Review of Udemy course – The RedTeam blueprint a unique guide to ethical hacking

Overview

RedTeam Nation – Brandon Dennis – Certificate of completion

The Redteam blue print is a video course created by Brandon Dennis which aims to take anyone with no previous security knowledge and give them a good starting point from which to pursue a career in cyber security.

The course covers all the topics you would expect as well as a multitude of others such as the typical structure of red and blue teams, advice for applying for jobs and tips for passing the interviews.

Most courses I’ve seen in the past briefly advise learners to find a programming language they are comfortable with and take a separate course to improve their knowledge however Brandons course includes 2:30 of Python tutorials and 1:40 in Assembly. While This is only enough to cover the topics briefly it is more than enough to get someone started with either language.

Brandon himself has completed the OSCP and is studying for the OSCE. it feels like his choice of topics and how deep he goes into each topic is aimed at someone who eventually wants to commit and study for the OSCP. The course would also be useful for someone looking at the Comptia Security+ or the EC-Council CEH.

Pros

• Far more in depth than other courses I’ve seen which claim to go to beginner –> hacker
• Plenty of demonstrations showing the concepts discussed.
• The course covers far more than just the technical aspect of cyber security.
• Lots of extra resources provided with the lectures such as templates or links for further reading:

  

  Extra resources attached to lectures

• All the standard stages of a red team assignment are covered: reconnaissance, enumeration, exploit, pivoting, privilege escalation, persistence, covering tracks.
• The teachers voice is clear and easy to understand.

Cons

• The screen capture was recorded at a high resolution and is sometimes only visible if you have a good steady internet connection which auto connects at 1080p, for some reason you cannot manually set it to anything higher than 720p which means if you are on a weak connection you cannot see what is happening on screen:
• The module regarding job hunting and salary is very specific to the USA. This isn’t Brandons fault and I wouldn’t expect him to tailor-make videos for every country but is worth noting if you are somewhere where the IT job market is very different from America.

Verdict

Very indepth course and value for money if you buy it during a Udemy sale

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Check the up/down status of servers and services with a batch file

Here is a template for a batch file you can run on demand to check the up/down status of servers and services using the command prompt.

Most companies will be using some sort of automated tool for monitoring the status of their servers however if you don’t have the budget or want something quick to use here is something you can setup which pings as many servers or services as you want and outputs their status to a text file which can quickly be scanned to find out if any have gone down unexpectedly.

Or maybe you pushed out a windows patch to all your machines and want to check everything has come back up after reboots?

Instructions:

• Copy and Paste the below script into a text file and save it using any name but with a .bat extension
• Place it in c:\X\       (if needed you can change this location in the script)
• Edit the bat file and replace #SERVER and #SERVICENAME with whatever you are checking. The service name can be found in the properties
• It should look like this:
• When you run the batch file it will output all the raw data into a file called servicestatus.txt then clean it up and place the final output into a file called FinalReport.txt which you can easily scan to see which servers either haven’t responded to ping or which services are showing as stopped.

 

:

REM ———————–SECTION 1————————————–

REM This checker has 4 sections

REM Section 1 = Version details and notes

REM Section 2 = Pings a list of servers to ensure they are up

REM Section 3 = Contacts a list of services to ensure they are up

REM section 4 = Gets the raw output of sections 2+3 and removes unwanted lines, then outputs the results to finalreport.txt

REM ———————–SECTION 2————————————-

ping #SERVER1 >> c:/x/servicestatus.txt

ping #SERVER2 >> c:/x/servicestatus.txt

ping #SERVER3 >> c:/x/servicestatus.txt

REM ———————–SECTION 3—————————————-

sc \\#SERVER1 query #SERVICENAME >> c:/x/ServiceStatus.txt

sc \\#SERVER1 query #SERVICENAME >> c:/x/ServiceStatus.txt

sc \\#SERVER2 query #SERVICENAME >> c:/x/ServiceStatus.txt

sc \\#SERVER3 query #SERVICENAME >> c:/x/ServiceStatus.txt

sc \\#SERVER3 query #SERVICENAME >> c:/x/ServiceStatus.txt

REM ———————–SECTION 4———————————————–

findstr /v “statistics Packets Approximate Minimum TYPE WIN32 STOPPABLE SERVICE_EXIT_CODE CHECKPOINT WAIT_HINT” c:/x/servicestatus.txt > c:/x/FinalReport.txt

del “C:\X\servicestatus.txt” /f /q