Jinja is a powerful template engine for Python. It’s commonly used to place variables and other content in files. You can see it in action by using Ansible’s template task. There is much more functionality that can be used to take Ansible playbooks to the next level.

The pause module can stop execution for an amount of time or wait for the user to hit Return. One of its return parameters is user_input which makes it great for getting variables or confirming actions during task execution. In this example, we ask the user to confirm that they want to delete an important file. The deletion task will be only be run when the user explicitly types yes or true.

I’ve been working with Ansible a lot recently and consequently also been reading about it. There are some things I’ve found that are incredibly useful or just interesting. In this series I’ll quickly go over something I learned and give examples of where it may be help.

I “received” my Hack The Box invite code over the summer but I never had time to get into it. Recently I decided to see what this whole pen-testing thing was about and put in some work to try and hack a box. I went for Jerry because it had a difficulty of 2.9/10 and had over 10,000 system and user owns (solves).

I used urlscan.io a lot this summer at my internship with a SOC. Every time I used it I wondered how it worked and if I could build something similar. The week after my internship ended I created HTTP-Info as my attempt to gather as much information about a website as I could.