I am not a financial advisor, this is not advice. This post is just for fun. For further advice, please seek a professional financial advisor. Don’t sue me. Tracking your personal finances is a great thing to do when budgeting and saving so you can see exactly where your money is going. I found that when I don’t track my spending I make a lot of assumptions of where my money is spent and it is vastly different to where the money is actually going.

The Elastic CTF is a capture the flag competition that I built based on the Elastic Stack (formerly ELK Stack). I created it for the Sectalks Ninja Night as a way to give back something to the community that has given me so much. It was designed to give people a chance to play with a platform that is used quite often in security teams in many companies. This was my first time developing a CTF challenge and I hope I get the chance to do it again another time.

This is a walkthrough for the Elastic Stack CTF scenario that was run for the Sectalks Ninja Night 0x08 (9th). The CTF is available to be spun up from my repository, for more information visit HERE. Feel free to spin it up and give it a go. Scenario: Overnight we’ve had an attack on our network, we have two devices in the cloud and it appears both have been compromised.

The Elastic Stack (formerly the ELK Stack) is composed of 4 core open source tools that create the stack, these tools combined allow for data to be taken from any source securely and used to search, analyse and visualise in real time. The core components consist of: Elasticsearch is a distributed database that is easily searchable Logstash is a data ingestor that is used to filter and customise your data Kibana is the user interface that is used to analyse and visualise data in real time Beats are the simple, lightweight and quick data shipping programs What can Elastic Stack be used for?