We talked about introductory OpenSSL in a previous blog Dipping Our Toes into OpenSSL, that covered how it supports rich cryptographic-centric operations, which are needed for all sorts of things in the security domain and even outside of it. Today, let's take the next step and understand some of the crypto arithmetic behind it, without making the topic too complicated.

Photo by Vanna Phon on Unsplash

DNS - Do Not think it's Simple

In our recent series of articles, we talked about network security-related tools and techniques one needs to be aware of to build a cybersecurity career. Next, we will cover DNS and its related security implications!

DNS, or Domain Name System, translates domain names to IP addresses, so your browser/s can find what you searched. DNS resolvers are usually stub resolvers, which means that the full DNS records lie elsewhere.

Socat - the tool of choice for proxies and networking pipes

In prior blogs, our team has written about tools like netcat, Nmap, and Zeek that network security engineers widely use. Security analysts and threat hunters use these tools to help with their daily tasks. So this time let's talk about socat. Socat is the tool of choice if you are creating your own proxies or networking pipes.

This is a quick introduction on popular Supervised Learning Algorithms.

As we may recall, Supervised Learning refers to the set of algorithms that uses training data comprising both of inputs and corresponding output to build a model that subsequently predicts the best output for future inputs.

Supervised Learning problems fall in two broad categories:

As a cybersecurity professional, knowledge of network and security tools is critically important. To help jumpstart this knowledge, we will focus on Nmap and introduce you to beginner's content. 

Nmap has always been the security engineer's tool of choice for a wide variety of tasks. You can use it to see which machines are up, if a machine has blocked pings, or if the firewall blocks ICMP packets. It also helps determine if a machine is switched on and connected to the network through performance scans. In the previous article: How to Use Netcat for Cybersecurity, we had covered netcat, also used for connectivity testing.

If your organization is running a web application, you are likely to use EC2. Further, there is a high likelihood your instances are all Linux. Linux systems are robust and a suitable first choice for server applications like a MEAN stack express.js web server, an application built using open source LAMP stack, commercial proprietary software, or basic server using Apache or Nginx. Linux is also very widely used for both SQL and NoSQL database applications like Redis, Mongo, or Postgres or MySQL.

In our previous blog, Supervised vs Unsupervised Learning, we learned that Machine Learning consists of algorithms that learn to solve a problem without expressly being provided step by step instructions by a human agent. Then we differentiated between two major categories of algorithms - Supervised Learning & Unsupervised Learning. 

Zeek the new Bro

Zeek is the new name for Bro that has been in existence since 1994. In this article, we will review the useful features of Zeek that make it a powerful tool for network analysis and security monitoring. Need a little more familiarity with Zeek? Check out our previous blog:  Bro: Security's Swiss Army Knife.

To start a career as a security analyst, one must have a good understanding of the network and knowledge of networking tools. Let's begin with netcat.

In our previous blogs on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life, we learned the basics of how our computers can be trained to think like humans and work like them. Now let’s move on to some actual application of what we learned and understand about one of the most versatile neural network models - The Autoencoder.