Howdy, cleared CISSP in first attempt

Happy to announce that I'm now a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) professional.

TL;DR of the success is:

• Read just one book. This book is awesome for experienced security principle. Explains just what is needed for experienced person.
• Utilized all practice questions and exams that came with the book
• Practised full practice exam on CCCure.org approx 5 times. I did not find it much useful.

And

No questions were even near to practice exam questions, the exam was expectionally centric towards CONCEPTS.

TIPS for the exam:

• Read the questions carefully before answering one
• Attempt easy questions first
• Attempt answering the scenario based questions correctly
• One great benefit of giving the full practice test is it makes you sit to give 250 answers..:)
• Take breaks whenever you want during the exam, you have plenty of time

All the best,

Nilesh

Setting Up a faster Android Emulator environment

Recently I had a revisit to setup a Android Emulator environment on my new Mac El Capitan. I realised that it has been running real slow after an upgrade. This was really annoying even when I used old API Level 19 with Android 4.4.2 emulation. It gave me this error message each time I started an emulator.

 

On selecting the x86 CPU arch, it throws another error saying "x86 is not supported. Hardware accelaration (HAXM) not supported".

 

I verified it from Android SDK Manager and it was already installed during the standard installation process.

After hours of googling, found that there is a separate Intel HAXM installer for Mac, Windows and Linux. You need to install this engine to make Android Emulator work to match your speed.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/android/articles/intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager

After installation, restart your Android SDK Manager and AVD Manager to solve the slow speed and error message annoyance. The emulator should now load up real quick.

The another problem that popped after this installtion was you cannot use -tcpdump switch with emulator utlity anymore.

/android/android-sdk-macosx/tools$ ./emulator -avd android_emulator -tcpdump app_dump.pcap

qemu-system-i386: -tcpdump: invalid option

I could not find the workaround for this yet. Though you can still use -http-proxy option to hook your Burp with the android emulator. Please feel free to post answers in case you find the solution.

Happy Reading

OWASP New Zealand Day 2016

Last week I spoke at OWASP day in Auckland, New Zealand. It was all security+fun and had a crowd more than expected, ~600 approximately.

You can view the synopsis of my talk and bio here:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_New_Zealand_Day_2016#tab=Speakers_List

The presentation slides will be available soon here:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_New_Zealand_Day_2016#tab=Presentation_Schedule

It was pleasure meeting you the organisers and all security headed people out there. Please free to post any questions if you haven't got chance to ask.

Stay tuned!!!