Training | Random CPU

Night Owl DVR Reset

I recently had a friend lose access to his Night Owl WNVR201 device. He said he lost his password, and I said I’d see what I could do. Through a long day of reverse engineering it, I found out how to reset the password on the device.

Finding Your Linux Version with uname and lsb_release

Ever wonder what Linux version is running on your machine? I commonly connect to friend’s machines, or to one of my servers and I have no clue. This can make a huge difference, as some distributions use apt, and some use yum. There are two super helpful commands to accomplish figuring this out.

In this article, we’re going to cover uname, and lsb_release.

Hack The Box: Bitlab

In my previous article about Hack The Box, we made an account on the site. In this article, we’re going to be tackling the Bitlab box, which you can find the page for here

Undocumented APIs

Because I always love to push the envelope, and love learning how different services work in the background, I find myself running into undocumented APIs fairly regularly. Through writing many random bots, I’ve come up with a pretty nice workflow for handling, and documenting these APIs.

This article is going to cover how I typically go about the endeavor of documenting unknown APIs.

Building a Linux Kernel

I find myself fairly regularly hearing about new features in the Linux kernel (the core of Linux operating systems), getting excited, and checking to see if my distribution’s repository of packages has the latest kernel built. Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s repositories don’t have the most recent versions of the kernel available for some time.

Fortunately, the Linux kernel is open source, so we can freely download the kernel’s source code, compile it, and install it.

This article details the steps necessary on a fresh install of Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine).

OverTheWire Bandit Part 2

In my last post, I walked us through connecting to OverTheWire’s Bandit server, and completing level 0 and level 1. Following along with the previous article is a prerequisite to following this article, as you’ll need to get the password from the file in level 1 first.

You can view my last post about this by following this link.

OverTheWire Bandit Part 1

OverTheWire is a website with two games. One is “Wargames”, which is a level based game, the other game is “Warzone”, which is more of a free-for-all hacking game.

In this series of articles, I’m going to give a walkthrough of how to complete the “Bandit” series of levels on their website.

Deep Learning Neural Networks

I keep seeing news about something awesome that a computer has been “trained” to do with “deep learning”. These news spiels refer to something called “Q Learning”, “Deep Learning Neural Networks”, or “Hierarchical Learning”.

Although these are huge terms, it’s a pretty simple idea as to how they work. In this article, we cover some of the basics of this genre of algorithm.