Blog
Supplier Assurance Tools
Do they replace the need for OSINT and Supplier engagement?
I’ve been conducting sales and assurance-based activities for some while (I’m not counting it will make me feel old!) and I have started looked at a range of supplier management tools which leverage tool-based OSINT, attack surface mapping and manual data inputs and I have to say this:
Cyber Insurance: How would I decide to buy it…
Is Cyber Insurance right for you?
Wow a big question, right? I can’t answer this for you, obviously I’d recommend that you consider cyber insurance, however I’d also recommend that you:
- Understand your business and it’s supply chain with regards to financials and linkages to cyber risk
- Understand your current cyber asset, threat, vulnerability and therefore risk landscape
- Ensure you have a good understanding to make informed decisions
I’m not going to write lots this evening on the subject, but I was reviewing a report and thought in line with some research that I started recently (but was side-tracked) and then have seen the report so purchased that instead! (Sometimes it’s easier to not do everything yourself right!)
Read more “Cyber Insurance: How would I decide to buy it or not?”Vulnerability Management Concerns by Role Type
Have you ever thought about what kind of data/intelligence you may need with regards to vulnerability management? It tends to vary at levels of abstraction based on the audiance, but don’t think the person doing the patching may not be considernig upwards or that someone in a C level position won’t care about the zeros and ones (life doesn’t work that way!)
Anyway I was talking to a friend and came up with these so thought I’d share them with the world. Have I done a decent job? can you think of others? How do you measure and report? What are your concerns?
Let’s take a look at what I came up with (this wasn’t a very long time in the making 😉 )
Read more “Vulnerability Management Concerns by Role Type”How to use Putty as a SOCKS Proxy
Ever stuck in an environment where your internet access isn’t what you want it to be? Ever need to exfilrate data and bypass some DLP? Obviously I’m talking like a pentester (don’t use this if it beaks policies on anohers assets) so this is useful for some scenarios in testing but also in real life!
Read more “How to use Putty as a SOCKS Proxy”Infrastructure Penetration Testing Realities
Penetration testing is just like being a cybercriminal, right?
Honestly, it feels weird writing this, however I feel there’s a real issue with penetration testing and some myths that (for understandable and obvious reasons) exist in some people’s minds. So I’ve taken to trying to explain to people what an external penetration test actually entails in the real world of business. So here goes!
Read more “Infrastructure Penetration Testing Realities”UK NCSC Active Cyber Defence (ACD)
Defending a single server is often far more complex than people apreciate, defending a single organisation is significantly harder than a single server, defending a country… a much more complex challenge than I think people actually realise.
What is ACD?
According to the NCSC:
The aim of ACD is to “Protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.” We do this through a wide range of mechanisms, which at their core have the ability to provide protection at scale.
ACD is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, rather than the highly sophisticated and targeted attacks, which NCSC deal with in other ways.
UK NCSC
What is included?
The UK NCSC offer and run a range of Active Cyber Defence capabilities which include the following:
Read more “UK NCSC Active Cyber Defence (ACD)”Offensive KEV Alpha 0.1
Working out what exploits to care about is a tough job, kill chains, availability of exploits, complexity, data flows, controls etc. all play a part in understanding a vulnerability and how it affects your organisational risk. To support this effort I’ve started to compile a list of public exploits against CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). This may be useful for defensive and offensive security pros.
Read more “Offensive KEV Alpha 0.1”Security Awareness Training Example
Introduction
There are tons of “products” for security awarenss training, however you might find that sitting and watching canned CBT videos isn’t your organisations thing or perhaps you want to see what other options there are available. Well for starts the UK NCSC has some free online security awarenss training (see further down the post), or you may want to actually spend time with your staff to make the learning a collaboarive experiance that drives engagement and communication. If the last one if your desired approach there are lots of ways to do this. One of which can be supported by a question based assessment, other ways include tabletop scenarios and incident simulations (i honestly would go with a blended appraoch if it was me!).
So to help people get thinking about this I’ve put together some example questions to drive the message about incident reporting, collaboration and education vs blame. So here we go, here’s some ideas for communication and some questions to get staff thinking about cyber security, sure they aren’t rocket science, but then it doesn’t need to be!
Read more “Security Awareness Training Example”Common Windows Services
Exploitation of common windows services is an important area of knowledge for both offense and defence.
- Server Message Block (SMB)
- Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
- Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
- Windows Remote Management (WinRM)
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Other common technology platforms in the Windows Stack Include
- Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)
- Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS)
- Internet Information Services (IIS)
- Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)
For now I’m just going to look at a few of the common protocols and vectors.
Read more “Common Windows Services”