Cisco Capture The Flag - Meraki Version

Capture the Flag is a networking game that will allow you to gain hands-on experience with designing and operating cloud-based solutions with the Cisco Meraki platform.
#CiscoCTF

Find it HERE (Until July 17th 2020) - An Online treasure hunt! Where the treasure is "things to put onto your resume."

After signing up, you log into an emulator of a Meraki dashboard.

This is how it looks forreal. I've used Meraki in demos before!

One of the clues is

"What is the name of the custom performance class configured at London’s MX which matches the metrics described?"

[metrics ommitted by runtcpip.com]

Then you go to the appropriate page and you look around; When you answer successfully, you get a nice,DOS-esque screen;

There are hints; Don't be ashamed to use them, even if you lose points. It's all a learning experience!

Even if said hints are a strange mixture of vague and obvious.

Change Access Point Radio Frequency somewhere in the 'Wireless' menu? Groundbreaking.

You don't lose points from clicking 'Read More Task Details'.

When even the hints have you stumped, there was an open WebEx chat where someone was on hand to help.

Shout out to Nate Austin for helping me with #18 - You can run APIs here, you don't need to download Postman if you're a beginner! I found where to put the API key myself and got the correct answer.

You can also get an e-mail with a summary of the "flags" you've captured.

Things I learned

Meraki has cameras!
Meraki appliances can be configured in different deployment modes.
When blocking with filters, site categories are updated dynamically.

Retweet?

Comments

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now OpenTofu Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process. Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach. That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init. As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory

Building, Breaking, and Building A CRM with Retool

I like no- or low-code solutions to things. I've often wanted to simply push a button or move some GUI around and have the code implement itself. I've thought about building something that's like a customer relationship management (CRM) system for keeping up with my network better than my little spreadsheet where I click links and then go like something. The general idea in this CRM Development is: To have a GUI to add people to a NRM (Network Relationship Management). Attach it to a database (MySQL is what I went with eventually using Amazon Relational Database service, but you can use PostGRES, and probably others). Make sure components are connected to each other in the retool interface. This video is a good start. Watching the tutorial video, heard some SQL commands and went 'Oh no 😳" before going "Wait I know basic SQL", which is good, because you'll see. When you get set up, there's a plethora of resources you can use -- Incl

RUN TCP/IP | Morgan Lucas' Tech Portfolio

Search This Blog