The Security Setup - HD Moore

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.thesecuritysetup.com/home/2014/10/1/hd-moore

[Interesting website I found while following someone else who was profiled 
earlier, Uri with @redteamsblog, the idea here is 'what setup do folks in 
security use to attack, defend, build, break, hack, crack, secure, etc.' 
which should make for some interesting reading.  - WK]


H D Moore
OCTOBER 1, 2014

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is H D Moore (since the day I was born, it doesn't stand for 
anything). I am a security researcher and the chief research officer for 
Rapid7. Some folks may be familiar with my work on Metasploit, but these 
days I also spend a lot of time scanning the internet as part of Project 
Sonar. My servers send friendly greetings to your servers at least once a 
week. Howdy!

What hardware & operating systems do you use?

Lots. My normal workload involves crunching a billion records at a time, 
running a dozen different operating systems, and still handling corporate 
stuff via Outlook and PowerPoint. As of 2009, I finally made the switch to 
Windows as my primary OS after being a die-hard Linux user since 1995. 
That doesn't mean that I use Windows itself all that much, but I find it 
to be a useful environment to run virtual machines and access the rest of 
my hardware with SSH and X11. The tipping point was the need to quickly 
respond to corporate email and edit Office documents without using a 
dedicated virtual machine or mangling the contents in the process. The 
second benefit to using Windows is on the laptop front; Suspend, resume, 
and full hardware support don't involve weeks of tuning just to have a 
portable machine. Finally, I tend to play a lot of video games as well, 
which work best on overspecced Windows hardware. All that said, Windows as 
productivity platform isn't great, and almost all of my real work occurs 
in web browsers (Chrome), virtual machines (VMWare for Intel/AMD64 and 
QEmu for RISC), and SSH-forwarded XFCE4 tabbed-terminals.

The laptop I currently use started life as a banged up ASUS ROG G750 (17") 
bought as the display model from a Best Buy. The drives, video card, and 
memory were swapped out bringing the total specs up to 32Gb RAM, a 512Gb 
SSD boot disk, a 1Tb backup disk, and a GeForce GTX 770 GPU. This runs the 
most loathed operating system of all, Windows 8.1 (Update 1) Enterprise, 
but it has a huge screen, was relatively cheap, and can run my development 
virtual machines without falling over. It also runs Borderlands2 and 
Skyrim at maximum settings, critical features for any mobile system. Given 
that the total cost was under $1,500, it is a great machine for working on 
the road and blocking automatic weapons fire (as its weighs about 20 Lbs 
with accessories). I carry this beast around in a converted ammunition 
bag, sans the grenade pouches.

[...]



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