Hello, world

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Alex and I will attempt an introduction.

I am happily married with three kids. I enjoy the outdoors during the warmer months, either camping in my hammock or out Jeeping with the top off (the Jeep's, not mine... usually). The cooler months mean beer league hockey with the boys.

I have been involved with IT since the late 90's. I started my career like most people, doing the occasional odd job fixing a neighbor's computer while learning as much as I could. If I wasn't breaking something, I wasn't learning.

Throughout my professional career, I've moved from technician, to supervisor, back to technician before finally becoming an engineer at a larger privately owned company in the United States. During my tenure with my company, I have been given some great opportunities to travel the world. I've spent time across North America, South America, and Europe - I am very grateful for those experiences.

I've been in the systems engineer role for a few years now, but have always been passionate about information security. This blog is my collection of thoughts, script blocks, lab write-ups, and anything else that I want to share with you during my journey into the world of cyber security.


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Exporting BitLocker Recovery Keys From AD Using PowerShell

In preparation for migrating our workstations over to Microsoft BitLocker Administration Management (MBAM), I wanted to backup the recovery keys for my team's systems since we're testing and implementing it. In order to do this, I needed to write something that would pull in every computer in an OU in AD, then grab the msFVE-RecoveryInformation class for each object. I know, I know... there's better ways to create the PSObject. I've been mired in writing in PowerShell 2.0 to support the Windows XP systems here at the company. I know, I know... yes, we still have Windows XP. Yes, there are plans on moving to a supported OS. No, I don't know when that will be.
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Hack the Box Challenge - Blackhole

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It looks like HTB has added a few new Miscellaneous challenges since my last post, time to get back to work! First on my list is Blackhole, a 20 point challenge with a hint of "A strange file has been discovered in Stephen Hawking's computer. Can you discover what it is?" Let's get started! I use wget to download the zip file, then unzip to extract it. After I enter the password, it looks like there's another archive in here, let's try to extract that one as well. Well, according the file manager, it has the folder icon, but when I run the file hawking command, it appears to be a jpeg - let's rename it and see what happens. Using the rename command, mv hawking hawking.jpg changes the extension to a jpeg. Now I can see a picture of Stephen Hawking with a nice quote, "Life would be tragic if it weren't funny." This is probably going to be a stego challenge, awesome! I'll use steghide like I did in the Milkshake challenge,
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Hack the Box Challenge - You Can Do It!

Hint: The flag is in the format HTB{plaintext} Not much in the way of a hint, but let's get this show started! I download the zip file using wget , then extract it using unzip and the password provided. Just like the last Crypto challenge "Classic, yes complicated!", we're given a txt file that contains a "scrambled" string. I'm going to try to use ROT13 again to see if we have any luck. Nope, of course it wouldn't be THAT easy! I see the last character of this string is a "!". That's probably padding, so let's see what we can find. My research didn't find anything with padding, what else could it be? The first letter is "Y" and the last character is "!", same as the challenge name. I bet this is an anagram, off to find an online anagram solver! Searching online was a bust, but I was able to solve it by writing it out and crossing the letters as I used them. Just like the challenge, you can d
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