Recent content in Michael's Exploits on mjkranch.com
Teaching offensive cybersecurity techniques builds better defenders. While I’ve discussed this before ( like in this post ), this vulnerability disclosure is a great vignette for highlighting why teaching offensive cybersecurity techniques are so important for building defensive cybersecurity professionals as well as why bug bounty programs are so critical for improving the defensive posture…
So I have spent several years now working with students taking Offensive Security’s Penetration Testing with Kali Linux (PWK) - the preparatory course for the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP), and I decided it was finally time to write a post on how to get the most out of your lab time.
Welcome CISSE 2019. In this post, you can find my slides as well as a draft copy of the CISSE19 paper.
Welcome BSidesKC. I attended and spoke this year at BSidesKC. This post discusses the [awesome] conference and provides the materials, including a video, of my talk.
After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Congratulations! You found a hidden flag - I just love CTFs! Great job. Make sure you let me know at my reception for…
Papers Why You Should Start with the Offense: How to Best Teach Cybersecurity’s Core Concepts Michael Kranch , in The 23rd Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education (CISSE 23) , Las Vegas, NV, USA, Jun 2019. This paper uses a comprehensive approach to demonstrate why offensive (hacking) techniques are the best method for teaching cybersecurity’s core competencies, even when the purpose…
This post presents an argument for starting any cybersecurity education program with the offensive techniques, even when the purpose of the training is to build defensive cybersecurity professionals.
This is a super quick post on two recent awesome cybersecurity competitions I participated in.
This post contains some of the resources I built as part of a hacking club to teach cyber security to my peers.
A short post to keep track of my work talking about Django App Development, MailGun, CGSCHacks.com, and my CANSec Talk.
Example Page For more information, visit the page post. This is a basic example page to demonstrate what happens if you have a conflict in subdirectory. This is actually a page that exists in \example\ of archang31.gitlab.io , but I also have a project with the slug \example\ . As such, you will see that project if you go to archang31.gitlab.io\example and not this page. However, you will see this…
This is a short post on how to host multiple Gitlab project pages using a single Gitlab account. This task is actually very simple, but I could not find any documentation on it when I tried a couple weeks ago. I ended up resorting to creating a second Gitlab account. Turns out you do not need to use this hack, and this post will explain how to legitimately host multiple gitlab pages with just one…
The great (and sometimes intimidating) part about computer security is it’s such a broad and ill-defined field. This post shares some tips to help build this passion and lists several resources to start you on this journey. The post was original created for my new hacking club so geared towards novices with limited to no experience, but the content is useful even for those with a CS/IT…
Keeping with my purpose, I want to write a bi-monthly (bi-weekly?) 1 summary of what I have accomplished. In the past two weeks, I generated the base mjkranch.com content , transitioned to the Beautiful Hugo theme , generated a CV from Front Matter , migrated to Gitlab, and started CGSC Hacks . Looking back, I did quite a bit. I do feel like I have been stuck in the minutiae of website design and…
Notes: AY stands for Academic Year and the 1 or 2 refers to the semester. For example, AY17-2 means second (spring) semester of the 2017 academic year.
This page is devoted to what I do in my spare time which primarily consists of my three favorite things: [hacking](/play/#hacking), [family time](/play/#family), and [serving God](/play/#god).[^1] ## Hacking Hacking is more a hobby for me that I just happen to get paid (sometimes) to do than a job. I am a strong fan of the gamification of, well, everything and am particularly excited about many of…
Courses Visit below to learn more about the various courses I taught while at West Point: CS485: Ethical Hacking , CS482: Cybersecurity Engineering , IT305: Network Engineering , CY355: Cyber Foundations: Computing , and IT105: Introduction to Computing and IT . CS485 - Special Topics in Computer Science: Ethical Hacking Description (from Course Catalog): This course provides in-depth study of a…
Initial Military Service I originally enlisted in the Army in the summer of 2001 when I thought the world was calm and peaceful. Obviously, I was wrong, but I am proud that I helped defend this country and, almost two decades later, that I continue to serve. Soldier Cadet
As I mentioned in the previous post’s footnote, I actually decided to host this site on GitLab primarily because GitLab is awesome (requires no maintenance on my part, has free private repositories, and natively supports Hugo). There is also good documentation on how to use Hugo with Gitlab from both Hugo and GitLab ; however, I ran into a couple small issues I felt were worth addressing.…
Why I decided to blog I’ve had a website for almost two years, but I always envisioned this site being more than simply a persistent resume. I dabbled in this more twice before, but I allowed myself to get in my own way. I convinced myself that my website design was not polished enough, my framework was not secure enough, my writing was not professional enough, and, most paralyzingly, my…
I’ve had a website for a little over a year now, but I recently had several technical experiences that I really want to share with the world. As such, I decided it was time to create a blog. Three weeks and several frameworks later, I decided upon using Hugo . I still think I will ultimately end up switching to Django due to some of the more advanced goals I eventually have for my own cite…