Free Tool
Account Lockout Examiner is an investigation tool to help you quickly identify the root cause of an AD account lockout. This tool replaces a manual search through cryptic log entries with a single click, allowing you to easily identify improperly mapped network drives, services or scheduled tasks running under stale credentials, or an outdated password saved on a mobile device.
Certificate Transparency Project is Google’s answer to the vulnerabilities to compromise and manipulation of certificates and issuing CAs. It provides an open framework for monitoring and auditing HTTPS certificates, so you can search all the certificates in active Certificate Transparency public logs for a given domain. Site owners can use the tool to check their domain names and see if there have been any problematic issuances of certificates referencing their domains. This site from Google is pretty handy to view the cert history.
Cntlm is a fast, efficient NTLM/NTLM Session Response/NTLMv2 authenticating HTTP proxy that stands between your applications and the corporate proxy, adding NTLM authentication on-the-fly for those who wish to escape the MS-proprietary universe. Integrates TCP/IP port forwarding (HTTP tunneling), SOCKS5 proxy mode, standalone proxy and offers NTLMv2 support, password protection, password hashing, mutliplatform code and more.
MAC Address Vendor Lookup enables you to retrieve OUI vendor information, detect virtual machines and possible applications and read the information encoded in any MAC. Also returns results of the site’s own research regarding that MAC address or the OUI.
Microsoft 365 Licensing provides an easily navigated view of the frustratingly complex licensing options for Microsoft products so you can figure out what makes the most sense in your situtation. A very useful tool for getting to grips with all of the options for Microsoft 365 licenses.
Fess is an OS-independent, scalable search server with an easy to configure, browser-based admin GUI that puts the power of Elasticsearch at the disposal of those with no prior experience using the tool. Contains a crawler that searches many types of documents on the web, file system or database and provides search/click log and statistics. Ceyax suggests it for indexing because “it’s free and uses ElasticSearch, it has an OCR Option and you can get it running quickly with Docker.”
Crt.sh allows you to enter any identity (Domain Name, Organization Name, etc), a certificate fingerprint (SHA-1 or SHA-256) or crt.sh ID to instantly see details on all its associated certificates. Recommends this open-source certificate checking website from sectigo.
Tutorial
Ben Eater’s YouTube Channel provides some terrific explanatory videos on various topics related to electronics, computer architecture, networking and other technical subjects. Includes nice tutorials on some IT fundamentals that are often taken for granted rather than fully understood as well as a nice set of higher-level how-tos.
How to Integrate Google Forms With Google Sheets walks you through how to make reporting data more consistent by controlling what people can enter. This article explains exactly how to set up a Google Form and link it to Google Sheets, which can save you time and make your workflow more efficient.
Everything you should know about certificates and PKI but are too afraid to ask explains the knowledge the author reluctantly gathered after years of intentionally avoiding the topic. It’s essentially the missing manual on the rather complicated but incredibly useful subject of certificates and PKI.
itfreetraining is a terrific free professional course that walks you through all the required objectives for the 70-642 MCITP exam.
Nornir Introduction is a post that makes it easier to get acquainted with the Nornir framework, so you can plug your automations with less frustration. Explains, Sadly Nornir does not have a lot of great tutorials like Ansible does. [This is] one of the most useful tutorials I’ve found, which only scratches the surface of what it can do.
Aaron Gould Network Knowledge is a YouTube channel full of detailed educational videos intended to help others enhance their networking expertise and skill and work toward industry certifications. Includes helpful how-tos for specific equipment, documentation tutorials, and a series focused on the Cisco CCNA.
Tip
A shortcut: “You can type CMD in the address bar of Windows Explorer in any mapped drive and open a command prompt in that folder. You can also just type PowerShell in the address bar and open a PowerShell session in that folder. If you need to run a configuration file as a command-line argument for a console command, you can drag and drop the configuration file from a Windows Explorer window into your command prompt.”
Some time-saving automation. Problem: “Man, it’s annoying to remember to check the cert expiry dates on all these different servers and make sure the renewal actually worked.”
1-line bash solution:
cat <<< $(( ($(date -d "$(echo -n | openssl s_client -servername "$domain" -connect "$domain:443" 2>&1 | openssl x509 -enddate -noout | grep '^notAfter' | cut -d'=' -f2)" "+%s") - $(date "+%s")) / 86400 ))
“Never a problem again, just set up a super simple job to run this against the domains I care about every few minutes or so, and I know if anything is getting close to expiring. Costs basically nothing to do it… I don’t really have any reason not to do it every few minutes, even if I could get away with once a day or something.”
Do not hoard information. It makes it impossible to promote you and difficult to have your vacation time approved. Your co-workers will hate you, especially if you leave with knowledge in your head that only you know.”
Suggestions on how to properly document a network: “Put descriptions on interfaces and/or use a program to build a visual of your network… include link capacity (1 Gig or 10 Gig link, etc..), traffic flow and model of the switch/router/firewall/other network elements in the paths. This can save you time when troubleshooting an issue to know what each interface is connected to or planning for upgrades.”
Script
Python MAC address manipulation provides a way to work around different vendors using different formats for MAC addresses when you need to create strings to pass as CLI commands. You’ll learn how to check the string is a valid address and to convert between formats. A mac-format converter script. Takes a mac in any format and outputs many formats.”
Blog
Networking Fun is the work of Katherine McNamara, a Cisco Cybersecurity Systems Engineer and author. CCNP Security Identity Management SISE 300-715 Official Cert Guide, as probably one of the best resources for ISE out there. After years of fielding technical questions, she decided to share some of her expertise with the community through this series of blog posts, which memchenr tells us. Recommendation for her YouTube channel, which is more on the advanced side, but her explanations are clear and concise—a joy to listen to.
Cheatsheet
“Is it worth the time?” looks like a cartoon, but it is actually a useful, at-a-glance cheatsheet to help you determine how long you can work on making a routine task more efficient before you spend more time than you save. I do escalation tasks and automation at my company, and I use this thing all the damn time.
