So long Microsoft Internet Explorer - you gave us hell for 25+ years, but yet somehow will still be missed*… a little.

Considering how long The Serpent has been online, we’ve not done a great job of making some of our older content available. It seems to get lost with every re-write, database change or new hosting provider. Well that changes now! Starting today, you can read some of the crap we’ve written as far back as 2002, and plenty of other articles since then. The database is a little worse for wear, so there are many years missing, but we’ve made available what we can.

I remember back in 2016 when Microsoft announced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, I was super-excited to try this new feature. At the time I was working on Linux daily but only for pretty basic stuff, yet it was still stuff that Windows made difficult. Tools like grep, wget, ssh and nc required a whole VM to be running elsewhere on my machine.

Python is an incredible language. I moved over to it in the mid 2000’s after realising that C++ was a full time job. Since I’m no professional developer, I wanted something that could produce results rapidly, without much of a learning curve. Python was a great fit at the time (we didn’t have these fancy new languages like Go, Rust and Ruby on Rails etc!)

I’ve been asked a lot recently on my opinion regarding Kaspersky, and whether or not they can be considered a trusted player in the cybersecurity field. Obviously recent events in Ukraine have caused IT departments all over the world to re-evaluate their decision to rely on Kaspersky, but this isn’t a new issue. In IT, we’ve been discussing the possible risks with Kaspersky since before the Crimea annexation.

For many years, things in the superuser world of Linux were ticking along nicely. Thanks to abilities that allowed us to separate commands meant for important system configuration, and checking our email. However one day back in 2017, it all went and got a little bit more complicated, albeit briefly.

It’s OK if cURL arguments still escape you, since there are over 200 of them! This new cheatsheet provides some of the most common use cases wih cURL, the most comprehensive network tool for firing off HTTP(S) requests and interpreting their responses.

It didn’t take long for my experiment in cheap Chinese electronics to go bang… literally.

Congratulations! If you can read this, you also made it to 2022. A year that I hope is full of fortune, a little luck and lots of happiness.

Phishing links really are annoying aren’t they? Between using unicode characters in hostnames and legit looking designs coupled with good English (unlike here at The Serpent), it’s no wonder that this method of hacking an account still reigns supreme.

I’m still stuck in cloud hell when it comes to hosting my own operating systems and other lab devices. The ageing on-premise equipment just doesn’t provide enough oomph I need these days. It’s also too expensive to host a brand new ESX environment in my home office. So ever since, my lab has been a mash of Azure and AWS hosted kit.

Well hasn’t 2021 just flown by! Amongst changing jobs (again) and buying a house, there’s been very little time dedicated to my side projects such as The Serpent. That is until I recently discovered Home Assistant!

It’s always interesting to look through The Serpent’s logs to see what unusual traffic makes its way to our doors. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that the names of exploits may change, but the methods have largely remained the same.

I’m going to gush a little about an application I’ve been using for a few years now. It’s been absolutely instrumental to my career as a network engineer, a cybersecurity consultant, and as a solution architect.

Powerline adapters are great for spreading Ethernet throughout the house without running cables through walls or along floors. Yet there’s a commonly overlooked factor I’ve noticed when people select them. It’s do to with the advertised speeds the adapters are capable of.