Hardware on System Overlord

Is Reusing an Old Mac Mini Worth It?

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was cleaning up some old electronics (I’m a bit of a pack rat) and came across a Mac Mini I’ve owned since 2009. I was curious whether it still worked and whether it could get useful work done. This turned out to be more than a 5 minute experiment, so I thought I’d write it up here as it was just an interesting little test.

Course Review: Applied Hardware Attacks: Rapid Prototying & Hardware Implants

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past 4 days, I had the opportunity to take two hardware security classes taught by Joe Fitzpatrick(@securelyfitz) along with @_MG_. Both courses are part of the “Applied Hardware Attacks” series of courses taught by Joe. The first course, “Rapid Prototyping”, is focused on using 3D printers and PCB mills to build interfaces to hardware systems. The second course, aptly named “Hardware Implants” applies these skills to build hardware implants to perform attacks on hardware systems. Both courses are very timely and informative, as well as a lot of fun.

Matir's Favorite Things

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of my friends was recently asking me about some of the tools I use, particularly for security assessments. While I can’t give out all of these things for free Oprah-style, I did want to take a moment to share some of my favorite security- and technology-related tools, services and resources.

Hardware

{:.left} My primary laptop is a Lenovo T450s. For me, it’s the perfect mix of weight and processing power – configured with enough RAM, the i5-5200U has no trouble running 2 or 3 VMs at the same time, and with an internal 3-cell battery plus a 6-cell battery pack, it will go all day without an outlet. (Though not necessarily under 100% CPU load.) Though Lenovo no longer sells this, having replaced it with the T460s, it’s still available on Amazon.

Playing with the Patriot Gauntlet Node (Part 1)

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 07:54:05 +0000

I recently picked up a Patriot Gauntlet Node just to take a look at it. Playing with the device, it seemed to be a pretty straightforward wireless SoC with a hard drive interface. Many, if not most, of these embedded SoCs use Linux as their operating system, so I decided to go a bit further and see what was going on.

I headed over to the Patriot website and downloaded the firmware for the Gauntlet Node, unzipped the file, and ran binwalk against it. (Binwalk is an awesome tool that essentially runs 'file' with a special magic file against every possible byte offset to find the parts of a firmware image.)