August 2020 – My CMS

blockchain

Crytpoasset Analysis – Paxos Gold – Tether Gold

August 17, 2020 By nexusvirtual

Bottom Line UpFront (BLUF) Tether Gold is neither audited nor backed perfectly. Paxos Gold though audited shows some similar discrepancies to Tether such as slightly less gold than token. What is Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Cryptocurrency has taken the world by storm since the early days of the financial crisis and Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous Bitcoin Whitepaper. […]

blockchain

Decentralized Web

August 14, 2020 By nexusvirtual

This takes me back to the heady days of 2017 at DEVCON3 where we are all still just Ethernauts buidling games and kitties. I learned about the re-entrancy attack and got to game with incredible young geniuses. I stayed at the Ritz Carlton and swam in the beautiful ocean every morning. ETH hit $1000 that […]

AWS

Cloud to Decentralization

August 13, 2020 By gouthum_940gt4dv

The time has come to restart the blog. For the past four years I have been deep in the bowels of the Internet learning cloud directly from its pioneers at Amazon Web Services (AWS). I held multiple roles migrating Financial Services (FINSERV) into the cloud. These include leading five Technical Account Managers migrating the first […]

Cloud

My Life is a James Bond Film – Mitigating Cloud Sidechannel

January 5, 2018 By gouthum_940gt4dv

Queue the music maestro… 2018 starts with a James Bond style explosion. Too sidechannel attacks were published called Meltdown and Spectre resepectively. They allow malicious actors to read memory addresses on a machine that does not belong to them. What does this mean in simple terms? Come and sit down on my knee young Padawan […]

AWS

AWS Lift and Shift: “I’m just a Microserf”

May 9, 2016 By Gouthum

Everyone has heard my stories of “Back in my day _____.” Graybeard Karate has been teaching himself some python-fu to round out his security toolkit. While creating brute-forcers and crackers for his red-teaming activities he thought about distributing executables to Windows like in the old days of Internet scumbaggery. Naturally he ran into good ole py2exe, […]

Forensics

How to Use Encrypted iTunes Backups for SMS Messages without the Device or Jailbreaking

April 12, 2016 By nexusvirtual

A client comes to our firm to find out whether an intern took unauthorized photos of confidential talking points in order to warn the competition. Though the suspect had a private iPhone, he backed it up to a corporate system. We use the backup to correlate unauthorized activity with corporate policy. [pdf-embedder url=”http://virtualnex.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/How_to_Use_Encrypted_iTunes_Backups_for_SMS_History_without_the_Device_or_Jailbreaking-KaradiG-VirtualNexus-FINAL.pdf”] Karadi, Gouthum […]

Apple

It’s a Trap: Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Part Deux

March 31, 2016 By nexusvirtual

It’s a Trap! MSFT: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish For almost twenty years I have consulted for the top firms in many industries. These include the largest web hosting provider in the first Internet, the world’s largest software company and the world’s largest firm and retailer. These positions include Enterprise Security, Cloud, Hosting, Configuration Management, you name […]

Hacking

Microsoft Cybersecurity Summit Keynote

March 29, 2016 By nexusvirtual

Nearly thirteen years ago, I worked on the largest outbreaks in corporate history. As a third-party validator for ExecHot, the Top 500 Microsoft customers, I traveled to client sites to mitigate the impacts of Nimda, CodeRed and SQL Slammer. Today I attended Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Virtual Summit. For a professional with many years of current experience, […]

Leadership

Golden Age II – Free Education – From Zero to Hero

February 16, 2016 By nexusvirtual

When I was a youth, education at a top ten University in the United States of America (USA) cost about $25,000/yr. At my Alma Mater, Berkeley, you also took five instead of four years for about $125,000.00. The first several years of my education involved accepting money from my folks which I promptly wasted along […]

Leadership

Golden Age Part I – Captain of Your Fate

February 15, 2016 By nexusvirtual

Everyone alive today knows only a world of growth. Before protesting, please listen. In all of recorded human history, fewer wars are being fought, more children survive to adulthood and those adults live longer more educated lives than ever before. Even in the so-called developing world the children and people prosper. One minute watching […]