You know when you have so much information, you don’t know where to start, so you just don’t? That is where I am at the current moment. It’s good, but it’s been 2 weeks, and I really haven’t made progress on Georgia’s book. Today, I will work on it. That is until I get the OSCP material!
I have been doing a few things other than studying – but it’s been good. I have been:
- attending the first CSA-DC chapter meeting. I met Anil, the host and founder of the chapter at a Federal Cloud Summit in DC. I really enjoyed it and will go back for their next meetup in January. But I met Martin there! He’s a pentester AND he is from Argentina. That’s awesome – we met up later again to talk about how to get into pentesting and Argentina, which my family and I are vacationing to in February of next year.
- Attended the 2018 Cyber Maryland conference. I really had a good time. Some jerk talked my ear off about how idiotic I am for being a federal employee and how he’s racist inherently because he’s white. Just some random stranger. We live in some odd times, folks. But after that, it was awesome! There were three presentations that stood out to me:
- One on Snowden and Quantum Computing. It solidified my thoughts on Snowden – he’s a traitor and really F*&#$ up our national security. 99% of what he leaked isn’t even about privacy. It was national secrets, folks. You’re welcome, Russia. I also really enjoyed the discussion on Quantum Computing.
- Synthetic Identities on the Dark Web. I never knew how susceptible kids are to identity fraud so easily. Freeze your Kids credit, folks.
- Election Security. We need to go to paper ballots. But we are idiots and apparently, West Virginia is going to use blockchain to have votes counted. Mobile Voting in the 2018 elections. It’s a horrible idea.
I met Amber there! Totally awesome person – she told me about some things that she is working on and I really hope to stay in touch.
- Decided through Martin and my wife that I am going to just start studying for the OSCP. I have been waffling around books and thinking about getting my Pentest+ (which is so new, no one knows if it’s good), or retake the CEH… Inna stated that if she is going to give me the time to study, just go for the one that matters – and Martin, he thinks the same thing. The test with 3 months of the lab is $1,150.00. That, in hindsight, is nothing, and if I fail, it’s only 60 bucks for a retake. So, I am going to make a case to my boss about taking it, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just pay for it out of pocket. Work is slowing down for the holidays – I am going for it. I am going to #tryharder 🙂
tldr; I did some stuff, made some friends, F&$%# it, I am going straight for my OSCP.