Hi everyone! Hope everyone had a happy holidays - I wanted to write a small blog about a Goal sheet I put out back in March. I’m a big goal setting motivation person; I think speaking things into existance and manifesting them certainly help tackle them. The aforementioned blog post had three goals and I’ll break them down below on the things I completed and my weak excuses :P

  1. CRTO - Certified Red Team Operator - Crushed this one! I was able to get the course through my employer (Optiv) and we had a large group take the course. It was overall a sweet course, maybe I’ll write a blog post about the course but there is a ton of those already out there. As far as the exam, it was submitting points to a dashboard so no report PDF (Thank goodness) but with that being said, I don’t remember much on what was on the exam. The exam was challenging but all required materails were in the course, just make sure you cover all things like Cobalt Strike profiles etc…. Goal achieved!

  2. API/Web Apps - This one was a good one, I found a ton of API vulns this year and ended up giving a talk at work about it during the Source Zero Con. It had a good turnout and I ended up heading to Blackhat to give the talk at our company’s booth. It was a fun trip and my first time actually out to Vegas during the BH/Defcon timeframe. I also recently took a seperate job at AWS that deals mostly with API’s, even ones without front ends so that field to me has done nothing but blow up. I can confidently say I achieved this goal!

  3. OSWE - I never was able to complete this in 2023. Between switching jobs, I had quite some stuff that kept me busy. I won’t be dropping this one, just listing it on my 2024 list. Not afraid to say I failed the timeframe but won’t fail on the exam hopefully.

So all in, I was 2/3.. Not bad but 66% would be a D in a college class so I guess it’s all relative. Looking forward to 2024 and all of the things that come. I wish you all the best of luck and wellness in the new year.