Drowning in bureaucracy

Hello cherubs, back again.

Time for the annual update on this blog I honestly hadn't forgotten I had. Bit like my LiveJournal account which I only remember when someone tries to reset the password, because twenty three characters might take a while to brute force.

Onwards and upwards.

Today I find myself dealing with a clients third party. Not normally a huge ballache, but this guy has ISO procedures to follow, which means everything needs to be signed in triplicate, and I have to destroy everything he gives me as soon as I'm done with it. "When I'm done" is a subjective time reference, but there you go, I don't have to fill in the paperwork for that one.

So far, two days of banter, including time differences, has got me absolutely nothing. Not strictly true, actually; I've earnt a number of empty promises and learnt to let clients do their own dirty work when they need to get sensitive data out of their partners.

Other than that, life is fairly straightforward. PvP games online are keeping me moderately sane (until I consistently lose), and RPGs pick up where FPS's leave off.

As for the UK General Election, how May has managed to keep her arse warming the comft chair at #10 I'll never know. She's presented the most diabolical campaign in the history of politics, publishing a manifesto which can be summed up by "If you're not shitting £50 notes, well then, fuck you", refuses to be drawn into a debate with her opposition (fair enough I suppose, he'd have made her look like the clownshoes muppet she is), has performed so many policy u-turns she must be dizzy, but still wants to bring back the universally vilified fox hunting and ivory trades, whilst preserving the failed Tory austerity measures, ensuring anyone who doesn't have family money doesn't get to keep any of their cash. Bloody train wreck. I thought the Americans had it bad with the tangerine twat, but we've got a scarecrow some people I formerly considered intelligent and politically aware are happy to re-elect. What the actual fuck? I hope they all manage to keep their jobs and stay healthy, because they're in for a world of hurt if they don't.

Enough of that.

On another topic, you'd think the internet would have an easily accessible picture of a cat eating a fried breakfast, wouldn't you? Not the case, and certainly not worth hunting down for more than five minutes for the briefest of jokes.

Junior team members

Fuck knows how long it is since I posted on here. Hi again. Miss me?

I bet.

Anyway, the resurrection of this little vitriol dumping ground is due to some fuckwittery on my colleagues part.

Background: we're all pentesters.

I'm working on a web app test, which is mildly interesting. As a sidebar, I have a VPN test which has been causing me pain due to errors with the certificate auth. As a sanity check, I asked a colleague to install the client, and test....

Same error.

Fine. Troubleshooting continues. For expedience, we decide to dispense with the certificate auth, as it's not pertinent to the actual scoped test. I no longer have the client installed, as it b0rked my laptop for four hours when I tried to uninstall it, so I have been proxying testing via the aforementioned colleague.

So, I ask him to check the user logon and 2fa work as intended.

WAIT. No. He's still got a test running.

Ok, that's fine... I don't expect him to trash current testing to do me a favour.

Hang on.

He's been given an application test which is effectively three login portals (which is really one login portal accessed three different ways). He's been running sqlmap against the username and password field since yesterday morning. That's his current testing... he's still sqlmapping a login portal. TWO FUCKING DAYS he's been at that. For the uninitiated, once it's kicked off, you get to watch it tell you what it can't find, until it does find something, which in his case it hasn't. He's spent two days watching a script say "NOPE" every couple of minutes.

I'm hard pressed to tell if he's dedicated, optimistic, or just bloody lazy.

Annual Update

So, I'm becoming slack. Monthly turned to quarterly turned to annually. In my defence, I've been extremely busy running round the country breaking peoples networks.

Scotland.

Lovely place, full of lovely (if somewhat difficult to understand) people. I have taken as many trips to Scotland in the last four months as I have in the rest of my life before this year. Some business, some pleasure. And I'll be going back for the Commonwealth Games with a bit of luck. Still, it's a fair trek from home, half of the card readers in unmanned train stations don't work, and the private hire cars are unreliable gits, although you can always find a taxi.

On transport... Yet again someone had enough of it all and heaved themselves in front of a rush hour train, turning a 90 minute commute into a 5 hour trawl. Downside - I was stuck in a train seat risking DVT and dehydration. Upside - I was sat next to and opposite pretty ladies, who were reasonably susceptible to idle banter, and I was sat, not standing.

Out for a run tonight - I need the exercise almost as much as I need the solace of the empty road. There's nothing more relaxing than belting down a country lane with a decent playlist on the iPod. Due to the location of my house, I'm right on the edge of empty country... a few farms and not much else. It's like running a few years after the apocalypse. Pretending other pedestrians are zombies livens it up and gives the sprint sections a hint of randomness. Might see if I can smash my 5k record again...

Hacking for a living. It's all ethical, honest.

So, I no longer run a technical team, as stated in my last post. It got fucking old, fucking fast, after 12 years of ball ache my patience all went at once... imagine the bloodbath.

So I requested a move to the penetration testing team, and a few weeks later, here I am, sat in a hotel, bored out of my mind, waiting to go back to one of the larger gambling companies in the country to inform them of precisely what's wrong with their network. Not that they don't already know, but some bugger somewhere needs an independent report, so we get to go do it.

It means time away form home, which themissus and tehkid will need to get used to, but I'm sure they'll cope. They get to see me two days this week...

Anyhow, back to writing up lasts weeks reports (scary shit considering who they're for).




Got to eat less and exercise more - all this free/expensed restaurant food cannot be good for me.

Career Limiting Move

So, for all intents and purposes I run a technical team. This team are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of both our and clients kit.

So, this morning, I've had nothing but grumblings from Captain Charisma opposite me complaining that his machine locks up every weekend. My response? "You're a techie, fix it".

If you took your car to the garage/shop, and the wrench monkey was moaning that he couldn't solve an issue with his car, would you go back? Ever?

Long story short: don't moan in front of your boss that you're incapable of doing your job.

Rant in F Major.

Originally, this was aimed at something else, but my rant took me this way. Understand, from the outset, that I have a medical understanding of both children and conditions involved. I am not comparing severities, merely situations.

I do not (although others do) use Facebook as a forum for bemoaning the hard life they're having (whilst not working, claiming a stack of benefits that'd make your average fraudster blush, a free computer and brand-new car). Yes, your child is disabled. Gutting, I understand. Perhaps moreso than you, as I'm around similarly disabled children and adults at least once a week, ever week, and I can see how bad it could really be, compared to your sons mild case. Now, that might come off as harsh, yet my nipper is disabled as well. So fucking what? He gets out and does stuff with the other kids, as do all the other disabled kiddies we know. Telling your son he'll never do this, and never do that isn't just factually incorrect, it's morally reprehensible. Cerebral Palsy is nasty, no argument. But then, it'll probably improve if you did his damn physical therapy exercises like you're supposed to, rather than coddling him because it's mildly painful and you can't be arsed to step up to the plate and be the parent he needs. It's hard, yes. It's not the breeze your other 4 kids are... but you made your choice to have more. Short story? Suck it up, man up and get on with it. Pull your fucking weight.

Hell, in a handbasket

Well, today's been fun so far. Not 11am yet and when the revolution finally comes, I doubt I'm going to be able to find a long enough wall to line all the pillocks up against.

My boss' boss' boss yesterday decided he didnt like the rack in my lab. So it's now been swapped out for a mobile rack with no cable management and the stability of a tramp after his third bottle of meths. Moderately frustrating. Then, I notice that the shelving housing the KVM has gone. Replaced with what is effectively a woodworking bench. Add to this all my server and appliances no longer have cabling of any form (power, ethernet, usb, serial) and the tip becomes less tip and more the entire bloody iceberg. If I want power, the 8gang and 6gang leads have all been packed under EVERYTHING I'll never need, ever.

Then my old boss asked me to magic up a server I dont have, install an OS I don't have on that, then install a product I don't have on top of that, and run it with a license key that (yes, no prizes for guessing) I don't have. Once that particular cluster of miracles has been performed, I need to pass this server on for transport. Within 7 hours. Could be fun, particularly seeing as the license takes 48 hours to procure on a good day.

Other than that I've only been hassled by about half the users for trivial information this morning. The others appear to have heard my not so quiet rant and are keeping their distance. It seems they can be taught.

Oh well, off to save the bloody world again I guess. Chin up, scuttlers, laters...