How to Crack NTHASH (commonly referred to as NTLM)…

Ok imagine this, you have got access to a file server and behold you find an unsecured, unencrypted backup of a domain controller (this isn’t made up I find these in networks sometimes!) and you yoink the NTDS.dit (or maybe it’s just a workstation SAM/SYSTEM file), you extract the hashes but now what, you need to crack those bad boys!

Check out the MS docs on how NT or LM Hashes are computed(hashed)! – (thanks @ANeilan for spotting my mistake!)

[MS-SAMR]: Encrypting an NT or LM Hash | Microsoft Docs

Defence

The Director of GCHQ speaks at CyberUK 2022

Sir Jeremy Fleming was speaking at CyberUK, the UK’s flagship cyber security conference this week.

The full presentation is here but I’ve picked out some key highlights.

“Of course, we can count ourselves lucky compared to those caught up in wars, but we are also seeing a heightened cyber risk. Cyber criminals are consistently evolving their tactics; the lines are blurring with hostile state activity and ransomware remains a real threat.”

“Cyber clearly matters to everyone.”

“At the global level, the UK has developed as a cyber power. Alongside the more traditional forms of diplomacy and statecraft, cyber now plays a vital role in our national security and prosperity.”

Leadership

CYBER CYBER CYBER – What cyber means for the…

I’m sitting here drinking a cup of tea and thought I’d jot down some of the things I tend to think about. I figured this might help people consider aspects of “cyber” that they might not have considered before.

Education

Stop rushing for “the solution”!

Before you start solutioning

Everyone these days seems to rush towards “the solution”, well as someone who now has few years under their belt, I’d advise people slow down a little and think about their business requirements, outcomes, current state, and constraints. Significantly as well think about how a service will run over a period, not just how to buy it and “fling it into production”.

Threat Intel

OPSEC is Hard: Are you even trying?

OPSEC is hard! Doing things that are covert is expensive and time consuming. Being invisible in today’s digital age is very hard. Operating covertly in plain sight it also hard.

Everything about this “stuff” is hard, except sometimes maybe it’s just viewed as “it’s hard and expensive” so why even bother, or conversely… maybe the objective can be “we want people to know it was us.”

Either way there’s some interesting reading if we look at “cyber” and “opsec”. For the minute I’ve just started to collect a list of links to articles which show some of the ways opsec failures have occurred in the past in relation to the GRU.

Leadership

Security Myths and Bad Advice

It must be good, someone posted about it on LinkedIn!

Ok this isn’t my normal jam, normally I’d just write something that’s hopefully good advice/practise and that would be that. But today let’s try something different!

This was inspired by a twitter convo which evolved into this: https://twitter.com/UK_Daniel_Card/status/1522138771789123584?s=20&t=dL9OkicTY2Orj5hfBtDvVQ

So… what are some cyber security myths that ended up being good practise or “good advice”? Well here’s what I came up with, supported by some awesome cyber community people!

Education

Real World Consumer Cyber Security

Cyber in the Consumer World

My focus normally is on business to business (B2B) environments and “Enterprise” computing and cyber security. However, I’ve been known to venture into the consumer world from time to time. I wondered whether people would be interested in exploring with me what cyber security in the consumer world look like?

Last week I set on an adventure to see what “hacking” myself might look like. I’m thinking that there might be more to this than a fleeting glance at Instagram hacking and a bit of fun on twitter with alts. Maybe we need to look at consumer security and how/if we have got a good user experience in this space?

Leadership

Cyber Events vs Incident vs Attack

Cyber Events

Yesterday I was asked about “attack volumes” I see in the PwnDefend HoneyNet and it reminded me about what people think an “ATTACK” is and therefore spring my brain into thinking about how we as an industry communicate. Far too often I see “number of ATTACKS” being used my marketing/sales etc. where the numbers are simply ridiculous and not reflective of how offensive cyber operations actually work.

Let’s look at some examples:

“Gov. Greg Abbott warns Texas agencies seeing 10,000 attempted cyber attacks per minute from Iran”
Gov. Greg Abbott – article in the Texas Tribune by CASSANDRA POLLOCK

Leadership

Tabletop: “you have 400 servers; 800 users and your…

CISO Tabletop Scenario Intro

I thought it would be fun to explore what people do with regards to Cyber Securityleadeship, budgets, contraints and realities of business change. So here’s a blog post to supliment my thread on twitter:

MrR3b00t | #StandWithUkraine #DefendAsOne on Twitter: “Tabletop: you have 400 servers, 800 users and your cyber security budget is 100K…. what do you do? https://t.co/Nw0Pd7rH8L” / Twitter

please note: the list below is based on experiance, it’s also a list I made whilst drinking about half a cup of tea so it’s not complete or “the answer” it’s just some observations about an approach I advocate.

Leadership

Why do “we” suck so badly at digital security…

Everything is fine until it’s not

I’ve been travelling to different organisations and visiting different networks for a while and whilst each organisation is unique (they really are) their operating models, technology challenges and weak security postures generally aren’t as unique as the organisational itself.

One thing that does spring to mind however is that there is a massively common pattern we find with organisations.

Those that invest well have better postures, better technology experiences and an improved security posture.
Those that don’t historically invest well, well they have quite the opposite:
- They don’t train staff
- They have very weak postures
- They carry an extraordinary volume of business risk

One thing that is common though, is that all of this tends to link to financial investments, so executives and boards usually have some idea if they are spending or not in this space, what they commonly don’t have a good view on is they getting what they “thought they were buying”. Sadly, too often what they assumed was “in the box” with the “IT provision” with regards to quality and cyber security just simply isn’t the case. Everything is fine, until you look… then it’s less than fine! So, what can we do about it?

Blog

Before you start solutioning

It must be good, someone posted about it on LinkedIn!

Cyber in the Consumer World

Cyber Events

CISO Tabletop Scenario Intro

Everything is fine until it’s not