Hot on the heels of the previous CyberDefenders Challenge Solution comes this noisy installment which solves their Acoustic challenge. You can find the source Rmd on GitHub, but I’m also testing the limits of WP’s markdown rendering and putting it in-stream as well. No longer book expository this time since much of the setup/explanatory bits… Continue reading
Post Category → R
Packet Maze: Solving a CyberDefenders PCAP Puzzle with R, Zeek, and tshark
It was a rainy weekend in southern Maine and I really didn’t feel like doing chores, so I was skimming through RSS feeds and noticed a link to a PacketMaze challenge in the latest This Week In 4n6. Since it’s also been a while since I’ve done any serious content delivery (on the personal side,… Continue reading
New TabularData Available in Swift on macOS Monterery (et al)
WWDC 2021 is on this week and many new fun things are being introduced, including some data science-friendly additions to the frameworks that come with Xcode 13 and available on macOS 12+ (and its *OS cousins). Specifically, Apple has made tabular data a first-class citizen with the new TabularData app service. A future post will… Continue reading
A {swiftr} Brief Interlude While Awaiting {cdcfluview} CRAN Checks
My {cdcfluview} package started tossing erros on CRAN just over a week ago when the CDC added an extra parameter to one of the hidden API endpoints that the package wraps. After a fairly hectic set of days since said NOTE came, I had time this morning to poke at a fix. There are alot… Continue reading
Avoiding The mdls Command Line Round Trip With swiftr::swift_function()
The last post showed how to work with the macOS mdls command line XML output, but with {swiftr} we can avoid the command line round trip by bridging the low-level Spotlight API (which mdls uses) directly in R via Swift. If you’ve already played with {swiftr} before but were somewhat annoyed at various boilerplate elements… Continue reading
Quick Hit: Processing macOS Application Metadata Weirdly Fast with mdls and R
(reminder: Quick Hits have minimal explanatory blathering, but I can elaborate on anything if folks submit a comment). I’m playing around with Screen Time on xOS again and noticed mdls (macOS command line utility for getting file metadata) has a -plist option (it probably has for a while & I just never noticed it). I… Continue reading
Check ‘Developer Tools’ First To Avoid Heavy-ish Dependencies
Guillaume Pressiat (@GuillaumePressiat) did a solid post & video on using Selenium to scrape a paginated table from understat[.]com/league/EPL/2020 (I just cannot bring myself to provide an active link to any SportsBall site). He does a great job walking folks through acquiring & orchestrating the heavy dependency that is Selenium. I did a quick “look… Continue reading
Brimming With Possibilities: Query zqd & Mine Logs with zq from R
Brim Security maintains a free, Electron-based desktop GUI for exploration of PCAPs and select cybersecurity logs: along with a broad ecosystem of tools which can be used independently of the GUI. The standalone or embedded zqd server, as well as the zq command line utility let analysts run ZQL (a domain-specific query language) queries on… Continue reading