Building a security culture on a foundation of concrete…

In this post I go on a winding road of exploration around some of the challenges I find with organisations when it comes to the realities of secure technology management, some of the barriers I see and the stark truth that technology security challenges are not a two-minute fix. Be warned this is an exploration of thought so it’s a bit random in it’s path but hopefully it shares some of my insights and thoughts from over the years. Read more “Building a security culture on a foundation of concrete not sand – ramblings of a consultant” →

Defense

Everything must be agile but is that really always…

A lot of people talk about AGILE but the normally mean ‘agile’ however when it comes to security testing and penetration testing (to me there is most certainly a difference) we need to be mindful of the different approaches, so we select the right one for the context, scenario, and objectives.

In this post we take a brief look at what we recommend for a range of scenarios and we look at the key differences and what some constraints might mean when it comes to approach selection.

Defense

5 Major Challenges with Business Digital Security

This is not meant to be an essay, but simply a rapid-fire view of things that I see that are major challenges with digital security in today’s age. So, without any further delay let us hit it:

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Change Management 101

Managing Change (and releases)

This is an area that I think some might be interested in. I have worked with orgs of all shapes and sizes and one central area I find people struggle with is change management. I am not talking about organisational change management (that is another) but I am talking about the change of information systems or security controls.

Now you might be familiar with ITILv3/2011 and the PROCESS of change management or you might be in the new practise world of ITIL4 where it is called change enablement, or you might have no idea what I am rabbiting on about. That is ok that is why we are here!

The purpose of change management is (according to ITIL) to help minimise the risk of change for IT services.

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Routine Security Governance and Management Activities you should plan…

Security Planning 101

I have been thinking about how organisations manage (or do not manage) their security postures from both a governance and management point of view. To help organisations that are just starting on their security improvement journey I thought I have put together a list of activities they may want to have in a forward schedule document (you could even call it a roadmap). It is not going to be all things to all people and different organisations and markets will have different requirements.

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New Year , New You! Securing Active Directory

By default, a ‘domain user’ can read mostly everything in active directory. I’m not sure every sysadmin knows this as I often find passwords stored in the description filed (see the example screenshot, this was from a domain user with no third-party tools leveraged). Read more “New Year , New You! Securing Active Directory” →

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Things to try & keep an environment safe

I chose these words on purpose, I don’t think keeping environments secure and working is easy. I don’t think anyone has all the answers, even with massive budgets large organisations fail to keep their data and systems secure. But I do know that by doing these activities we can massively change the game when compared to the security posture of an organisation compared to organisations that don’t do this! So, I thought I’d share some of the things I do to try and keep on top of environments cyber heigine. But to start let’s think about the kind of questions are we looking to answer:

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Make Logging Great Again (MLGA)

Ok so i’ve been showing how alot of things do NOT get audited in Windows out of the box (on Twitter obviously) so I thought I’d export the CSV which you can import to enable some of the advanced logging features into a GPO without so many clicks (RSA sucks!)

So here is a CSV file that you can use to import! this isn’t everything you need to do, but it’s a start!

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CVE-2020-27130 – Path Traversal on CISCO Security Manager

CVSS 9.1 – CWE-35

“A vulnerability in Cisco Security Manager could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information.

The vulnerability is due to improper validation of directory traversal character sequences within requests to an affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to download arbitrary files from the affected device.”

On the 16/11/2020 a POC for a range of CISCO device vulnerabilities was released on GitHub by https://twitter.com/frycos.

Defense

Secure Remote Access VPN

If your VPN can be brute forced, I hate to break it to you, but it’s got a bit of a design/implementation problem! Now I’m not going to go into VPN RCE’s (we’ve seen a lot of them in recent times) but let’s look at what we can do to protect our remote access services! Read more “Secure Remote Access VPN” →