7 Minute Security

Brian Johnson
  • 4.7 (71)
  • Technology
  • Updated Biweekly

7 Minute Security is a weekly information security podcast focusing on penetration testing, blue teaming and building a career in security. The podcast also features in-depth interviews with industry leaders who share their insights, tools, tips and tricks for being a successful security engineer.

  1. 2d ago

    7MS #743: Eating the Security Dog Food - Part 9

    Hey friends, it has been a long time since we talked about eating our own security dog food.  However, I couldn't be more excited about some big ways we've moved the 7MinSec security program forward, including the release of our shiny new trust center.  Enjoy!

  2. Oct 2

    7MS #742: Baby's First n8n

    Hey friends! I've got some personal and work travel this week, so I'm skipping the tangents (mostly) and jumping straight into something I'm nerdily excited about: Baby's First n8n. If you're not familiar, n8n is a platform for chaining together and automating just about anything your heart desires – and naturally, my heart desires automating away the boring parts of pentesting. In this episode I cover how I finally got hip to n8n (late to the party, as always), the Black Hills webcast that nudged me into it, how I fed Claude my Frankenstein "Swiss Army" pentest script and asked it to turn push-lots-of-buttons into push-one-button, the clever workaround for firing nmap, EyeWitness, and other tools like it (plus the safety gate I built so my automation can't go rogue and get me in trouble), a full OSINT recon fork powered by Project Discovery Neo that lands report-ready in SysReptor, and the many minutes of my life I get back from each OSINT run – and why that's the whole point. By the way, n8n is not a sponsor or partner – just something I like in case you like it too. Got cool n8n workflows of your own? I'd love to hear 'em!

  3. Sep 25

    7MS #741: Tales of Pentest Pwnage - Part 91

    Hey friends! Today's tale of pentest pwnage is brought to you by four hours of sleep, a large mint hot cocoa, and unhealthy levels of giggity. There's a very good reason for all three, but you'll have to hang out to the end of the episode to hear it. First, let's talk about an escalation path I've never walked before: A really tight network is a beautiful and terrible thing — this client went from a C-minus-ish environment in past years to one where I could find basically nothing. No local admin creds laying around, no poisonable protocols, no juicy file shares. Straight into "well, try harder" mode I went. Two new-to-me tools join the arsenal — one that gives you a second opinion on a big pile of pilfered files (Titus), and a one-shot PowerShell command (GPOZaurr) that hands you a report card for everything that's wrong with your GPOs (plus how to fix it). The finding I almost walked right past — an ADCS issue where only a tiny handful of objects could enroll. I said "all right, I'll move on." Then I came back to it, and saw I had missed the (kind of) obvious attack path. A certificate I couldn't authenticate with — and the 0xdf write-up that rescued me from my own gap in knowledge. Machine account quota was set to zero — so of course I tried to add a computer object anyway. Spoiler: it worked like a dirty shirt. The scheduled task trick rides again — my favorite "this is not going to get fixed" Windows behavior. I had a client push back on this one hard: "You had to know the password of the DA you abused, right? You stole the TGT, right?" Nope and nope. How to actually defend against all of this — some ADCS tightening, a checkbox on your high-privilege accounts that a lot of folks don't have ticked, and my new mantra: RDP with purpose. And then it's personal time — my oldest son Cam passed his national paramedic exam, and I am busting my buttons. Stick around for the whole story, including the 4 a.m. potty break that changed everything, the two health care professionals I'd like to hand a party invitation to in person (and why my wife says "I don't know about that, dude").

  4. Sep 18

    7MS #740: Tales of Pentest Pwnage - Part 90

    Hey friends! We've been on a bit of a Tales of Pentest Pwnage bender lately, so let's keep it rolling with Part 90. (And Mom, relax — this is not one pentest story chopped into 90 parts.) Today is less of an A-to-Z story and more a pile of tips and tricks pulled from a recent string of SCCM-flavored internals — plus a tangent about a video game and a little robot Claude and I built to get my life back. Multi-tier SCCM is having a moment — I've never administered SCCM a day in my life, but 2026 keeps dropping me into these split-role environments. Here's where I go to figure out my attack surface when all I've got is a low-priv cred. SMB signing on? Cool, I'll go around it — relaying from one SCCM box to the one with SQL on it, and the easy-button tool that vacuums the good stuff out of the database once you're there. (NAA creds, clear-text local admin passwords, install scripts with creds baked in…yes please.) Then relay the other direction — when the loot came back stale, a nudge from a Slack channel had me pointing the relay backwards, and I giggled like a little schoolboy at what popped out. Adding yourself to the local admin group: still weirdly undetected — an old episode of ours reminded me of an Impacket tool I don't see written up on many pentest blogs, and it slipped right by. My favorite cheat code hit a snag — the evil-scheduled-task-under-a-logged-in-DA trick kept coughing up permission errors, so I had to get creative. Plus the defensive recs I'm still trying to sharpen up — if you've got a better way to close this loophole, I'm all ears! Tangent: Halloween (the video game) and the lobby watcher — a million players and I'm still staring into the lobby abyss for 10 minutes at a time. So Claude and I built something that watches the screen and texts me when it's time to sprint back to the keyboard. It's not cheating. It's not! (The Texas Chainsaw crowd disagreed, loudly.)

  5. Sep 11

    7MS #739: Tales of Pentest Pwnage – Part 89

    Hey friends! Today is a tale of pentest pwnage episode, and this one features a path to escalation I have never seen before – one I could only find few references on the entire Internet. It happened completely by accident, but during the report readout I'm absolutely going to say it was intentional and that I totally meant to do that. Here's what we cover: A client that's actually doing the things – year two or three of testing this environment, and they had buttoned up so much that I had to dig deep. Great for them, freaking frustrating for me. Why my Kerberoasting success rate has fallen off a cliff – Microsoft pushed an encryption change earlier this year, and cracking those hashes is a whole different ballgame now. Selective poisoning vs. poison-all-the-things – a nod to Pretender, which I covered in a TuesdayTOOLSday video over at 7MinSec.club. It doesn't get nearly enough love in blogs and videos. The relay that fired… and did something completely different than I expected – I saw the ntlmrelayx log scroll by, thought "yes, I've got DA," and then had a "wait, wait, whoa, what?" moment. I was honestly a little panicked. An ancient Exchange vulnerability comes back to bite – CVE-2021-34470 (vulnerable Exchange schema) turned out to be the fallback that got me a foothold I had no business having. My favorite evil privesc trick, revisited – queuing up a scheduled task that runs under an interactively logged-in DA's context without ever knowing their password. The MDR alerts that come out of this are equal parts hilarious and terrifying. A bonus thing to always look for – scheduled tasks running under saved DA creds that point at a script you can edit. Add one little line to fire an evil command of your choice, and you're in like a dirty shirt. Check us out at 7MinSec.com for pentesting, training, controls assessments and security miscellany, 7MinSec.club for our Substack and weekly TuesdayTOOLSday videos, and 7MinSec.wiki for tips, cheat sheets and scripts (including pages on the scheduled task shenanigans above).

  6. Sep 4

    7MS #738: Baby's First ProjectDiscovery Neo

    Hey friends! Today I'm talking about Baby's First Neo — and to be crystal clear, I don't mean Keanu, and I don't mean the R&B guy with the hat. I mean the AI-powered pentest assistant from our pals at ProjectDiscovery. Also to be crystal clear: this is not a sponsorship, ad, partnership or anything of the sort. Just me sharing a thing I like so you can decide if you like it too. Here's what we get into: Why I didn't renew my ProjectDiscovery cloud subscription after a full year of running it side-by-side with Nessus — including the three things that ground my gears (one of which had me angry like the Hulk inside) The Palo Alto finding that made me plunk down a credit card and buy PD in the first place What happened when I actually told their team why I was canceling — and the surprise offer that followed How I set up my first Neo project, and the multi-paragraph prompt I fed it (spoiler: "please don't go rogue" was in there) Where Neo beat my manual process — and the two subdomains it found that I flat-out missed The OSINT recommendation Neo made about a job posting that I thought was genuinely smart My one big hesitation about the credit-based pricing model, and why a part two of this series is probably coming soon Then we close out with the tangent portion of the program: Grandma 7MS might be my neighbor soon, she bought a vehicle roughly the size of a small nation, and I'm asking for some good vibes on her house hunt. Also, thank you again to everybody who has sent kind messages since my dad passed — it means more than you know.

  7. Aug 28

    7MS #737: Tales of Pentest Pwnage – Part 88

    Hello friends! Today's tale of pentest pwnage isn't a start-to-finish march to DA – it's me finally emptying out the backlog of "gosh, I've got to share this next time" internal network tips that have been rattling around in my head. Here's what we get into: Don't skip the boring stuff. Even when I'm testing the same network for the third or fourth time, I've got an ever-growing list of things I check every single time – because config drift has a nasty habit of quietly reintroducing problems that were fixed years ago. Get a second opinion on your tools. Lately I've had BloodHound tell me a network is squeaky clean, and then gone and checked manually only to find the exact opposite sprawled all over the place. I don't know how to account for it, but it's changed how I work. (If you know the source of truth here, please write in!) Ghost machines. That innocent little checkbox in Active Directory that turns a computer object into a gift-wrapped present for an attacker. We keep finding these in environments that had zero of them last year – and I share the two-pass trick that shakes even more of them loose. The weekend freebie. Why I like to get my box lit up on a Friday even when the test doesn't officially start until Monday, and what tends to come wandering into my capture over 48 quiet hours. SNMP sweeps. I've never been caught doing one, and yet they'll happily hand over the make, model and firmware of some firewalls, switches and storage systems in the building. I think this finding deserves way more attention than it gets. (There are a few little commandlets waiting for you over at 7MinSec.wiki.) Be a consultant, not a Terminator 1000. Why I run certain checks even when I'm 99% sure I'll find nothing, why "you don't have this thing at all" belongs in the accolades section, and how that one habit has led to some of the most appreciated conversations we've had in report delivery meetings. Tangent department: the dumb-but-glorious AI project that gave me the giggidies – a fully automated lobby bot for a Steam game that is absolutely, positively not for the kiddos. Also: the one line I won't cross with it, no matter how much my buddy eggs me on. Got a tip of your own I should be adding to the "always check this" list? I'd love to hear it! 7MinSec.com for security services and show notes | 7MinSec.club for our Substack and weekly TuesdayTOOLSdays | 7MinSec.wiki for pentesting tips, scripts and cheat sheets

  8. Aug 21

    7MS #736: Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster – Part 9

    Hey friends! Today's another slice of our Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster miniseries, and fair warning — it's a bit of a Friday mood-ruiner. It's been almost two months since my dad passed, and we've moved into a phase nobody prepared me for. Here's what we get into: The paperwork nobody thinks about — my mom still doesn't know what her monthly income looks like now, and the answer is buried in a box somebody lost the key to. Divvying up a lifetime of stuff — and why our 2019 house fire completely rewired how I think about possessions. Dumpster weekend — my wife makes keep-or-toss calls like a Terminator. Also: my dad owned 60 rakes, and a spirited family debate about the resale value of bee spray. Sell it or pitch it? — why we mostly gave up on Facebook Marketplace mid-cleanout, and my one non-negotiable rule for meeting strangers to hand off your stuff. The conversation I wish we'd had five years ago — it's short, it's simple, and it's absolutely brutal to bring up with your parents. Do it anyway. My hope is this nudges you to have some of these talks now, while everybody's healthy and nobody's crying in a garage. Been through it yourself? I'd love to hear what you'd do differently. And if this is your first time here — we normally talk pentesting, blue teaming, certs and security careers over at 7MinSec.com. Come hang out at 7MinSec.club, our free Substack where TuesdayTOOLSday is getting back to fundamentals, and check out 7MinSec.wiki, where every article is getting paired up with a video. Have a great week, Brian

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About

7 Minute Security is a weekly information security podcast focusing on penetration testing, blue teaming and building a career in security. The podcast also features in-depth interviews with industry leaders who share their insights, tools, tips and tricks for being a successful security engineer.

Information

  • Creator
    Brian Johnson
  • Years Active
    2014 - 2026
  • Episodes
    742
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Brian Johnson
  • Show Website
    7 Minute Security

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