How to Test Yourself in a Personal Cybersecurity Lab
A practical skills checklist for building a personal VM lab, testing what you know, collecting evidence, and recovering from your own mistakes.
homelab
Latest
Watching the Network You Built - Network Security Part 2
Part 2 puts the security in motion: services, the monitoring pipeline your log lines feed, wireless done currently, safe remote access, and where it all leads.
The Packet Walk Comes First - Network Security Part 1
Network security is controls placed where traffic must pass. Part 1 builds the floor: addressing, switching, routing, and your first enforcement reps.
windows
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Windows Fundamentals for Cybersecurity, Part 2: The Server Assumes You Are Elsewhere
Part 1, The Machine and Its Evidence established one working rule: the GUI shows you what exists, and PowerShell is how you inspect it precisely and repeat the work across ten machines. Windows Server administration assumes you are somewhere else...
windows
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Windows Fundamentals for Cybersecurity, Part 1: The Machine and Its Evidence
Your first job in this field will hand you a domain-joined Windows machine and expect competence by Friday. Nearly every security career runs through the Windows estate whether it was planned or not...
Linux
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The Terminal Is a Conversation
My first Linux distribution no longer exists. I mention that because it lands two points at once: Linux is old enough to have history, and the skills transfer anyway...
Vaultwarden and HashiCorp Vault: Different Jobs in the Same Secrets Architecture
Yesterday I wrote about moving autonomous-agent secrets out of a flat .env file. Why I kept Vaultwarden for people and recovery, added HashiCorp Vault for workloads, and treated identity, audit, PKI, and tested recovery as part of the deployment rather than follow-up work.
Moving Autonomous Agent Secrets Out of .env
For a long time, my autonomous agent found credentials the same way many applications do. Why I replaced a flat environment file with scoped Vaultwarden access, short-lived agent sessions, and a verified audit trail that now reaches Graylog and Wazuh.
45Drives
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The 45Drives Professional Pro15: Storage You Actually Own
Most of the storage I have bought across my career came from a few of the usual vendors, and most of it worked. It also came with things I could not source elsewhere, firmware that refused drives and software layer I paid for every year whether I used it or not. The Pro15 is a different animal...
The Map and the Floor
After years of working, teaching, writing in this field, the pattern I see most in newcomers is not lack of ability. It is freezing...
Practice at Home the Way You Preach at Work
I spend my working hours telling teams how to do security well. Segment the network. Write the change down. Model the threat before you build the control. Then I go home, and if I am honest with myself, the temptation is to cut every one of those corners because it is "just the lab."
SOC
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From Log to Incident, and the Budget That Decides What You See
I have taught this material before as two sessions, and I usually open each session the same way: this is not a tool class. Tools get named below, plenty of them, but every one is an implementation of the same pipeline, and the pipeline is what transfers to whatever product your employer bought...