Cyberbits

  • Redteam lab updates

    Introduction Eight or nine weeks ago I built the red team lab on my Mac: one make up, a Kali attacker, two targets, an isolated 10.10.10.0/24. It worked, and then it did what every working lab does: it grew. This post is the catch-up. Same repo, same one command, five targets instead of two, and…

  • Fuzzers

    Introduction Plenty of TryHackMe rooms have a task like “find the hidden login page,” and the answer is the same ritual every time: throw a wordlist of paths at the web server and see what sticks. I had been switching tools based on whatever the room walkthrough used, so I sat down to pick a…

  • THM The Hollow Shell

    Introduction The Hollow Shell is another resort-themed box from TryHackMe’s Hacker Holidays run, and this one lives entirely in a zip file. Upload the wrong kind of archive to a “shell delivery” service and the server will happily write your files anywhere on disk it can reach. That’s Zip Slip, and this room chains it…

  • THM Do Not Disturb

    Introduction TryHackMe’s Do Not Disturb box chains five small vulnerabilities into one root shell: a NoSQL bypass into a staff console, a template injection field that runs code, a stray debug port, and a forgotten group membership that hands over the disk. Once again, this was a tough one for a beginning pentester. But it…

  • THM Beach Bar

    Introduction I’ve been working through TryHackMe’s Hacker Holidays 2026 event, a free 14-day run of rooms set in a five-star resort with a zero-star security posture. Beach Bar, a beginner Linux box, chains three real production mistakes: exposed credentials, remote code execution through unsafe YAML deserialization, and a root password sitting in plain sight. This…

  • Anonymous Kali setup on Mac

    Introduction Last week we setup a single Kali box as a daily driver. As promised, this week we take it a step further. The lab I built in July hands me an attacker box and two targets on an isolated segment, rebuilt from scratch with one command. Every VM in it still reaches the internet…

  • Metasploit EternalBlue, Hearthbleed, i.e.

    Introduction A while back I wrote a beginner Metasploit post where I popped a Metasploitable box. Since then I’ve kept poking at things, and a few features finally clicked. So here’s a more intermediate follow-up; two classic exploits, the shell upgrade trick I now use and the post-exploitation moves that make the framework feel like…

  • Automated lab setup on a Mac

    Introduction Last time I built a single Kali workstation on the Mac by hand: install the VM, update it, duplicate it, keep the clone clean. That’s fine when you need one attacker box. It stops being fine the moment you want a target to point it at, and then a second target, and then a…

  • Metasploit for beginners + hack a Linux box

    Introduction Short course I found on Coursera giving me some Metasploit basics. Already covered a lot on THM. Expanded quite a bit on this short course, to be able to present to you the below write up. Setup Create a lab with: I’m running on a Mac. Recon Find out what we’re working with. Note:…