http://www.thesecuritysetup.com/home/2014/10/1/hd-moore [Interesting website I found while following someone else who was profiled earlier, Uri with @redteamsblog, the idea here is ‘what setup do folks in security use to attack, defend, build, break, hack, crack, secure, etc.’ which should make for some interesting reading. – WK] H D Moore OCTOBER 1, 2014 Who are you, and what do you do? My name is H D Moore (since the day I was born, it doesn’t stand for anything). I am a security researcher and the chief research officer for Rapid7. Some folks may be familiar with my work on Metasploit, but these days I also spend a lot of time scanning the internet as part of Project Sonar. My servers send friendly greetings to your servers at least once a week. Howdy! What hardware & operating systems do you use? Lots. My normal workload involves crunching a billion records at a time, running a dozen different operating systems, and still handling corporate stuff via Outlook and PowerPoint. As of 2009, I finally made the switch to Windows as my primary OS after being a die-hard Linux user since 1995. That doesn’t mean that I use Windows itself all that much, but I find it to be a useful environment to run virtual machines and access the rest of my hardware with SSH and X11. The tipping point was the need to quickly respond to corporate email and edit Office documents without using a dedicated virtual machine or mangling the contents in the process. The second benefit to using Windows is on the laptop front; Suspend, resume, and full hardware support don’t involve weeks of tuning just to have a portable machine. Finally, I tend to play a lot of video games as well, which work best on overspecced Windows hardware. All that said, Windows as productivity platform isn’t great, and almost all of my real work occurs in web browsers (Chrome), virtual machines (VMWare for Intel/AMD64 and QEmu for RISC), and SSH-forwarded XFCE4 tabbed-terminals. The laptop I currently use started life as a banged up ASUS ROG G750 (17″) bought as the display model from a Best Buy. The drives, video card, and memory were swapped out bringing the total specs up to 32Gb RAM, a 512Gb SSD boot disk, a 1Tb backup disk, and a GeForce GTX 770 GPU. This runs the most loathed operating system of all, Windows 8.1 (Update 1) Enterprise, but it has a huge screen, was relatively cheap, and can run my development virtual machines without falling over. It also runs Borderlands2 and Skyrim at maximum settings, critical features for any mobile system. Given that the total cost was under $1,500, it is a great machine for working on the road and blocking automatic weapons fire (as its weighs about 20 Lbs with accessories). I carry this beast around in a converted ammunition bag, sans the grenade pouches. […]