So before we begin in this course and we really start to dive in it's important to cover one of the
topics that I'm going to harp on the most which is effective no keeping if you're going to be successful
in your career and you're going to be successful in this course you really need to take good notes.
Now in this first video I'm going to show you what my notebook kind of looks like not only for my personal
notebook but as a notebook for an assessment and how I might take notes for an assessment and then I'll
also show you some note keeping applications that I prefer or I've heard students prefer in the second
video we're going to cover how to install one of the applications.
And another cool application used for taking screenshots.
So let's take a look at my notebook first so here is my notebook and actually let's click over here.
So this is my notebook and you can see it's really long.
It's got all kinds of stuff in here and it's just something that I build upon.
This one in particular is actually only geared towards active directory.
So I have a few different notebooks.
This one is active directory and it's actually a few different courses that I've taken in the past they've
kind of put together and then just for assessment work et cetera.
I just kind of have a little cheat sheet here.
So I wanted to show you this one in particular because these were built off of courses and you're gonna
be working through a course.
So kind of just get an idea of how maybe to structure it.
So here you can see I structured it and I've got different modules here where.
Module one might have had this e-mail macro fundamentals model to to here has all these different components
to them right.
And we have we have notes then we have child notes and even sub children to those child notes and I'll
show you how to create that here in a second but let's say for example enumeration which is one of the
most important things that you're going to cover in hacking and we take a look at enumeration you'll
have to understand what any of this means here but you could see if I want to look at a domain and I
want to get the current domain that I'm on here's the command I run.
And here is a picture of what it looks like and here's what comes back when you run that command.
That's great.
That's what I want to see and I have a whole list of commands for all these in here right.
So if I'm confused on a assessment and I want to go and find a command that I'm not sure of I can go
to my little cheat sheet here.
Now again this is really long so you have to create your notes the way it really helps you for a course.
I think it's good to write it all out.
Step by step like this and then go back and make a cheat sheet.
I don't need this pictures anymore.
I've been doing this for a while so maybe I just say hey get current domain is getting that domain and
then I say hey OK get object of another domain.
Here's an example that I don't need the pictures it makes it really long but as an example and over
time you learn with the pictures as well at least I2
so let's build from that.
Here is an example of an actual assessment that I did for a client.
And you can see how I did this.
Now I did an external internal and web application assessment for this client and these were the findings.
Now I'm only going to show you what is master obfuscated already or doesn't reveal client information.
But as you can see here one example is on the internal.
They had something called SMB signing disabled.
You don't need to worry about it.
But here in my picture I've got a nice picture.
The picture has highlighted it says hey message shining disable that signifies SMB signings disabled
and it has the IP address so we identified the machine and we get proof of concept that this SMB signing
is disabled here.
Another example MH 17 0 1 0.
These are both internal exploits that you're going to encounter in this course.
Here's one.
I check this machine.
It says hey this target's not patched.
Now this is one I didn't exploit but it shows that it's actually vulnerable to this attack.
So these are a couple of screenshots that I'll put now.
Your notes could be different than mine.
How I organize is I take a screenshot I put it in here and then I make sure that I have at least the
IP address in the screenshot for reference because I'll remember it.
But if you need to go in here and take detailed notes that's absolutely fine as well.
You always want good notes for your assessments because you never know if a client's going to come back
in six months or even a year and say hey what was that one thing that you did here.
And if you go back to your notes you say oh you know I did this and some people get down really into
the weeds.
They have dates times everything for step by step what they do on an assessment.
And that's completely up to you.
And how well you take your notes.
This is kind of how I lay it out.
And then you see the green checkmark next to it.
I add those green checkmarks when I'm doing my report.
So as I'm building my report out and I cover something in the report I'll just go ahead and right click
and I'll change the no icon to a checkmark meaning that I've written that part of the report for that
finding.
And we just kind of go through over time.
So with that being said I do want to show you some decent applications the one that I'm using here and
that you see is called Keep No.
Now I run on Windows as a base.
So keep no dot org.
That's how you get keep No it is for Linux it is for Mac OS X but this is totally a preference thing.
Me I prefer I've been using it for a long time.
Some people don't like it.
OK.
So I'm going to offer some alternatives as well.
Cherry tree comes built into Kelly Linux as you're going to see here in just a little bit.
Worth looking at worth trying seeing if you like it.
One notes another example if you use Microsoft and if you're a Mac user a lot of students have told
me that Joplin is really good.
Now I've never used this but I keep hearing great things about it.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to put all of these into the course resources and you'll be able to
look at them download them decide on your own.
Now you're not limited to these for no keeping applications by any means.
Feel free to use whatever you like to take notes if you want pen and paper.
That's great as well.
So just make sure that you're taking good notes and we're going to we're going to harp on this throughout
the entire course.
Over and over and over again.
So make sure you're taking good notes.
So from here we're we're gonna do is we're going to install keep note in the next video and we're going
to install an awesome tool called Green shot.
I'm sure you screenshot does and why it's so cool.
And I cannot live on any assessment without it.
So let's catch you over in the next video.
When we work on installing those tools.