Author: Mitch Garvis
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Kali on VirtualBox: Start to Done
A few months ago I wrote an article called Kali on Hyper-V: Start to Done. I teach a lot of cybersecurity classes, and Kali Linux is a distro that includes most of the tools that so many cybersecurity professionals will use on a daily basis. When I wrote the article I was not thinking that…
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First Amendment Rights
<rant> To all of the First Amendment ‘journalists’ who post videos of themselves arguing with the police for asking them to not record: Yes, it might be your right to do it. It is always your right to be a belligerent and argumentative jackass. In the vast majority of cases, the police are very respectful…
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Another Pensive Airport Article
Airports can be hard to predict. When I got to the airport in Toronto ten days ago at 3:30am I was shocked by the mob scene that greeted me. It was only later when a friend informed me that it was the beginning of March Break that I understood the madness. Assuming that today is…
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Intune is In Tune… Again.
**NOTE: I do not know if there is currently an official logo for Microsoft Intune. Of the two included in this article, one was the original logo in 2010, and the other was found on the Internet. After being introduced to Microsoft Intune in the early part of the last decade, I was troubled by…
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A Brief Explanation of Subnet Masks
If you have ever searched for the IP Address of your computer, you have probably used one of the following commands: ipconfig, ifconfig, or ip addr. If you are really fancy and decided to use Windows PowerShell, you might even have used get-netipconfiguration. Whichever one you used on whichever is your preferred operating system, you…
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If Anyone Could Do It… Revisited
I came across this article that I posted three years ago, and thought it was worth sharing again. During my last contract with Microsoft I discovered that within the company they are essentially handing out the credential Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) like it was candy, requiring little or no proof of actual training ability. To…
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Linux on Active Directory
I remember a decade or so ago when Microsoft tried to reach out to the Open Source community and get them to give their products and environments a chance. ‘Microsoft loves Linux!’ was the slogan, with a big heart in there. I remember joking with some of my colleagues that they really did not, but…
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Lessons Of The Father… or things he should have taught you
A few weeks ago I heard a story on the radio about a man who lost over $40,000 to online scammers, and I was absolutely floored by how anyone could be taken in by such a scam. Please understand that online scammers are very good at what they do. If you are not actively expecting…
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VMware Vulnerability
This article was sent to me over the weekend. It seems that VMware is no longer immune to ransomware. If you did not believe me before when I told you that patch management was one of your most important defensive weapons in the fight against cybersecurity incidents, please believe me now! Massive ESXiArgs ransomware attack…
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Kali on Hyper-V: Start to Done.
**See notes on SecurityOnion at the bottom! It is funny where life can take you. I have been a specialist (and in some things maybe even expert) in so many different technologies over the course of my career, so when I sat down a few weeks ago to create a Kali Linux virtual machine on…
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Layoffs Layoffs Everywhere…
With the exception of a period from late 2014 through mid-2020, I have been a contractor in the IT space for most of my post-Army life. That was not necessarily how I wanted things to be, but it has been the reality nonetheless. In the parlance of the industry, I eat what I kill, and…
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System Issues and Public Panic
Air travel in the United States was severely interrupted by a cyber incident last week. I heard about it on the news as I walked my dog and spent the entirety of that walk framing how I would speak to the incident at the opening of my class later that day. I was teaching a…
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To Upgrade Or Not to Upgrade
If you had told a fifteen-year-old me that in adulthood I would be using exclusively laptops, having eschewed the expandability of desktops for the convenience and portability of the smaller (but at the time prohibitively expensive) form factor, I would probably have laughed at you. Of course, had you told me then that I would…
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The Twelve Networking Truths
As the weekend approaches, I am looking forward to breaking for a couple of days. I have not posted in a while, and I thought I would share this with you. If you are not familiar, RFC stands for Request For Comments, and is usually the definitive rules for a particular technology. Those of us…
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Women in IT
I have been in the IT field for most of my adult life… in addition to several years of my adolescence. I have seen trends come and go, and I have seen technology evolve exponentially. We have evolved from 8-bit computing to symmetric multiprocessing 64-bit CPUs that would blow the doors off of anything that…
The World According to Mitch 