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Contributing to Trace Labs: My Work in Training and Development

Contributing to Trace Labs: My Work in Training and Development

Hey everyone! 404 yeti here! Today I wanted to talk about my time at Trace Labs and what I accomplished and what I learned! I worked for two teams, a training team and the software development team. I served them for about 8 months and I really learned alot. I am so thankful for the opportunity to learn and grow from them. So lets start off with Development team

Development

  1. I had migrated our current kali linux virtual machine to debian 12. That was quite a new experience because I had to learn a new installation method for our tools and learning to add our branding to the login page and wallpaper
  2. I had made a menu installer which allowed ease of use for installing tooling, adding security hardening and privacy hardening, and showing system information
  1. I had added a notification system that would send an alert to the desktop letting the user know there was an update and then they would update the virtual machine with a gui interface and it was great to help people who did not know how to update the systems manually
  1. I built a Privacy Posture HUD to show how private the VM was. A lot of people appreciated this tool because it looks at Linux sys internals and sees if there were unnecessary ports or services open, and it was a good snapshot into helping people improve their privacy. I had a small form for stacking and it expanded into full form for further information.
  1. I added a osint framework in their obsidian templates. These templates show how to develop a workflow, how to use tooling from the vm, templates to input findings from an investigation and bookmarks of all the well known osint sites for investigations and their proprietary websites for coach knowledge and event participation knowledge.
  1. I was working a investigator mcp which would use current vm tooling and keep all info on the inside of the vm without reaching out to cloud properties, the goal was to keep it as secure as possible and help to reduce tooling problems for non technical people.

this was quite a good tool. I enjoyed building it!

Training

During my time on the training team, I developed OSINT challenges for the community to complete. They were short simple exercises to keep skills sharp like geoint, socmint, sigint. I was developing beyond just normal challenges that would actually go into threat intelligence to give people a wider scope due to the fact that many osint challenges only center around geoint ,socmint, and reverse imaging. I wanted to take that a step further and develop something more detailed.

As of my time of departure, I made 23 challenges. I didn't show any details of the challenges due to respect for Tracelabs.

I also managed and maintained their GitHub that had the challenge and the walkthrough. I personally wrote out all challenges and walkthroughs during that time

Finally, as a final moment from Trace Labs, I received my contributor badge for putting in so much time and effort into Trace Labs!

Thank you so much Trace Labs for the opportunity to allow me to grow and learn new things! I gained many experiences on the way and I am so thankful for that! Now onto my next journey!