Antisyphon: Reporting for Pentesters Review
When delivering reports for a living, it's important to know how to do it well. Fortunately, BB King knows how to do it very well.
I have a nice, short one here for you today as I was recently given the opportunity to take the Antisyphon on-demand courses through a giveaway! I started with what I think is the most important one, the report writing course. It's a 4 hour course with BB King that covers considerations that you need to make for report writing, and some MS Word magic.
Ethics Disclaimer
Like any other review I post, I need to post some context and ethical considerations so you understand some background on how I formed these opinions. First, as the initial paragraph states, I was granted access to the training library for free. Neither Black Hills Information Security, or any of it's sister companies including Antisyphon Training provided any payment, nor were they given any preview or editorial input for the purposes of this review. The views expressed here are mine and mine alone.
Course Content
I started off with this course because I firmly believe reporting really is the most important part of delivering your product to a client. It helps that it is a 4 hour course too, so I was able to bang it out 2 hours at a time over 2 afternoons. The course is delivered via the D2L LMS by Brightspace. I am very familiar with D2L as we used it in university, so it's back to haunt my dreams. I don't have a particular love or distaste for D2L. It's clunky at times, sure, but it gets the job done fairly well.
As far as the content itself is concerned, it's actually pretty straightforward. A lot of the slide content is covered in this talk on the Wild West Hackin' Fest YouTube channel here. The primary differentiator is that the course goes a little more in-depth on the MS Word portions that are lightly covered at the end of the talk. Frankly, the stuff that is covered should be mandatory in a college-level English class, or a report-heavy class. It covers making Word much less of a pain to use, and BB highlights some tips and tricks to help understand why Word does some of the dumb stuff it does, and how to make it behave. The end section of the course is a walkthrough on how to create a reporting template that incorporates the techniques that BB shares earlier in the course. BB did a great job explaining the how and why you want to do this, and I think it's great 0verall.
My sole complaint about the course is that I can tell they took the original live stream, re-ordered it when they uploaded it to D2L and it completely threw off continuity in a few places. There were a few points where I stopped the video, went back to the course outline and made sure I was where I needed to be. So, if that's all I can say I dislike about a course, it's a pretty solid course. I would recommend taking it if you are looking to make reporting take less time, and decrease the rush and the anxiety of getting a report out the door and to a client.