Leet Sheets

A tale of privilege escalation through careful enumeration. Starting with basic credentials, a clever hacker dances through AD permissions, manipulates group memberships, and cracks a KeePass vault - proving that in security, like in life, patience and persistence unlock all doors.

A journey through a Hopfield network puzzle where I needed to decode 16 hidden patterns from a 6400-neuron network's weight matrix. Like finding memories in a brain's maze, each pattern held a key, and together they revealed the flag. The network's beauty lay in its ability to recall complete patterns from partial inputs, mirroring our own brain's memory retrieval.

This Hack the Box challenge, "AI Space," involved locating a space hacker by analyzing data patterns from signal origins. The solution utilized Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to visualize a distance matrix, revealing the flag embedded in the 2D plot of the signal points.

Dive deep into an Android device's secrets. Mount, explore, and extract. From boot times to malware, unravel the digital threads of a phishing plot. Every byte tells a story; every file hides a clue. In the end, the truth is just a command away.

Ever wonder what lies beneath the surface of a seemingly ordinary web application? In this writeup, I detail the strategic steps I took to compromise the "Planning" machine. From navigating deceptive interfaces to breaking free from a containerized environment, uncover the innovative techniques that culminated in achieving the highest level of access.

A journey from web enumeration to root, showing how seemingly simple credentials and version vulnerabilities can cascade into full system compromise. The path winds through Grafana exploitation, environment reconnaissance, and finally mastering a crontab manager for ultimate control.

A revolutionary fusion of quantum computing and AI proposes using quantum superposition and qutrit-based circuits to simultaneously explore multiple attack paths and break encryption. Like a master chess player seeing all possible moves at once, quantum algorithms can exponentially accelerate cybersecurity analysis, though this same power threatens current encryption methods.

A Windows DC hack where NFS exposes sensitive PFX/cert files. Through cracking and crafting certificates, domain access was achieved. The key wasn't just breaking in, but understanding how to manipulate certificate-based authentication.

In the cosmic choreography of unseen waves, WiFi murmurs softly, tracing human shapes from silent shadows, undisturbed by walls or darkness. Researchers, sculpting whispers of amplitude and phase, have taught artificial minds to read these invisible ripples into gestures and postures, quietly transcending traditional lenses and lasers. Yet this dance is delicate—each room a unique theatre, each rare pose a fleeting verse in wireless poetry. Still, the promise remains profound: our spaces sensing softly, privacy unbroken, connecting us in subtle harmonies woven from the gentle static of the unseen.

Speech recognition (Whisper) and speech synthesis (ChatGPT voice) are opposite tasks with different priorities. Whisper prioritizes accuracy over speed, while ChatGPT's voice focuses on naturalness and low latency. Their contrasting goals shape their design, optimization, and performance. Understanding these differences unlocks the paradox of their speed disparity.

A misty journey through digital realms, where ports whisper secrets and certificates unveil hidden paths. In this haze, one must navigate the fog of protocols to uncover the true nature of the machine.

From ancient scribes to modern coders, the power of symbols endures. Writing, once a divine gift, now manifests as programming – both bridging worlds through arcane knowledge. Yesterday's sacred characters are today's algorithms, weaving reality with keystrokes.

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol, while promising a USB-C-like standard for AI connectivity, creates a paradox where standardization breeds vulnerability. Like a master key that opens all doors, it offers convenience but concentrates risk. The protocol's power to unite becomes its potential weakness to divide.

Written and tested by Ram Gunduz & Preston Zen. Hackers exploit AI's own prompts, turning obedient servants into unwitting spies. Even the mightiest models can be tricked into revealing secrets, like coaxing Santa to spill system prompts in an email. The attack surface? Instructions themselves.

Deep Research: ChatGPT's autonomous researcher, weaving through web's labyrinth. A digital detective, it queries, reads, analyzes, and synthesizes - crafting comprehensive reports with the finesse of a seasoned analyst. In minutes, it accomplishes what humans take hours, dancing between multiple AI models to unravel complex inquiries.

In the cosmic dance of waves, some shout to silence others. A deliberate cacophony drowns the whispers of connection, leaving only static in its wake. Yet in this noise lies a strange harmony - the power to shape the invisible landscape of communication.

Face swap models dance a delicate tango between identity and appearance, each with its own unique flair. From BlendSwap's artistic blend to Ghost's spectral iterations, InSwapper's compact charm to SimSwap's scalable swaps, and UniFace's unified approach - the face swap waltz continues to evolve, trading steps of resolution, speed, and fidelity in an ever-changing performance.

Memory is the key, but don't forget the dance of dollars. Old warriors may surprise you, while new titans flex. Choose wisely, for in unity, there is strength – and heat.

Combining causal reasoning with reinforcement learning offers a powerful new approach to cybersecurity, reducing false positives, improving anomaly detection, and enabling adaptive, context-aware incident response. By understanding cause-and-effect relationships and learning optimal actions over time, this integrated framework helps security systems make smarter, faster, and more explainable decisions—transforming reactive defenses into intelligent, self-improving protection against evolving cyber threats.

This article explains why the order of IPs and hostnames—whether in your hosts file or command-line tools—matters during pentesting. It shows how misordered entries can break Kerberos auth, force NTLM, or target the wrong host. Real-world examples with Evil-WinRM, CrackMapExec, and others highlight how small resolution issues can derail enumeration and access. Also includes a brief look at SPNEGO's cross-platform name resolution behavior.