Cyber Work Templates by Me!
The obvious approach
I use Emacs + Org-mode for my note-taking workflow as a Cybersecurity Analyst. Emacs is my geeky cred at my job, plus it is genuinely useful. So one day when working on taking some repetitive notes on an incident I had a bright idea. Why don’t I just create a few templates that speed up my workflow?
- A demonstration of my workflow for capturing notes on an incident
Incident --> Get Data --> Investigation --> Capture Templates --> Notes
Expanding the approach
Once I became comfortable with the approach of my capture templates, I expanded them to use the full power of Emacs and Org-mode! I began integrating Org-babel into my workflow. I use a Window 10 PC for my day job and I have WSL2 for all my Linux needs. Furthermore, I can call WSL from a regular shell (by default it calls the Windows Command Prompt) in Emacs. Org-babel does the work of putting the results in my notes. If this sounds familiar to you #Emacs nerds, well it’s the concept of Literate Devops by Howard Abrams. I as many others was inspired by the work of Howard Abrams and decided to incorporate their ideas into my workflow. It’s a little weird to use these tools in a Windows environment, but hey it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Here I am explaining one of my weird workflows.
The templates and beyond
So I put up my templates on Github and licensed them under CC BY-SA 4.0. I will continue working on them and updating them as needed. At the time of writing this blog post, I move my note-taking workflow to Org Roam and I will be tweaking the templates to better fit that workflow. But I plan on creating a different set of templates, I do change them.
I mentioned Literate Devops earlier and while my workflow isn’t “Devops” but it is “Literate”. It’s more like Literate Pentesting which is very useful for me. I am not the first one to try this idea for Pentesting. Michael Taggart and @HuskyHacks have the really cool project Blue Jupyter. They take the Jupyter Notebooks and apply them to Blue Team work.
So check out and fork my templates on github! Happy Hacking!
https://github.com/eduardo-robles/cyber-work-templates
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