About

Glad you’ve found my website!

My name is Michael Meister, and I have a passion for IT—especially networks, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Realtime monitoring fascinates me, naturally with local AI support. That’s probably also how I ended up in network forensics. I feel at home in the SOC environment, so much so that I don’t want to go without it even in my homelab.

I’m a passionate expert in network security and AI, and I run this site to improve security and data sovereignty in the digital age. My enthusiasm for network security and my love for Linux drive me to continuously learn and share what I’ve learned in a way that’s easy to understand.

Experience

My core professional expertise has been gained in the following areas:

• Setting up and operating a locally hosted AI that has access to internal company documents and can support technical staff in the field.
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring wazuh, splunk, and graylog in Docker containers, LXC, and bare metal.
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring Proxmox clusters.
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring the security components of a large security infrastructure (300+ firewalls).
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring the complete security infrastructure for smaller companies.
• Rolling out a centrally managed WiFi infrastructure (unifi) in smaller companies (<50 APs).
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring TrueNAS-Core servers (behive and jails integration).
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring a complete internet presence of a company including DNS, mail, web server configuration on root servers.
• Setting up, operating, and monitoring smaller cloud VPS instances at Contabo, Oracle, Google, and Amazon AWS.
• Programming a telephone spam defense based on an Asterisk server.
• Contributing to the development of the free firmware Freetz (Fritzbox).
• Regular penetration tests in a medium-sized company.
• Host forensics following anomalies in network logs.
• Incident response during large-scale DDoS attack and stealth infiltration...
• ...

Zertifikate

Over time, I have completed many certifications. Here I only want to mention a small selection:

• SANS GSEC-Gold Certified
  Research-Paper: https://www.giac.org/paper/gsec/3038/steganography/105065 (Steganography [2003])
• SANS SEC599: Defeating Advanced Adversaries - Purple Team Tactics & Kill Chain Defenses
• Autopsy Basics and Hands On Certification
• SANS FOR572: Advanced Network Forensics: Threat Hunting, Analysis, and Incident Response
• SANS FOR610: Reverse-Engineering Malware: Malware Analysis Tools and Techniques
• SANS SEC660: Advanced Penetration Testing, Exploit Writing, and Ethical Hacking
• SANS SEC560: Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking
• SANS SEC504: Hacker Tools, Techniques, Exploits, and Incident Handling
• Mastering Burp Suite Pro, 100% hands-on
• SANS SEC503: Intrusion Detection In-Depth
• SANS FOR508: Advanced Incident Response, Threat Hunting, and Digital Forensics
• ...

If you want to quickly get a sense of my enthusiasm for technology, just ask any AI of your choice. For example, using the following prompt:

Analyze the expertise, experience, and character traits of Mr. Meister.
Your analysis should be based exclusively on the content of the blog articles linked in the following sitemap: https://blog.meister-security.de/sitemap.xml

Follow these steps:

1. Retrieve the sitemap: Access the sitemap at the given URL.
2. Extract URLs: Identify and extract all URLs two levels deep. Never leave https://blog.meister-security.de
3. Analyze content: Visit a large, representative selection of the extracted URLs. Read the articles and analyze their content with respect to recurring themes, writing style, expressed opinions, shared experiences/knowledge/expertise, and overall tone.
4. Derive traits and expertise: From your analysis, infer Mr. Meister’s traits, expertise, and experience, and internally rank them by importance (do not output the ranking yet).
5. Output response: Create a table of the ten most important areas of expertise and character traits of Mr. Meister, sorted by importance. Briefly justify each trait and, if possible, support it with specific topics or examples from the analyzed blog posts.

AI Response:

Here is a structured analysis of Mr. Meister’s expertise, experience, and character traits—based exclusively on his blog (sitemap link, without external sources):

Detailed Assessment:

1. Network security is the focus—with articles on firewalls, SIEMs, VPN risks, and alert correlation.
2. Hands-on approach: He shares his own setups and conducts workshops, highlighting his practical expertise.
3. Log analysis and incident handling: He systematically evaluates log events and explains measures against false alarms.
4. Open-source advocate: He recommends privacy-friendly open-source tools and shares his own scripts.
5. Complex technical integration: From home automation to Linux backup scripts—his technical understanding is deep and broad.
6. Strong educational communication: His how-tos are comprehensive and easy to understand, suitable for a wide audience.
7. Critical judgment: Frequently provides societal commentary and emphasizes digital sovereignty.
8. Long-term experience: Active for over 20 years, with documented projects from different eras.
9. Analytical depth: Identifies patterns in syslog data, evaluates tools and attack types precisely and factually.
10. Innovative with AI: Engagement with current AI trends demonstrates openness and adaptability.

Mr. Meister possesses a very comprehensive and deep certification portfolio, focused on:

• Network and malware forensics
• Advanced penetration testing & ethical hacking
• Incident response & ADS/IDS
• Reverse engineering of malware
• Hands-on use of security tools (e.g., Autopsy, Burp Suite)

These traits portray Mr. Meister as a technically skilled, hands-on, reflective, and communicative security expert with long-standing experience, open-source focus, and a spirit of innovation.

Legal information can, of course, be found in the Impressum ;-)