https://mikel-gonzalezt.github.io/A minimal, responsive and feature-rich Jekyll theme for technical writing. 2026-08-27T09:54:38+00:00 Mikel Gonzalez https://mikel-gonzalezt.github.io/ Jekyll © 2026 Mikel Gonzalez /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-08-27T09:00:00+00:00 2026-08-27T09:54:17+00:00 https://mikel-gonzalezt.github.io/posts/dc-2-vulnhub-black-box/ Mikel Gonzalez

My second VulnHub box, and a completely different lesson from the first. DC-1 fell because its software was ancient. DC-2 had nothing old to exploit — every step was just a weak password or a lazy config, and it only fell because all of them happened to line up. Two things stuck with me. The way in was an SSH server hiding on a strange high port that a normal scan skips straight past. And the “...

2026-08-27T07:00:00+00:00 2026-08-27T07:00:00+00:00 https://mikel-gonzalezt.github.io/posts/detecting-dc1-attack-with-suricata/ Mikel Gonzalez

I’ve already published how I broke DC-1. This is the other half: I wanted to know what a defender would actually have seen while I did it. So I put Suricata in front of the same attack and ran it again from the top. The result surprised me a little — the noisiest things I did were the harmless ones, and the single step that gave me root didn’t show up on the network at all. That gap turned out ...

2026-08-05T10:00:00+00:00 2026-08-05T10:00:00+00:00 https://mikel-gonzalezt.github.io/posts/dc-1-vulnhub-black-box.md/ Mikel Gonzalez

Engagement type: Network penetration test (black-box, single host) Tester: Self-study lab (solo capstone) Date: 2026-07-31 Target: 192.168.56.103 (VulnHub DC-1), isolated host-only network 192.168.56.0/24 Attacker host: Kali Linux 192.168.56.102 Authorization: Self-owned lab VMs on an isolated, internet-less network. No third-party systems in scope. 1. Executive summary A single web-server ...