Building Useful Splunk Dashboards for a Home SOC
Most Splunk tutorials show dashboards with clean data. Real log
data is messy. The searches that actually work.
research blog
Threat hunting.
The most sophisticated actors.
Technical research across DFIR, malware analysis, threat hunting, and CTF write-ups. No product pitches, no fluff.
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DLL Side-Loading in Practice: A Walkthrough of a Real Sample
DLL side-loading keeps appearing in threat
reports. Breaking down a sample that used a legitimate signed binary as a loader.
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Intentions | HTB Forensics (Hard)
Three days. A heavily obfuscated PowerShell dropper, a second-stage payload living
entirely in memory, and a flag hidden in a registry key that should not exist.
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Windows Prefetch Files in Incident Response
Prefetch files can tell you what ran, when it ran, and sometimes from where -
even after the original executable has been deleted.
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Detecting Mimikatz Without Signature-Based Rules
Mimikatz has hundreds of variants and most AV signatures fall
behind. Behavioural detection approaches that catch it regardless of version.
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My Windows DFIR Checklist for Initial Triage
After working through enough incidents and CTF challenges, a checklist that
covers the things that matter most in the first 30 minutes.
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Building a Home Lab for Threat Hunting and DFIR Practice
A walkthrough of setting up a home lab capable of supporting realistic DFIR and threat hunting practice. Covers hardware selection, network topology with VLANs, Sysmon configuration, and getting a full SIEM stack running on a budget.
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PersistenceIsFutile | HTB Forensics (Moderate)
A walkthrough of PersistenceIsFutile on HackTheBox. Eight backdoors on a compromised Linux server with no documentation left behind. Systematic enumeration of persistence mechanisms from obvious to kernel-level.
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Obscure | HTB Forensics (Easy)
A walkthrough of the Obscure Easy forensics challenge on HackTheBox. An obfuscated PHP webshell uploaded to a compromised Apache server. Deobfuscation, traffic analysis, and flag recovery through Wireshark.
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Reminiscent | HTB Forensics (Easy)
A complete walkthrough of the Reminiscent Easy forensics challenge on HackTheBox. A memory dump from a machine infected via a malicious email attachment. Process tree analysis, base64 command decoding, and document recovery.
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