The relay that fired… and did something completely different than I expected – I saw the ntlmrelayx log sc

Hey friends! Today I'm talking about Baby's First Neo — and to be crystal clear, I don't mean Keanu, and I don't mean the R&B guy with the hat. I mean the AI-powered pentest assistant from our pals at ProjectDiscovery. Also to be crystal clear: this is not a sponsorship, ad, partnership or anything of the sort. Just me sharing a thing I like so you can decide if you like it too. Here's what we get into: Why I didn't renew my ProjectDiscovery cloud subscription after a full year of running it side-by-side with Nessus — including the three things that ground my gears (one of which had me angry like the Hulk inside) The Palo Alto finding that made me plunk down a credit card and buy PD in the first place What happened when I actually told their team why I was canceling — and the surprise offer that followed How I set up my first Neo project, and the multi-paragraph prompt I fed it (spoiler: "please don't go rogue" was in there) Where Neo beat my manual process — and the two subdomains it found that I flat-o

Hello friends! Today's tale of pentest pwnage isn't a start-to-finish march to DA – it's me finally emptying out the backlog of "gosh, I've got to share this next time" internal network tips that have been rattling around in my head. Here's what we get into: Don't skip the boring stuff. Even when I'm testing the same network for the third or fourth time, I've got an ever-growing list of things I check every single time – because config drift has a nasty habit of quietly reintroducing problems that were fixed years ago. Get a second opinion on your tools. Lately I've had BloodHound tell me a network is squeaky clean, and then gone and checked manually only to find the exact opposite sprawled all over the place. I don't know how to account for it, but it's changed how I work. (If you know the source of truth here, please write in!) Ghost machines. That innocent little checkbox in Active Directory that turns a computer object into a gift-wrapped present for an attacker. We keep finding these in environments tha

Hey friends! Today's another slice of our Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster miniseries, and fair warning — it's a bit of a Friday mood-ruiner. It's been almost two months since my dad passed, and we've moved into a phase nobody prepared me for. Here's what we get into: The paperwork nobody thinks about — my mom still doesn't know what her monthly income looks like now, and the answer is buried in a box somebody lost the key to. Divvying up a lifetime of stuff — and why our 2019 house fire completely rewired how I think about possessions. Dumpster weekend — my wife makes keep-or-toss calls like a Terminator. Also: my dad owned 60 rakes, and a spirited family debate about the resale value of bee spray. Sell it or pitch it? — why we mostly gave up on Facebook Marketplace mid-cleanout, and my one non-negotiable rule for meeting strangers to hand off your stuff. The conversation I wish we'd had five years ago — it's short, it's simple, and it's absolutely brutal to bring up with your parents. Do it

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 fartface@meowmix.com tries to log

Hey friends! Today's episode is a two-parter: some security stuff up front, and then a big ol' personal celebration on the back half. If you're strictly here for the security bits, I love you and you're free to bail after the first half. If you're here for both, God bless you. Part 1: Kicking the tires on Insight Recon What it is: Insight Recon is an Active Directory security assessment tool out of Heath Adams' new venture, Breach Point. I signed up for early access a while back, finally got a login, and took it for a spin this week in my GOAD lab. Not a sponsor, not an ad — just a tool I was curious about. Watch it in action: I covered the install, a couple of hiccups I hit, and some of the report output in this week's TuesdayTOOLSday video over at 7MinSec.club. The setup: Log into the portal, grab the installer, run it on a domain-joined box, then pick whether you want to scan as your current user or specify creds. Say go, wait a few minutes, and your report card shows up on the dashboard. My two nitpicks

Hey friends! Today's episode comes to you from a parking lot in the rain, with a mint hot cocoa in hand and your host absolutely dragging his butt (D-R-A-G-G-I-N-G, not D-R-A-G-O-N – I've never seen a dragon's butt and can't speak to how mine compares). I've had a bunch of internals back to back lately and I'm basically a drooling dog who found a frisbee and refuses to put it down. Sleep be darned. So instead of walking through one test start to finish, I want to share a few things that have helped me claw out a foothold in environments that are otherwise really locked down: The "good problem" of a mature client – several of these engagements are third- or fourth-year tests, and the clients actually clear findings off the board. Which is great for them and rough for me, because this year's test shouldn't look anything like last year's. All my favorite go-tos came up empty – machine account quota set to zero, no broadcast traffic tomfoolery (Responder and mitm6 got me nothing), SMB signing on everywhere, ADCS

Hey friends! Welcome back to another Tales of Pentest Pwnage — my favorite mini-series where I share the good, the bad, and the "why didn't I check THAT first?!" moments from real-world engagements. Today's story has a little bit of everything: a legit path to domain admin, some late-night rabbit holes, a lesson in humility, and a villain you've definitely met before. (Spoiler: it's DNS.) A couple of quick plugs before we dive in: Private GOAD training is going strong! — We just wrapped a 3-day private session (7 students — that's max capacity!) of our Active Directory pentesting class built on the Game of Active Directory (GOAD) framework. Over three days, students enumerate, attack, and fully pwn three separate AD environments. The private format is just *chef's kiss* — when it's a team from the same company, the conversation gets real fast. Like, "hey I just checked Bloodhound on break and Bob from accounting has full rights over the DC" real. If you want to send 3–7 people from your org, hit up 7MinSec.c

Hey friends! Fair warning: today's episode is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster — we've got a big security win, some honest lab feedback, and a very personal share about my dad's funeral. Buckle up. CARTP certified, baby! — I'm officially a Certified Azure Red Team Professional (CARTP), courtesy of the folks at Altered Security. It's been a long time coming (I originally signed up for the live version and fell off after missing a couple Saturdays), but I came back for the self-paced 30-day version and finally finished the job. The lab experience — the good: — ~25 objectives, a solid lab guide, and a really fun variety of attack paths. Highlights include stealing tokens, enumerating Azure tenants, attacking apps and VMs and key vaults, simulated phishing against real tenant email addresses, popping reverse shells, and some clever OneDrive-based follow-on attacks via session hijacking. There's even some web app pen testing (hello, server-side template injection!) sprinkled in. The lab experience — the not-so

Hey friends! Still your grieving pal over here, but also your swarming friend and Protecting My Network Edge host — because this week I've been tinkering with something called Project Swarm and I've got my diapers on regarding it, but I really, really like what I see so far. Then, fair warning, I flip on the tangent light and verbally barf up some personal stuff at the end. I'll make the hand-off super clear, so if you want your free security podcast to do exactly what you want and nothing else — totally fair, and you won't offend me by hopping off. Here's what we cover: What is Project Swarm? This comes to us from our friends over at GreyNoise. It centers around little sensors you deploy to the edges of your network that you can dress up to look like just about anything — attracting flies to the honey, if you catch my drift. You get more enumeration, insight, and logging into whatever shenanigans those flies are using to poke at your edge. Setup was refreshingly easy: You need a very low-powered VM or hardw

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 Hacke

Hey friends! This is a tough one to write. My dad passed away on Friday, and instead of the hacker-y tech episode I had planned, I pivoted to something more personal — another installment of our "Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster" series. I talk pretty raw and transparently today about loss, grief, and the practical stuff that makes a hard situation just a little less hard. Fair warning: it's about death and dying, so if that's not where your head is today, it's totally okay to duck out – we'll catch you next week. Here's what I cover: My dad's last day — He spent Thursday doing all his favorite things: chainsaws, ATVs, trap-shooting, mowing, and weed-whipping. Then Chinese food with the family and marveling at modern video games for the first time since the Atari 5200. It was, by all accounts, a perfect day for him. How we found out — My son Cameron, who's finishing up paramedic school, was visiting and sprung into EMT mode when my dad was found unresponsive Friday morning. He did CPR for 10

Hello friends! It's been over a year since we did a dedicated mental health episode, so today I'm doing a big catch-up and running through my 7-point plan for being a more mentally secure me. None of this is professional medical advice (I am most definitely not a doctor or therapist — well, actually, I am in therapy, but that's tip #5), so take what's useful and leave what isn't. Terms and conditions apply. Here's my current mental health toolkit: Drink a ton of water — I try to chug a full Yeti thermos before my morning mint hot cocoa, then keep it going throughout the day. I taper off around dinnertime to minimize, uh, nighttime tinkle stops. Science agrees this does good things for your brain. Brick your phone — I've been using a little Bluetooth device called Brick that hooks into your phone's screen time features so you can block distracting apps on demand or on a schedule. I've got a "Brian Needs Sleepy" timer set for 9 p.m. every night — pretty much everything except the clock app goes dark. Outlook,

Hello friends! I've been on a bit of an AI agent journey lately, and today I'm sharing my experience ditching OpenClaw and going all-in on Hermes — a self-hosted AI agent built by Nous Research. A Network Chuck video sold me on it, I wiped my Mac Mini (again), and baby's first Hermes adventure began! Here's what we get into today: Why I left OpenClaw — After getting the Mac Mini set up, OpenClaw left me feeling pretty meh: burning through API requests, random mid-conversation shutdowns, and a marketplace where the top listings were flagged as "potentially malicious." Hard pass. Network Chuck's five reasons Hermes rocks — His video summarized why Hermes stands out: (1) Nous Research has serious open source model cred predating OpenClaw, (2) more flexible persistent memory via markdown files + optional Honcho integration for building a profile of you over time, (3) a mission around humanistic and democratic AI, (4) a self-improvement loop where it writes its own skills after figuring things out, and (5) it jus

Hey friends! Backups are not as cool as pentesting, but boy do they matter when things go sideways. This week I'm sharing how a Proxmox backup disk space meltdown led me to a completely overhauled — and honestly pretty bulletproof — backup setup for both home and work. Claude played a big role in helping me sort it all out. Here's what we get into: The backup history tour — I've been through CrashPlan, Dropbox, Backblaze (which saved my bacon after my house fire in 2019!), and a mystery one that may or may not have had "Panda" in the name. These days I'm settled on ARQ for personal backups — dead simple, backs up to just about everything (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, even their own ARQ Cloud for ~$80/year), and all data is encrypted at rest. Not a sponsor, but they should be. The 3-2-1 rule — I actually asked Siri mid-episode, and she initially thought it was a grounding/anxiety technique. (Valid, I guess?) The real answer: three copies, two different media, one offline. I've got a local copy plus On

Hey friends! Today we're going deep on external network pentesting — something I realize we've barely touched in however many episodes we've done. I'm currently in a long stretch of back-to-back external assessments, so it felt like a good time to talk about it. Here's what we get into: Scoping headaches — why the old "count your public IPs and multiply by a big hourly rate" approach drives me crazy, and how we actually scope external tests to be fair to everyone Web apps in scope or not? — this needs its own conversation before the test starts, and skipping it causes pain later Testing under real conditions — the debate around whether to request an allowlist vs. scanning as-is, and why I lean toward creating the best testing environment possible Multi-tool enumeration — why we run Nessus, Project Discovery, and Shodan together, and what each catches that the others miss Reporting the surface — why just walking a customer through what's exposed to the internet (ports, services, screenshots) has more v

Hello friends! Today's a hybrid episode — some security content up top about a new certification I've kicked off, followed by an aggressively quick trip to Tangent Town. Feel free to bail after the security stuff if tangents aren't your thing! The security part: starting CARTP I've started the Certified Azure Red Team Professional course from Altered Security (enterprisesecurity.io). It's the Azure follow-up to CRTP, which I took a few years back. Quick notes: Why now: Active Directory and internal pentests will always be my first love, but more and more of our customers are shifting to hybrid or full-Azure environments. Time to get some formal training in that lane. Self-paced vs. live: They offer both. I'm past the point of giving up Saturdays to security training, so I went with the ~$500 self-paced 30-day option. You get a portal, a lab manual, and a remote Windows VM with low-priv creds into a target Azure tenancy to attack and enumerate. The catch: The lab manual is thorough on "do this, see this