Engineer Spotlight: Cory Duplantis and the 2015 SANS Holiday Hack Write-up

As an engineer, solving puzzles is part of everyday life. Any new challenge, whether it be learning a new exploitation technique or seeing a new embedded architecture for the first time, is simply another puzzle that I can learn how to solve in time. It is that mindset of always being curious and wanting to explore and apply new concepts that is utilized everyday at Praetorian. This mindset is also my default when approaching capture the flag (CTF) puzzles such as the CounterHack HolidayHack from this past year. As an internal penetration tester at Praetorian, I don’t usually dabble in the web spaces frequently, so the web challenges from the HolidayHack were a great opportunity to brush off the old web knowledge and maybe add a new web technique to the ever growing bag o’ tricks.