Learning Extra Fundamentals and Site Maintenance

Progressing in Skills

One mid-term goal on HTB is to earn their Certified Defensive Security Analyst (CDSA) certificate. In order to do that, I need to go through their SOC Analyst path. It’s recommended to do the SOC Analyst Prerequisites path before that, and the Information Security Foundations path before that. This foundational path includes 12 modules:

1. Intro to Academy
2. Learning Process
3. Setting Up
4. Linux Fundamentals
5. Windows Fundamentals
6. Introduction to Windows Command Line
7. Introduction to BASH Scripting
8. Introduction to Networking
9. Introduction to Active Directory
10. Intro to Network Traffic Analysis
11. Introduction to Web Applications
12. Web Requests

Briefly, I find it interesting that of the 12 modules, seven of them start with Intro* and five of the seven go all the way with Introduction. Odd. Why not all seven?

Hack The Box estimates that completing these 12 modules would require 10 8-hour work days. I had thought that my previous experience with Linux, both through my own experimentation and in school, would have made the Linux Fundamentals module a breeze. I’m happy to report that even this “Fundamentals” module has given me new information.

Specifically, I didn’t know until today what the purpose of having execute permissions on a directory meant. I didn’t realize that without that x enabled, a person wouldn’t be able to either read or write to the directory, regardless of having those two flags set.

I also didn’t know until today how the services being called by systemd worked. I’ve used systemctl in several capacities, but I’ve never seen how it’s configured, where those config files are located, or done the work to make a service myself. I even went through the “I use Arch, btw” phase.

After today, I’ve finished 19 sections of 30 in the Linux Fundamentals module - 63% - and according to HTB, I have completed 30.37% of the Information Security Foundations path.

Progressing in the Site

I’ve gotten it working, so that’s nice! I’ve also gotten my name where it belongs and made some other textual changes.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to get the post times to work, so I’ve just been setting the time to 00:00 UTC, but that isn’t too terribly important. But I do want accuracy, so I’ll be trying to get that to work properly eventually.

I also want to have a nice picture in the frame, replace the favicon, and remove the Twitter link at the bottom, since I don’t have a Twitter account.

Another todo: write the “About Me” page.

I also want to set up a “Goal Tracker” of sorts as another page. I’ll want to learn how to do tick boxes, both checked and unchecked for that. I’d love to use an unordered list style for that in markdown rather than just using a UTF code. That feels like cheating. I want the real deal - an unordered list of checked and unchecked boxes. I like that idea.