7MS #734: Insight Recon

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: Insight Recon is an Active Directory security assessment tool out of Heath Adams’ new venture, Breach Point. I signed up for early access a while back, finally got a login, and took it for a spin this week in my GOAD lab. Not a sponsor, not an ad — just a tool I was curious about.
• Watch it in action: I covered the install, a couple of hiccups I hit, and some of the report output in this week’s TuesdayTOOLSday video over at 7MinSec.club.
• The setup: Log into the portal, grab the installer, run it on a domain-joined box, then pick whether you want to scan as your current user or specify creds. Say go, wait a few minutes, and your report card shows up on the dashboard.
• My two nitpicks (and they’re mine, not necessarily yours): The download does a full-blown install with an install footprint, and the raw scan data gets shipped back up to Insight Recon so you can view your report. I can’t help but compare everything in this space to PingCastle, where you unzip, run the EXE, and your HTML report is sitting right there on the C drive — nothing leaves the building. As someone who tries to be a good data janitor and nuke assessment data after reports go out, cloud storage is just one more place I’ve got to remember to go scrub.
• What I really liked: The remediation guidance is legit. I clicked into a few of the critical findings — some ESC/ADCS stuff especially — and it walked me through exactly what to change, why an attacker cares, how to verify the fix afterward, and where to go read more. There’s also a “quick wins” view that pares the big list down to the biggest security impact for the least effort. The dashboard and the slide-out detail panes are genuinely pleasant to use.
• Why this matters even for offense-only folks: We’re mostly on the offensive side with a little blue team consulting — we don’t do hands-to-keyboard remediation. But I think you become a better pentester when you can speak confidently at delivery time about not just what to fix, but the gotchas that might bite them along the way.
• Pricing: On the podcast I guessed “a few thousand a year” and admitted that number may have come straight out of my bum cheeks. Turns out I wasn’t too far off — there’s a free tier to start, and paid runs $3,000/year with founder pricing at $1,500/year locked in for the first 25 customers. See the pricing page for the current details.
• Verdict so far: A promising first dance. I want to give it a proper workout — run it side by side with PingCastle on a couple of real assessments and see if either one has blind spots the other covers. More on that in a future episode.

Part 2: Why I’ve got the giggidies

• My son Cam graduated paramedic school! As of tonight he has everything signed off to go take the gargantuan national test. I’m not going to pretend I got through recording this without getting a little watery-eyed.
• The journey: Senior year of high school, nothing career-wise floated his boat — there were subjects he tolerated and subjects he hated, and that was about it. Then a conversation with a family friend who’s a paramedic lit a fire in his belly, and he’s been running at it ever since: EMT coursework in high school, then straight into the paramedic program.
• How he did it: He wrestles with ADHD, so he had to figure out how to hack his own brain to get through a mountain of material. Come home from five or six hours of class, eat dinner, then hit the books again and re-take his own notes. Then he’d sit down with my wife or me and do an Ace Ventura-style verbal dump of everything he’d learned that day — and any time he caught himself glitching on something, he’d write it down, keep going, then go back and shore it up. Every single night.
• The Mr. Miyagi moment: My wife has been a nurse for 20+ years, and about six months ago she had to tell him she couldn’t help anymore because he’d surpassed her in certain areas of healthcare.
• Yes, AI made a cameo: The night before his final scenario testing, he and I sat down and had Claude generate random practice scenarios so I could prompt him and just watch him talk for two minutes straight about airway management, medication dosing, all of it.
• The cliffhanger: Four-ish hours of individual scenario testing, an hour-and-a-half drive to the ceremony, and no word either way on if he passed his tests. I hit the front door of the building not knowing whether I was walking into smiles or tears — and right as my hand hit the door handle, a text came in with a giant happy face: I passed. Somebody must have been cutting onions in that parking lot.
• His people: Cam’s the youngest of the bunch — most of his classmates had been working EMTs for years — and from day one they told him “we got you, we’ll get through this together.” For the group photo on the steps afterward, one of them tried to pick him up solo and just about threw her back out, so it took three of them. That’s the little family he’s got, and I hope they stay close, because they’ve all got that beast of a test coming next month.
• The hard part: If you’ve listened to the last few episodes, you know my dad passed away at the end of June, and that Cam was the one who found him and sprung into paramedic mode. My dad was a cop and a pilot who had enormous respect for paramedics, EMTs, and nurses, and he was one of Cam’s biggest cheerleaders. Whenever I did something my dad was proud of, he’d say, “I’m busting my buttons over here!” That’s exactly what he’d have said tonight, and not having him here to say it is a karate kick to the heart. But I’ll tell you what — I’m busting my buttons about Cam for the both of us.
• Thank you: So many of you have reached out with condolences and shared stories of your own losses these past weeks. I’m sorry for every one of them, and I appreciate you more than I can say.

Thanks for listening — to the security stuff, the tangents, or both. Come find us at 7MinSec.com, and/or subscribe (free or paid) over at 7MinSec.club, and dig through the our notes at 7MinSec.wiki.