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Restarting My Blog in 2026

I’m Back

After a long hiatus — my last proper post was back in 2022 — I’m restarting this blog.

Life got busy (as it always does), and the blog quietly slipped down the priority list. But I’ve decided it’s time to change that.

Why Restart Now?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of maintaining a personal blog. A big inspiration for me recently has been Simon Willison .

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Installing Hashcat with AMD Radeon drivers on Ubuntu Linux

Summary

This post describes how I got the latest build of Hashcat working on a newly installed Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS.

History

My previous password cracking rig was a 2009 Mac Pro with an AMD Radeon RX580 and this proved a fast and reliable platform for several years until I upgraded the MacOS version to 10.15 (Catalina) after which hashcat started throwing runtime errors like:

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Kiterunner - an API scanner

Kiterunner is a context based webscanner that uses common api paths for content discovery of an application’s api paths.

Example usage:

kr scan https://example.com -w ~/kiterunner/routes.kite

kr scan https://example.com -w ~/kiterunner/routes.kite --ignore-length=1234

Book Review - Hacking APIs by Corey Ball

  • Title : Hacking APIs - Breaking Web Application Programming Interfaces
  • Author : Corey Ball
  • Date : April 2022
  • ISBN-13: 9781718502444
  • Link: https://nostarch.com/hacking-apis

Hacking APIs

Our penetration testing engagements web applications increasingly involve URLs with /api/ in their path. Of course these can be tested just like any other URL but it became obvious that there are subtleties to testing APIs that required a new set of testing methods.

This book promises to provide a thorough grounding in API testing. I purchased this book for our pen test team bookshelf with the hope that it would fill in any knowledge gaps that our team may have.

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Testing for F5 Networks BIG-IP vulnerability (CVE-2022-1388)

Background

CVE-2022-1388 is a critical vulnerability (CVSS 9.8) in the management interface of F5 Networks’ BIG-IP solution that enables an unauthenticated attacker to gain remote code execution on the system through bypassing F5’s iControl REST authentication. The vulnerability was disclosed publicly on 4 May 2022.

Testing

A bash script to test for CVE-2022-1388 was published at https://www.randori.com/blog/vulnerability-analysis-cve-2022-1388/. I modified the sample script to accept a target IP or FQDN as a command line argument, as follows:

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