Archive
Incident teardowns, detection engineering, reverse engineering and network forensics.
You generate the evidence yourself, then find it. Reading about a technique and recognising one are different skills, and only the second is worth anything at 3am.
Every other lab here asks for a virtual machine. This one asks for a terminal. Pre-recorded event logs, a cross-platform parser, and the same reasoning, on whatever laptop you already have.
The first lab for a machine of your own. You create the evidence yourself, delete a file from it, and then recover the file you deleted, which is the only way to be certain the recovery worked.
A business email compromise where the obvious finding is a decoy. Ninety minutes on Microsoft 365 audit logs, OAuth consent grants, and why resetting the password does not end this incident.
Plant a scheduled task with Atomic Red Team, then find it four ways and work out which one survives an attacker who names their task properly. Closes the loop on the persistence you found on the domain controller in the Northwind case.
A first investigation for anyone who has read about persistence but never gone looking for it. You will plant a Run key with Atomic Red Team, then find it three different ways and work out which of the three you would actually trust in production.
A constructed intrusion written as a DFIR report. You get the same artifacts an analyst gets on day one, in the order they arrive, and you build the timeline yourself. The company is fictional; the techniques, event IDs and analytic reasoning are not.
Windows services run as SYSTEM and start before anyone logs in, which makes them the most valuable persistence on the box and the hardest to spot among the two hundred already there. Part three of the persistence series.
WMI event subscriptions run code on a condition you choose, survive reboots, live nowhere in the filesystem, and log nothing by default. The last of the persistence series, and the one that changes how you think about the other three.
Four variants of the same PowerShell technique, three of which walked past a rule that looked fine on paper. Notes from a purple team afternoon.
Six months of a detection lab that was impressive to look at and useless to work in, and the four changes that fixed it.
