We’re doing a quick review of the Verizon Data Breach report. We’ere also looking at Micosoft 365 options. We’d like to migrate to it if we can.

Black Hills has put out another amazing blog post. This one is titled “A Pentester’s Voyage - The First Few Hours”. We’re not pentesters, but we can learn a lot from the process.

We need to make sure our projects are useful. To help us do that, were mapping our projects to the Critical Security Controls. We’re also looking at the Black Hills presentation on How to Build a Home Lab. This is full of good information.

Its been an interesting week. Wireshark saved me at work. Wasn’t expecting that. I’ve been using the Security Onion training. Learning how to set it up and install test data. I’ve also realized that a security lab needs evil. How do you look for evil if you don’t have any?

Good news. Everything works! We still have to manage IP address, subnets, vlans, firewall rules and more. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that it all works. Our hard work is paying off.

That’s right, we have a new VMware server. We also have a new set of problems. How do we manage VMware? How do we access it over a vpn connection? What Fortinet firewall rules do we need? What IP address do we need? What subnets do we need?

We would love to start our Windows and security projects. That’s not going to happen until we get everything under control. Time for more documentation and process creation.

Time to document our Fortinet equipment and plan for our VMware server. Dorothy will do the documentation. She needs to see how the network was put together. Once some of that’s done, we can pick out a server. The sooner we get the server the better.

Meraki firewall is out, Fortinet equipment is in. It works!

Things to think about:

1. How many devices do you have?

2. How many Subnets will you need?

3. How many switch ports do you need?

4. What kind of features do you need?

5. What kind of security do you want?

6. What’s high priority?

We have a VMware server. It’s kinda wimpy with only 32GB of RAM. We need more power. More power means we can do more things. We’re looking at hardware options.