This was our final Networking report paper during my master’s degree in Information Security (InfoSec) that we did not try to publish. The topic and initial router configurations were presented by my group mate, E.C. However, I had to make some changes to the provided router configurations and network architecture to remediate the issues we faced in the lab. I deployed the lab environment and revised router configuration using GNS3, then wrote our report paper, which you see now below. I decided to post this in my personal blog since there are limited resources out there relating to this topic and the hope that this will fill in certain knowledge gaps. As a matter fact, I had troubles researching and understanding certain concepts because of this limitation.

Similar to my previous post regarding RFC 6598 and Network Address Translation (NAT), when I was still studying for my master’s degree in Information Security (InfoSec), I was tasked to present the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 and how it relates to InfoSec. Being in this industry we are often tasked with safeguarding sensitive personal information, and this may include protected health information (PHI). HIPAA of 1996 establishes a standard for protecting sensitive health information of patients from unauthorized disclosures [1]. However, understanding HIPAA of 1996 and how to comply with it as an InfoSec professional can be daunting due to its scope and complexity. In this blog post, I will try to make HIPAA of 1996 digestible and highlight available tools and resources to assist professionals in their journey to compliance. I hope this blog post can become a single-page reference or guide in understanding HIPAA in the context of InfoSec.

Pixie Lite PowerShell (PS) is a lightweight PS script designed to aid security analyst to look up bulk IP addresses against Abuse IP DB database using its APIv2. The script is only 92 lines long and 2.15 KB in size. This iteration of Pixie was developed to eliminate the need to install anything in Windows environments.

Get the PS script at: https://github.com/UncleSocks/pixie-defenders-automated-ip-address-workflow/blob/main/Pixie%20Powershell/pixie.ps1

Before the PowerShell Script

When I was working as an L1 SOC Analyst at an Australian Managed Service Provider (MSP), one of the challenges I encountered was manually researching large volumes of IP addresses to gather their geographic location and ISP details. This was necessary to identify IP addresses to which internal hosts were connecting to that were not part of the validated list.