Well, the jolly ol' man has arrived and now we're on the verge of a brand-new year. If it is one thing I am thankful for this year is the ability to have patience, especially in this latest segment of my home lab! Why you may ask? Well, let's start from December 27th to now so I can lay down what happened.... It was a cold December afternoon and I was getting ready to put together my brand new server rack given to me by my lovely wife Tamara Pryor . As I was doing so, I shut down the Proxmox VM that was running my cyber range with no problems, as well as the server itself. All was hunky-dory, as I begin building and installing my server rack ensuring that everything was in place and done properly. It wasn't until I plugged the sucker back in that I realized something was off.... It was at this exact moment that my heart sank into my stomach, as I realized that weeks worth of effort was now gone. I looked in my backups, checked my checkpoints, even tried to see if may...

 Long time no see! As we all gear up for the Christmas holidays, I figured I would circle back to this dusty old blog and tell you what I've been up to as well as why I have been radio silent over the last little bit. For those who do not know, I have been homelabbing since the summer and been pretty much flat-out with making things work in this lab. One of these things is a dedicated cyber range where defensive along with offensive operations can be launched, all in a safe environment that is ran on the infrastructure I have built. If you're looking to build your own cyber range, this is the blog post for you as I will be covering all the lovely hiccups and things I have learned during my ongoing journeys. I will also be providing an opportunity for YOU to get your hands on the range if you wish to play around. Let's talk homelab! The Tech Stack Infrastructure So for my tech stack, I learned fairly quickly that having a good hypervisor is crucial for setting up your cyber ...

Is your organization rolling out Privileged Identity Management (or PIM)? If you haven't already, you're probably in the same boat as a lot of organizations. Rolling out Privileged Identity Management isn't about another checkbox, it's a shift towards strengthening access, accountability, and agility. With this in mind, I wanted to give you an effective strategy to begin your journey into PIM and provide some insights from my experience. Discovery and Assessment Take stock of the current roles that are active within your tenant already across the applications, from Entra ID itself, to Azure and your Microsoft 365 apps. Once you have your inventory of roles gathered, determine who has access and why - are there any roles that are no longer needed? Is the role necessary if a lesser role can achieve the same task? Check for overprivileged accounts. Identify high-risk roles such as Global Administrator, Exchange Administrator, etc. Identify service principals and applicatio...