About this journal

Who I am

I’m Daniel Barber, a computer science student at the University of South Alabama working toward a B.S. I’m interested in cybersecurity analysis, penetration testing, machine learning, and AI, and this site is where I write up what I learn in those areas.

What gets published here

CVE analyses take a published vulnerability and work through it: what the flaw is, why it exists, what an attacker needs to exploit it, and how to detect and fix it. The aim is to understand the class of bug, not just the one instance.

Lab writeups document training machines and challenges: the enumeration, the foothold, the privilege escalation, and what I’d check first next time.

Notes are everything shorter: a technique, a tool, or an update about the site.

I’m a student, so read these as working notes. I’ll show my reasoning, cite primary sources, and correct what I get wrong.

How to read a document

Every document has a permanent identifier: DB- for CVE analyses, LAB- for lab writeups, and NOTE- for posts like this one. Identifiers are never changed or reused, so they’re safe to cite.

CVE analyses open with a fact sheet: the CVSS score and vector, the weakness class (CWE), affected and fixed versions, patch status, and whether the flaw is in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Sections are numbered. The disclosure timeline, references, and revision history follow as lettered appendices.

Ground rules

• Retired targets only. Writeups cover machines and challenges that are retired, or whose platforms allow public solutions.
• No weaponized tooling for unpatched flaws. Exploitation is described at the level needed to understand the risk.
• Primary sources first. Vendor advisories, NVD and CVE records, and original research are cited directly.
• Corrections are logged. Changes to a published document go in its revision history instead of being made silently.

Contact

For corrections, questions, or security reports, email DWMBarber@protonmail.com. This site publishes a security.txt. New documents appear on the index and in the RSS feed. I’m also on GitHub and LinkedIn.