Starting something new - SLAE: SecurityTube Linux Assembly Expert

2017-06-22 19:48:00

The ecstacy of achieving the OSCP certification didn't last long for me. Sure, I'm very happy and proud that I passed, but not two days later I was already yearning to move on! I wanted to get back to the PWK Labs, to finish the other thirty-odd servers. I wanted to retake the exam a second time. I wanted more challenge! So I set to making a list!

• I'd love to take the three Microsoft MCSA exams for Windows 2016, considering how my new job involves a lot of AD and Windows. 
• My RHCSA and RHCE certs from RedHat will expire later this year, so I should take a look at retaining those by retaking their exams. 
• Offensive Security's follow-up to OSCP, the course and exam CPT+OSCE sound awesome! But they're a bit expensive. 
• I've been eyeing the CoreLAN exploit-writing course and wanted to go to BruCon this fall, but sadly that course has already sold out. Maybe another time. 

As something inbetween, I've signed up for SecurityTube's SLAE course: they teach you basic x86 assembly programming, to build and analyze Linux shellcode. Sounds very educational! And at only $150 for the course and exam it's a steal! I'll be blogging more about this in the future :)

Signing up for the course went easily and I got all the details within a day. However, actually getting the course files proved to be a struggle! There are three ZIP files, totalling roughly 7GB. They're stored in Amazon S3 buckets, which usually implies great delivery speeds. However, it seems that in this case SecurityTube have opted not to have any edge locations or POPs outside their basic US-WEST location. This means that I was sucking 7GB down a 14kbps straw :( That just won't do! Downloads were horribly slow!

After doublechecking that the issue did not lie with our home network, I attempted to download the files using my private server in the US: speeds were great. However, downloading from my own server wasn't much faster. Darn. Maybe there's another hickup? Two of my colleagues suggested using a VPN like PIA; sure that's an option. But I've been meaning to look into Amazon's AWS service, which allows you to quickly spin up virtual machines across the globe, so I went with that. 

I built a basic Ubuntu server in Frankfurt and downloaded the files from the US. Seeing how both the source and destination were on Amazon's network, that went perfectly fine. Grabbing the files from my Frankfurt system also went swimmingly. So after two days of bickering I finally have the course files on my laptop, ready to go :)

kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin, slae,

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