Guess who got her hands on the pre-release version of IDA Pro on Apple Silicon (ARM64/M1)! Oh neat! It comes with local ARM MacOS debugging. I had to disable SIP for it to work though.

I just choked on my food reading this nonsense, then realized the article came from a popular far-right blog that is also known to spread pro-Russia disinformation. The dEeP StATe y’all

Time for another scammer story!

An Indian dude called Amartya Tagore (@AmartyaTagore) thought it would be a good idea to steal my code & graphics, and pretend to sell my courses.

Too bad that my website code is self-written obfuscated JS with little detection easter eggs. Which means... it calls home. 🙃

Here's the email I got from my little bug tracker:

Hm.. training.cyber-defences.com?

Brain Hack:

How to trick your brain into learning something new, faster & more effectively.

1. Tell yourself you are going to only focus on it for the next 45min, with high intensity.

2. Once you're done, stop everything and enter deep rest mode.

What this does to your brain: Step 1 will induce a sense of urgency and the release two chemicals that trigger your brain into learning mode:

Adrenaline:
Raises your alertness

Acetylcholine:
Increases the modification of synapses related to the task, basically highlighting the areas it wants to change.

There are so many interesting topics I want to learn, but "I don't have time".

The sad reality is: we do have time. We just waste so much of it. Sometimes I look at my screen time and see the hours I could've spent productively. But time management is harder than it sounds. I had times in my life where I would work full-time, attend lectures for my full-time degree program, and spend every free minute learning. From windows exploitation, wifi hacking, to malware analysis.

Other times I'd spend/waste my free time debugging Linux and Windows issues.

Oh, so apparently my contribution to the community is “clearly equal to almost zero”. 🙃

Let’s have a quick look at some of my community contributions; done in my free time, outside of my actual job. 30+ technical tutorials covering topics like Arm assembly, exploitation, iOS Zone and Glibc Heap internals, Firmware emulation, TrustZone internals, focus and learning, and so on: azeria-labs.com

Summary of release tweets can be found here: @azeria_labs

On the topic of developing a specialized skillset:

Last year I wrote a blog post on “The Process of Mastering a Skill”, based on my own experience and advice from my favorite books on the topic.
azeria-labs.com/the-process-of… It covers topics like motivation, focus, deliberate practice, deep work habits, productivity apps, and the three stage process from the book Mastery by Robert Greene.

There has been a discussion about whether the OSCP is a useful certification and worth the money.

I want to clarify that I am not against the OSCP, not at all. The usefulness of it depends on multiple factors.

Here is my advice on how to determine if the OSCP is right for you:

https://twitter.com/z3roTrust/status/1256802569709514752

Is the OSCP a useful cert? The answer entirely depends on certain factors such as: your skill level, the time you’re willing to spend on it, and the goal you expect to achieve by completing it.

My skill level when I took it: 3yrs Pentesting experience.

Self-isolated hackers, assemble!

✨ 3 new tutorials and a new VM for you to play around with:

Lab VM 2.0:azeria-labs.com/lab-vm-2-0/

Emulating Router Firmware: azeria-labs.com/emulating-arm-…

Stack Overflows: azeria-labs.com/stack-overflow…

XN Exploit Mitigation and ROP: azeria-labs.com/return-oriente… The new Lab VM contains:

- QEMU emulated Armv7 environment ready to start

- Two different Tenda router firmware versions (AC6 and AC15)

- All scripts necessary to start the firmware emulation

- Two small Arm exploitation challenges to learn the basics of bypassing XN

Social Distancing Survival Guide

Learn...

Reverse Engineering:
github.com/tylerha97/awes…

Reverse Engineering Malware:
malwareunicorn.org/workshops/re10…
malwareunicorn.org/workshops/re10…

Web Hacking:
portswigger.net/web-security
github.com/infoslack/awes…

Exploit Development:
github.com/FabioBaroni/aw… APT Lifecycle:
azeria-labs.com/advanced-persi…

Arm Assembly:
azeria-labs.com/writing-arm-as…

Arm32 Shellcoding:
azeria-labs.com/writing-arm-sh…
azeria-labs.com/tcp-reverse-sh…

Heap Exploitaiton:
azeria-labs.com/heap-exploit-d…
azeria-labs.com/heap-overflows…
azeria-labs.com/grooming-the-i…