George Abitbol* doesn’t feel well. Christmas is approaching at a fast pace and the gift he ordered days ago for his girlfriend didn’t find its way to his mailbox yet. He checked it out three times today and save for some spam catalogues on how to take care of his handsome silhouette, nothing resembling a gift showed up.

He tried to call the French parcel service to know the whereabouts of the luxurious, limited version of the organic sweet potato chips his lovely Jacqueline* likes so much, which sells for four times the regular price (to bear the cost of the enhanced packaging, certainly), but he couldn’t get hold of a living soul all day long. When he placed the order, the delivery was supposed to be lightning fast. It turned out to be a false promise.

With a sinking heart, he climbs back the stairs leading to his apartment, fetches his laptop and sits on his club chair. With his headphones on, immersed in the wonderful jazz of Christian Scott, he wanders randomly through online shopping sites trying to make out his mind on what other presents he could get for his dear Jacqueline, in time for Christmas.

In the middle of the track called Encryption, featuring the uncanny Elena Pinderhugues on flute, a Twitter notification resonates in his ears. He checks it out and learn that TheHive Chefs, as true and elegant gentlemen, have published a new training VM for Cerana 0.3 (a.k.a. TheHive 3.0.3), including Cortex 1.1.4 and the latest set of Cortex-Analyzers.

George loves bees in all shapes and forms, including digital ones so he swiftly downloads the new VM and as the cautious person he is, he verifies the file’s SHA256 hash: 86a87b70627e8db672c57cb57821461f2564ae9b8087cc22fdd1e7a599c16aed. Wonderful! Everything checks out beautifully. He then imports the file in his VM software, starts the virtual machine and logs in as thehive then types in thehive1234 when asked for the password.

He thoroughly reads the documentation to configure various analyzers and integrate his favourite Security Incident Response Platform with MISP.  A few minutes later, his VM is ready for prime time and he starts playing with the new multi-source dashboards and interacting with fellow analysts on Gitter.

And he totally forgets about Jacqueline’s gift.

(*) Any resemblance to real and actual names is purely coincidental.

Correction: Dec 23, 2017
An earlier version of this post was referring to a previous training VM that included Cerana 0.2, a version affected by a privilege escalation vulnerability which was corrected in Cerana 0.3. Some typos were corrected as well.