4ntar3s

Chapter 01 — Thinking About Thinking

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: These are my study notes for Chapter 1 of Psychology of Intelligence Analysis by Richards J. Heuer, Jr. (Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1999). Everything below is written in my own words, with my own examples. It is a summary and commentary, not a copy of the book. The original is available free from the CIA’s website.

The big idea of the whole book

When an intelligence agency misses something big, the first question people ask is: “Why didn’t we have the information?”

Metasploitable 2 — Rooting the Box Two Ways

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

First dispatch from the dark. This is box #1 of a 24-box road to OSCP, documented start to finish — the wins and the errors, because the errors are where the learning lives.

What is Metasploitable 2?

Metasploitable 2 is a Linux machine that was built on purpose to be broken into. Think of it as a house with dozens of rusty, broken locks — a safe place to practice picking them without breaking any laws. It’s the classic first target for anyone learning offensive security, because it lets you run the full workflow end to end: find the target, map its weak points, break in, and prove you own it.

Redeemer — Starting Point Tier 0

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

First box on the 4ntar3s log. Redeemer is a Tier 0 Starting Point machine — no exploitation chain, no privesc, just a single misconfigured service. The lesson here isn’t the hack, it’s the habit: enumerate fully before you touch anything.

Recon

Two-stage nmap. Fast full-port sweep first, then deep service detection on what comes back.

1

nmap -p- --min-rate 5000 -oN sweep.txt 10.129.x.x

A single port answers:

1
2


PORT STATE SERVICE
6379/tcp open redis

Then version detection on that one port: