The Mission

The goal of this publication is to inspire, educate, and share ideas about InfoSec. Dark Roast Security is a platform designed to bring people together that are passionate about sharing their knowledge or want to learn something new about Cybersecurity.

Through this publication, I hope to share experiences of Cybersecurity professionals across the industry, spread knowledge, and publish thought-provoking content for our readers.

What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity has become so important in today’s modern world. For any non-IT reader, think about all of the technology you use today. Your smartphone, maybe a tablet, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and all your other smart devices…

To kick off our OWASP collection of articles, we’re starting with the number one web application vulnerability: injection.

As we covered in the Introduction, injection attacks occur when an attacker is able to inject commands into a website and trick the application into retrieving the information requested.

This can be done a few ways: using input fields, or modifying the URL. Input fields are usually a username and password, but could also be sign-up forms, surveys, etc. Any website that looks for user input can be at risk for injection attacks if vulnerabilities aren’t addressed.

Attackers may also attempt to…

Dear Gluten,

Why must you be so cruel to my body? I wish we could just have a normal relationship like everyone else does.

I remember all the times growing up I would indulge in cakes, cookies, baked goods, and all of the other delicious foods full of gluten. You never bothered me then, but here we are today and you’ve become an enemy of mine.

I’m not sure what changed. We used to be best buds and now you wreak havoc on my body whenever I consume you! What did I ever do to you? …

When I first started writing, I read oh so many articles on how to be successful. A common theme across many of them was to “find your niche”. But, as a writer, you have to take these articles with a grain of salt because all of our definitions of success are different. Finding a niche for one person may be exactly what’s necessary for them to hit their goals, but it’s not the end all be all.

For me, I’ve read those, how to be successful, articles with many grains of salt because initially, this was a hobby for me…

When you hear the term sock puppet, the majority of people probably think of something like this:

While I would love to talk about DIY sock puppets, that’s not the type of sock puppet we’ll be discussing today.

In the world of tech and all things security, Sock Puppets are actually social media accounts created for the purpose of protecting one’s identity. I’ll dive into that a bit deeper as we go.

Up until a few months ago, I had never heard of this phenomenon and when hearing the term sock puppets, I had no idea what they were. Out…

Welcome to the fourth and final part of the Dark Side Intro to Python series. If you haven’t done so already, check out the below articles for parts one through three:

• Dark Side 110
• Dark Side 111
• Dark Side 113

Let’s get to it!

Functions

Now that we’ve learned the basics, like defining variables, creating arrays, and building if/else statements, let’s learn how we can further develop these skills to have python perform a task for us.

Functions are exactly that: blocks of code that perform a task. They take an input, process the input, and provide us an output. You…

OWASP, also known as the Open Web Application Security Project, is a community initiative focused on improving web application security through providing open-source methodologies, tools, and techniques. Every year, they publish what’s referred to as the Top 10: a consensus of top vulnerabilities that lead to cyber-attacks on web applications.

Web Application security, app sec for short, is critical to the security of the various web apps we all use every day. Including Medium? Yes, including Medium! …

NFS, or Network File System, is a network service that allows files and folders to be shared with other systems over the network. NFS leverages RPC, Remote Procedure Call, which is a protocol that allows for remote systems to perform processes on other computers over the network. More information on that can be found here.

For our purposes today, we don’t need to go too into the weeds on either of these technologies, however, it’s important to understand that NFS will enable a computer to access files remotely by mounting an accessible directory like it would a drive or device…