Andrew Roderos

Networking and Security

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Hi, I’m Andrew Roderos

A network security engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This site is where I talk about tech-related topics like networking and security.

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VMware ESXi Home Lab – Intel NUC 12 (Wall Street Canyon)

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I recently installed ESXi 7 on Intel NUC 12 (Wall Street Canyon). It will join my existing ESXi hosts in my home lab I assembled in 2012, 2016, and 2020. The Intel NUC 6th generation has been showing its age. Most of my Windows VMs, if not all, are running slow now. I can still use the VMs, but it is not ideal. With that said, I decided to buy yet another Intel NUC to run ESXi on. Hardware I wanted to get …

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Passed GMON

Back in March, I passed the GMON (GIAC Continuous Monitoring) certification exam, and I wanted to share my experience. As a follower, you may remember that I passed the GCIA exam last year. With this certification exam, I scored a bit higher than my GCIA exam, but not quite like my GCIH exam results. Exam information The exam has the following format: SEC511 class The SEC511 was the second lengthiest SANS class I have ever taken - the first one was SEC503. If …

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How to solve my PCAP CTF challenges

For the past three years, I have been a volunteer for our Cybersecurity Festival event during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. In my first year, I volunteered to create a few purposely-built vulnerable machines for the Red versus Blue team event. Last year, I volunteered for two events. The first was the Capture The Flag (CTF), and the second was the Offense for Defense event. This year, our Information Security Office team asked me to come back to be part of a talented team to create …

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Penetration Testing 101 – CTF Edition

As mentioned in my previous article, I participated in a CTF competition. Part of that CTF competition included OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) and penetration testing exercises. Today, I want to discuss penetration testing 101 in a CTF environment. Pre-engagement Pentesting in the real world starts with the pre-engagement phase. This phase involves engaging with the client to find out their goals, scope of work, etc. It's different in a CTF environment. Some CTF will give you the …

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