7 Minute Security

7 Minute Security is a weekly information security podcast focusing on penetration testing, blue teaming and building a career in security. The podcast also features in-depth interviews with industry leaders who share their insights, tools, tips and tricks for being a successful security engineer.

7 Minute Security is a technology podcast hosted by Brian Johnson, with 742 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Brian Johnson hosts 7 Minute Security, a technology show with 742 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  7 Minute Security

  7MS #742: Baby's First n8n

  Oct 2, 202627 min

  Hey friends! I've got some personal and work travel this week, so I'm skipping the tangents (mostly) and jumping straight into something I'm nerdily excited about: Baby's First n8n . If you're not familiar, n8n is a platform for chaining together and automating just about anything your heart desires – and naturally, my heart desires automating away the boring parts of pentesting. In this episode I cover how I finally got hip to n8n (late to the party, as always), the Black Hills webcast that nudged me into it, how I fed Claude my Frankenstein "Swiss Army" pentest script and asked it to turn push-lots-of-buttons into push- one -button, the clever workaround for firing nmap, EyeWitness, and other tools like it (plus the safety gate I built so my automation can't go rogue and get me in trouble), a full OSINT recon fork powered by Project Discovery Neo that lands report-ready in SysReptor , and the many minutes of my life I get back from each OSINT run – and why that's the whole point. By the way, n8n is not a sponsor or partner – just something I like in case you like it too. Got cool n8n workflows of your own? I'd love to hear 'em!

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  7 Minute Security

  7MS #741: Tales of Pentest Pwnage - Part 91

  Sep 25, 202637 min

  Hey friends! Today's tale of pentest pwnage is brought to you by four hours of sleep, a large mint hot cocoa, and unhealthy levels of giggity. There's a very good reason for all three, but you'll have to hang out to the end of the episode to hear it. First, let's talk about an escalation path I've never walked before: A really tight network is a beautiful and terrible thing — this client went from a C-minus-ish environment in past years to one where I could find basically nothing . No local admin creds laying around, no poisonable protocols, no juicy file shares. Straight into "well, try harder" mode I went. Two new-to-me tools join the arsenal — one that gives you a second opinion on a big pile of pilfered files ( Titus ), and a one-shot PowerShell command ( GPOZaurr ) that hands you a report card for everything that's wrong with your GPOs (plus how to fix it). The finding I almost walked right past — an ADCS issue where only a tiny handful of objects could enroll. I said "all right, I'll move on." Then I came back to it, and saw I had missed the (kind of) obvious attack path. A certificate I couldn't authenticate with — and the 0xdf write-up that rescued me from my own gap in knowledge. Machine account quota was set to zero — so of course I tried to add a computer object anyway. Spoiler: it worked like a dirty shirt. The scheduled task trick rides again — my favorite "this is not going to get fixed" Windows behavior. I had a client push back on this one hard: "You had to know the password of the DA you abused, right? You stole the TGT, right?" Nope and nope. How to actually defend against all of this — some ADCS tightening, a checkbox on your high-privilege accounts that a lot of folks don't have ticked, and my new mantra: RDP with purpose. And then it's personal time — my oldest son Cam passed his national paramedic exam, and I am busting my buttons. Stick around for the whole story, including the 4 a.m. potty break that changed everything, the two health care professionals I'd like to hand a party invitation to in person (and why my wife says "I don't know about that, dude").

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  7 Minute Security

  7MS #740: Tales of Pentest Pwnage - Part 90

  Sep 18, 202634 min

  Hey friends! We've been on a bit of a Tales of Pentest Pwnage bender lately, so let's keep it rolling with Part 90. (And Mom, relax — this is not one pentest story chopped into 90 parts.) Today is less of an A-to-Z story and more a pile of tips and tricks pulled from a recent string of SCCM-flavored internals — plus a tangent about a video game and a little robot Claude and I built to get my life back. Multi-tier SCCM is having a moment — I've never administered SCCM a day in my life, but 2026 keeps dropping me into these split-role environments. Here's where I go to figure out my attack surface when all I've got is a low-priv cred. SMB signing on? Cool, I'll go around it — relaying from one SCCM box to the one with SQL on it, and the easy-button tool that vacuums the good stuff out of the database once you're there. (NAA creds, clear-text local admin passwords, install scripts with creds baked in…yes please.) Then relay the other direction — when the loot came back stale, a nudge from a Slack channel had me pointing the relay backwards, and I giggled like a little schoolboy at what popped out. Adding yourself to the local admin group: still weirdly undetected — an old episode of ours reminded me of an Impacket tool I don't see written up on many pentest blogs, and it slipped right by. My favorite cheat code hit a snag — the evil-scheduled-task-under-a-logged-in-DA trick kept coughing up permission errors, so I had to get creative. Plus the defensive recs I'm still trying to sharpen up — if you've got a better way to close this loophole, I'm all ears! Tangent: Halloween (the video game) and the lobby watcher — a million players and I'm still staring into the lobby abyss for 10 minutes at a time. So Claude and I built something that watches the screen and texts me when it's time to sprint back to the keyboard. It's not cheating. It's not! (The Texas Chainsaw crowd disagreed, loudly.)

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  7 Minute Security

  7MS #739: Tales of Pentest Pwnage – Part 89

  Sep 11, 202618 min

  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 Kerberoasting success rate has fallen off a cliff – Microsoft pushed an encryption change earlier this year, and cracking those hashes is a whole different ballgame now. Selective poisoning vs. poison-all-the-things – a nod to Pretender, which I covered in a TuesdayTOOLSday video over at 7MinSec.club. It doesn't get nearly enough love in blogs and videos. The relay that fired… and did something completely different than I expected – I saw the ntlmrelayx log scroll by, thought "yes, I've got DA," and then had a "wait, wait, whoa , what?" moment. I was honestly a little panicked. An ancient Exchange vulnerability comes back to bite – CVE-2021-34470 (vulnerable Exchange schema) turned out to be the fallback that got me a foothold I had no business having. My favorite evil privesc trick, revisited – queuing up a scheduled task that runs under an interactively logged-in DA's context without ever knowing their password. The MDR alerts that come out of this are equal parts hilarious and terrifying. A bonus thing to always look for – scheduled tasks running under saved DA creds that point at a script you can edit. Add one little line to fire an evil command of your choice, and you're in like a dirty shirt. Check us out at 7MinSec.com for pentesting, training, controls assessments and security miscellany, 7MinSec.club for our Substack and weekly TuesdayTOOLSday videos, and 7MinSec.wiki for tips, cheat sheets and scripts (including pages on the scheduled task shenanigans above).

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  7 Minute Security

  7MS #738: Baby's First ProjectDiscovery Neo

  Sep 4, 202629 min

  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 ProjectDiscovery . 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 gears (one of which had me angry like the Hulk inside) The Palo Alto finding that made me plunk down a credit card and buy PD in the first place What happened when I actually told their team why I was canceling — and the surprise offer that followed How I set up my first Neo project, and the multi-paragraph prompt I fed it (spoiler: "please don't go rogue" was in there) Where Neo beat my manual process — and the two subdomains it found that I flat-out missed The OSINT recommendation Neo made about a job posting that I thought was genuinely smart My one big hesitation about the credit-based pricing model, and why a part two of this series is probably coming soon Then we close out with the tangent portion of the program: Grandma 7MS might be my neighbor soon, she bought a vehicle roughly the size of a small nation, and I'm asking for some good vibes on her house hunt. Also, thank you again to everybody who has sent kind messages since my dad passed — it means more than you know.

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