7MS #721: Fun Professional and Personal AI Project Ideas – Part 2
Release Date: 05/08/2026
7 Minute Security
Hey friends! Today is a tale of pentest pwnage episode, and this one features a path to escalation I have never seen before – one I could only find few references on the entire Internet. It happened completely by accident, but during the report readout I’m absolutely going to say it was intentional and that I totally meant to do that. Here’s what we cover: A client that’s actually doing the things – year two or three of testing this environment, and they had buttoned up so much that I had to dig deep. Great for them, freaking frustrating for me. Why my...
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Hey friends! Today I’m talking about Baby’s First Neo — and to be crystal clear, I don’t mean Keanu, and I don’t mean the R&B guy with the hat. I mean the AI-powered pentest assistant from our pals at . Also to be crystal clear: this is not a sponsorship, ad, partnership or anything of the sort. Just me sharing a thing I like so you can decide if you like it too. Here’s what we get into: Why I didn’t renew my ProjectDiscovery cloud subscription after a full year of running it side-by-side with Nessus — including the three things that ground my...
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Hello friends! Today’s tale of pentest pwnage isn’t a start-to-finish march to DA – it’s me finally emptying out the backlog of “gosh, I’ve got to share this next time” internal network tips that have been rattling around in my head. Here’s what we get into: Don’t skip the boring stuff. Even when I’m testing the same network for the third or fourth time, I’ve got an ever-growing list of things I check every single time – because config drift has a nasty habit of quietly reintroducing problems that were fixed years ago. Get a second opinion on...
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Hey friends! Today’s another slice of our Securing Your Family During and After a Disaster miniseries, and fair warning — it’s a bit of a Friday mood-ruiner. It’s been almost two months since my dad passed, and we’ve moved into a phase nobody prepared me for. Here’s what we get into: The paperwork nobody thinks about — my mom still doesn’t know what her monthly income looks like now, and the answer is buried in a box somebody lost the key to. Divvying up a lifetime of stuff — and why our 2019 house fire completely rewired how I think about possessions....
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Hey friends! Today’s episode has a new-to-me toy up front and some podcast housekeeping on the back half – all recorded with a raging case of the anxious parent giggidies, because my son Atticus had a big audition and I was minutes away from finding out whether we were doing tears of joy or tears of sadness. Baby’s first Cloudflare Tunnel Not a sponsor, not an ad – just a thing I’d heard about for years and finally had a reason to use. Here’s what we get into: The problem that sent me down this road: I wanted push-button status pages for clients that pull from one source...
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Hey friends! Today’s episode is a two-parter: some security stuff up front, and then a big ol’ personal celebration on the back half. If you’re strictly here for the security bits, I love you and you’re free to bail after the first half. If you’re here for both, God bless you. Part 1: Kicking the tires on Insight Recon What it is: is an Active Directory security assessment tool out of Heath Adams’ new venture, . I signed up for early access a while back, finally got a login, and took it for a spin this week in my lab. Not a sponsor, not an ad — just a...
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Hey friends! Today’s episode comes to you from a parking lot in the rain, with a mint hot cocoa in hand and your host absolutely dragging his butt (D-R-A-G-G-I-N-G, not D-R-A-G-O-N – I’ve never seen a dragon’s butt and can’t speak to how mine compares). I’ve had a bunch of internals back to back lately and I’m basically a drooling dog who found a frisbee and refuses to put it down. Sleep be darned. So instead of walking through one test start to finish, I want to share a few things that have helped me claw out a foothold in environments that are otherwise really locked...
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Hey friends! Welcome back to another Tales of Pentest Pwnage — my favorite mini-series where I share the good, the bad, and the “why didn’t I check THAT first?!” moments from real-world engagements. Today’s story has a little bit of everything: a legit path to domain admin, some late-night rabbit holes, a lesson in humility, and a villain you’ve definitely met before. (Spoiler: it’s DNS.) A couple of quick plugs before we dive in: Private GOAD training is going strong! — We just wrapped a 3-day private session (7 students — that’s max capacity!) of our Active...
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Hey friends! Fair warning: today’s episode is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster — we’ve got a big security win, some honest lab feedback, and a very personal share about my dad’s funeral. Buckle up. certified, baby! — I’m officially a , courtesy of the folks at . It’s been a long time coming (I originally signed up for the live version and fell off after missing a couple Saturdays), but I came back for the self-paced 30-day version and finally finished the job. The lab experience — the good: — ~25 objectives, a solid lab guide, and a really fun...
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Hey friends! Still your grieving pal over here, but also your swarming friend and Protecting My Network Edge host — because this week I’ve been tinkering with something called and I’ve got my diapers on regarding it, but I really, really like what I see so far. Then, fair warning, I flip on the tangent light and verbally barf up some personal stuff at the end. I’ll make the hand-off super clear, so if you want your free security podcast to do exactly what you want and nothing else — totally fair, and you won’t offend me by hopping off. Here’s what we cover: ...
info_outlineHello friends! Picking up the AI-automation series from a couple weeks back — here’s another batch of scripts and integrations that have been giving me precious minutes (and sanity) back. Yes, I had to upgrade to Claude Max. No, I’m not trying to automate myself out of a job — just freeing up bandwidth for the more interesting parts of work/life.
- QuickBooks invoice automation: Got tired of the eight-factor login plus click-fest just to send a few invoices. Now I run a PowerShell menu — type the client name, pick the project, enter the amount, hit Enter — done in ~30 seconds. The QuickBooks dev onboarding (security questionnaire, IP allowlist) was actually a bigger time sink than the script itself.
- Password Pusher API integration: A menu-driven PowerShell script that prompts for a label, pops an Explorer window to grab the files, optionally adds a password, then auto-drafts the client email with the secure link filled in. A few minutes saved each time, a couple times a day — adds up to some nice time saved!
- Basecamp + Claude: Linked Basecamp into a Claude project so I can ask plain-English questions like “what personal project tasks are due this month?” or just voice-note a new task while I’m in the car. Honestly the biggest win is anxiety reduction — once it’s in Claude, it’s out of my always-simmering pressure cooker of a brain.
- Blumira agent auto-installer for the GOAD lab: I revert the GOAD lab to vanilla a couple times a week, which means re-installing Blumira agents constantly to show clients the attack/defense telemetry side. Wrote a Kali-side script that uses NetExec over WinRM to check each box for the Blumira service and push the installer if it’s missing. (Tried SMB exec first, but escaping got wonky on the PowerShell one-liner.) Bonus: Blumira’s dashboard auto-removes agents that haven’t phoned home in 24 hours, which is a perfect fit for a lab that’s constantly getting nuked.
- Auphonic + API for podcast production: This one’s a little meta. Old workflow: record → drag into Hindenburg/GarageBand → manually line up intro and outro → noise reduction → export. New workflow: one terminal script that previews the first and last few seconds so I can trim silence, ships the audio to Auphonic via API, and returns a cleaned-up, levels-corrected MP3 plus a full transcript and auto-generated chapter markers. (If your podcast app supports chapters (like Downcast) pop open this episode or #720 and you’ll see them.) Next step: pipe the transcript straight into Claude for a show notes first draft.
One quick personal note before I run: my oldest son just landed an EMT job with a great Minnesota medical network, and is wrapping up paramedic school in a few months. I cried some happy dad tears today.