Today, I received an email from INE that I passed my eJPTv2 beta exam. It means that I obtained the eJPT certification again, but this time it is for version 2. I discussed my beta exam experience here. I suggest you read it and come back to this. There might be some information that you would want to know before reading the rest of this post. Preparation I received an email from INE on August 8th that they selected me to participate in the eJPTv2 beta program. I started going …
Network Security
Passed GCIA
I recently passed the GCIA (GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst) certification exam, and I wanted to share my experience. As a follower, you may remember that I scored almost perfect on my GCIH exam. With this exam, however, I scored nowhere near it, and I am okay with that. Exam information The exam has the following format: 106 questions (including CyberLive)4 hours68% passing scoreMultiple-choice and single-answerYou can skip questions (up to 10 if I remember correctly)You can …
Attacking Cisco IOS device
Cisco IOS-related CVEs get announced consistently, but we will not be exploring any of those in this article. I will, however, demonstrate that attacking a Cisco IOS device is possible with SNMP misconfiguration. If interested, I covered another attack on a Cisco IOS device running HSRP here. I included this exercise on our Paradise Lost: Red Team versus Blue Team event during our CyberFest 2021. Unfortunately, only the blue team members touched this node. The red team focused on …
Defending against SSH brute force attacks
I was a victim of SSH brute force attacks, which I covered here. As a result, I discovered a great solution without using SSH keys. As another layer of security, I added two-factor authentication to my server. A few years ago, I wondered if there was a solution in Cisco IOS. I discovered a security feature called login enhancements or login block. Let's look at how it can help defend from SSH brute force attacks by enabling this feature. What is login block? It is a Cisco …
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Securing Cisco IOS passwords
Over the years, Cisco has made improvements in storing passwords in the configuration file. As a result, securing Cisco IOS passwords is part of my checklist when hardening Cisco-based network infrastructure for clients. This article also appeared on Art of Network Engineering. History Cisco IOS has always had the option to store passwords in cleartext in the configuration file. As you and I both know, storing passwords in the configuration file is a big no-no. That said, …