Blog ✍️



    2022

  • Game Over

    One sunny 😎 day I came to a coworking office very early in the morning. As usual, I’ve decided to kick it off with a freshly brewed coffee which we never had, so, I had to go with an instant substitute. Ugh 😣! I was hoping to savour my disgust meditating over the Feedly recents, when I noticed that I was not the only lark that day. Mark, a freelance designer who happened to be a huge fan of Assassin’s Creed games (just like me), was sitting in the corner of the shared kitchen with his laptop, looking so gloomy that I was sorry I didn’t take my β˜”οΈ with me. When I’ve forced the last sip of that potion inside, I wished him good morning and headed to my working nest. He didn’t respond though, which was weird, since he usually was very friendly. I thought he needed some time on his own and was about to leave the kitchen when suddenly he hailed me. Long story short, he seemed to get himself a virus and didn’t know how to get rid of it. He seemed scared, since lots of important files were encrypted.


  • Once There Lived Admin

    Hey, ps! Would like you to hear a fairy tale? I am sure that you do! It all happened not long long time ago and not in a galaxy far far away… . Let’s imagine that in the J.Rowling’s universe there were cybersecurity specialists as well and Hogwarts had a real website in the Internet. Funky idea! πŸ’‘

    A very hard-working girl, let’s call her Rachel (yeah, Rachel πŸ˜‰) was sitting at her table, working as usual when she suddenly saw her phone vibrating nearby. She picked up the phone, hoping that wasn’t a spam. Indeed it wasn’t. That was her colleague, asking if she is interested in a little side project.




  • 2021

  • The Lord of the Apple: The Return of the iPhone

    πŸ“† 22/08/2021 , Sunday, ☁️

    πŸ•° 11:21 AM.

    It was a cloudy Sunday morning. I was sleeping peacefully till 8:45 AM when my daughter started crawling all over me and my husband asking wether I am awake already… . Well, now I am, darling, many thanks πŸ€¦πŸ»β€β™€οΈ! After having a delicious breakfast (eggplants with home-made tomato sauce, yummy πŸ˜‹) and getting the kitchen back to the clean state (it’s very hard to keep it that way), I’ve decided to finally repair my little old fellow iPhone 7. Several weeks ago I went on vocation to Cyprus and broke the rare camera glass and the screen as well, because I somehow managed to drop the phone on the pavement 3 ❗️times! To be honest, these were not the first times when my iPhone met some surface harder than my palm, so it’s a miracle this had not happened before.


  • To Carry Out MockInv'estigation. Part 1

    ❗SPOILER ALERT!

    πŸ“† 16/06/2021 , Wednesday

    πŸ•° 09:21 PM.

    It was a very sunny day and a very nice a long walk that my daughter and I had before lunch. I feel uplifted because there is finally enough sun and green grass in my life! Unfortunately, no coffee today, since we don’t have BonAcqua, which might be not the best for drinking, but is indeed one of the best to prepare coffee (quoting my husband).


  • To Carry Out MockInv'estigation. Part 2

    πŸ“† 16/06/2021 , Wednesday

    πŸ•° 09:21 PM.

    I had a 7-day license of Magnet AXIOM and I’ve decided to try this tool and compare it with others that I had. In 2021 May-June Magnet held a great event of a great value - Magnet SUMMIT with lots of very useful webinars and workshops. One of them was a case study using Magnet. I am going to follow these steps and study another way to solve a crime.


  • How I Got Started With ARM

    πŸ“† Friday, 12th of March, 202

    ⏰ 09:00

    β˜€οΈ It was a very deceptively sunny morning, children laughing and squeaking merrily. When I closed my eyes I could almoust believe it was late spring or summer…. And the soul was filling with joy and inspiration. But unfortunately the temperature was too low (-10 ❄️ ⛄️ if you believe Yandex) and going for a outside-working-day was impossible πŸ˜”.

    I am finishing my cup of coffee β˜•οΈ , my husband working in the adjacent room and my daughter playing with her new toys.


  • How I Got Started With AWS

    In this blog post I am exploring AWS services (EC2). I am currently using a Free Tier license and I am trying to learn how to use. Why? Well, knowing AWS seems to be a very useful skill on the market. And the second reason for that is that I used to have different VMs that cosumed too much memory (HDD and RAM). Now I am also using M1 MacBook Pro and that’s why having so many VMs locally is impossible since there are only some Linux and Windows 10 Machines available for ARM platform. Besides, I’ve notices that I don’t really use them much so having 60 GB of space occupied for occasional usage is weird. Everything speaks in the favour of AWS.


  • How I Have Built My Lab

    One late evening when my eyes were so difficult to keep open, I’ve decided to setup a Windows Lab on my M1 Mac. Long story short, I couldn’t make Autopsy work as expected and that’s why I had to waste my time on this task…

    📆 01/03/2021

    22:17

    First, I had to sign up to Microsoft Insider Program here. It was free and I signed up. Then, I’ve installed Parallels from here using “Try technical preview” option that was available at this point in time. Also, at this point of time a free activation key 🔑 was available for Parallels (thank you πŸ™ so much, guys, for this) here. During installation process I was a little bewildered by the question about the use purpose of this software… Gaming or ordinary use (text editing, web-browsing etc). I’ve chosen “Gaming” since I presume Autopsy and software alike do consume much power. However, I’m not sure if this option changes the performance or it’s rather some survey. Anyway. After all that everything worked like a charm. But I still have not tried installing autopsy… So, let’s… .


  • Spoiling Dr Evil

    I’ve decided to solve a puzzle per week just to keep myself “forensically fit”. This is my case study of Dr.Evil case (spoiler alert ⚠️). If you wish to solve it yourself, don’t read this blog post!

    Case Objectives

    On 09/20/04 , a Dell CPi notebook computer, serial # VLQLW, was found abandoned along with a wireless PCMCIA card and an external homemade 802.11b antennae. It is suspected that this computer was used for hacking purposes, although cannot be tied to a hacking suspect, G=r=e=g S=c=h=a=r=d=t. (The equal signs are just to prevent web crawlers from indexing this name; there are no equal signs in the image files.) Schardt also goes by the online nickname of β€œMr. Evil” and some of his associates have said that he would park his vehicle within range of Wireless Access Points (like Starbucks and other T-Mobile Hotspots) where he would then intercept internet traffic, attempting to get credit card numbers, usernames & passwords.




  • 2020

  • A Few Good Bits

    Saturday

    I’ve recently have had a severe poisoning (I only hope it’s not the rotavirus 😨) and I’ve spent one evening and one day barely moving. Even now, almost two days have passed, but I still feel a little nauseous. But I’m not that bad enough now to refresh and learn some assembly (it’s always a good medicine for the wicked 😸). The following chain of thoughts was cut from this article once the critical mass of text for SHL/SHR has exceeded its maximum.