Cyber Security Design Review

Purpose

To conduct a solution review we need to consider multiple perspectives. Cyber security can be described as (from the NCSC):

“Cyber security’s core function is to protect the devices we all use (smartphones, laptops, tablets and computers), and the services we access – both online and at work – from theft or damage. It’s also about preventing unauthorised access to the vast amounts of personal information we store on these devices, and online.”

Cyber Security is concerned with risks, threats, vulnerabilities, and controls. This really means the breadth and depth of cyber security is vastly wide and terribly deep. Read more “Cyber Security Design Review” →

Defense

Risk management is easy! Isn’t it?

Information security theory and practises use a commonly understood and simple range of tools, methods, and practises to help organisations understand their risk portfolio and to enable them to make both strategic and tactical investment decisions….

Ok someone pinch me. this simply isn’t the reality I see on the ground. The theory is vast, complex and there are a multitude of good/best/insert phrase frameworks and tools that you can leverage to map, model, and communicate risks, vulnerabilities, controls, threats etc.

I’m not going to do a detailed analysis and comparison of different models here, but I am going to at least give people a view of some of the tools and frameworks that you can and may likely experience in the cyber security world. Read more “Risk management is easy! Isn’t it?” →

Leadership

Cyber Security Architecture

I remember (now it was a long time ago) when I worked in a support role and my dream job was being a technical architect, back in the warm and fuzzy days of no host-based firewalls, IPsec being something only MCPs knew about other than the networking team and when cybercrime was a shadow of how it is today.

It wasn’t until I had a few more notches under my belt when I realised that architecture in technology has different viewpoints, not only that but even the industry can’t agree on what things are or are not. That aside the reality is, is that architecture has different domains, specialisms, views, and viewpoints. I often find myself working across a whole range of areas, that is driven largely by specific customer requirements and scenarios (this is why I have a cool lab and lots of kit!)

When we consider a business technology system it has risk and by nature cyber security in that view. To think of this not being the case would be odd because ultimately “business” is the highest abstraction, and let’s think about what makes up a business: Read more “Cyber Security Architecture” →

Defense

Exposed VMWARE vCenter Servers around the world (CVE-2021-22005)

There’s a new CVE in town but don’t think it’s the only problem you get when you expose administrative interfaces to the wild west of the internet (yeeha or something). Let’s go on a quick exploration of what the world looks like with the help of our friends at Shodan and then let’s see the ramblings of Dan when looking at how benign enumeration and exploration of services can work. Let’s get started looking at the world, a quick face analysis on Shodan with vmware as a product shows a hit or two, what we are going to focus on is vCenter but you know.. you might want to review your attack surfaces so any exposed services (damn people expose some risky stuff!) Read more “Exposed VMWARE vCenter Servers around the world (CVE-2021-22005)” →

Leadership

Measuring Cyber Defence Success

What does “good” cyber security look like? Sure, we can run a maturity assessment and see what good indicators are and we can create a baseline of our current state to establish where we are and what gaps we have (honestly in real terms this isn’t something to consider you should be doing this!) but how do we measure success in cyber security? Is every success an invisible outcome? Because one question that often comes to mind here is, just because we don’t see something, does that mean everything is ok? In the fast-paced world of cyber security, measuring success isn’t as easy as you would think. I’ll give an example of this, let’s say we don’t monitor, we get breached, but the threat actor just performs crypto mining (let’s say this is on premises) and we never really notice in the grand scheme of the world that our energy consumption costs have increased, if we didn’t know this had occurred, we might think our security is good. Read more “Measuring Cyber Defence Success” →

Defense

How to restore AdminSDHolder Object Permissions using ADSIedit

Ok so the other day “we” as a community put out some guidance around post active directory compromise actions for when you can’t simply nuke the forest from orbit. Well, following on from that a friend asked about how to restore AdminSDHolder permissions? Read more “How to restore AdminSDHolder Object Permissions using ADSIedit” →

Defense

CAF Workbook

Undertsanding the current state of cyber capability maturity across an organisation is no simple feat. The team at NCSC have created a really good set of guidance with CAF. With all things there’s different ways on consuming, understanding and leveraging good practises.

I often find have XLS workbooks incredibly valuable when looking at indicators of good practise inside organisations. With this in mind, I started to put the GAF indicators into a workbook. This isn’t complete yet. It needs refactoring so it can be pivoted etc. It also needs some parts added for metadata capture and analysis.

I’m publishing this because sitting collecting virtual dust is probably the least valuable thing that can occur.

Hopefully this is helpful to people, even in it’s current half baked state. I’ll and complete this at some point!

Threat Intel

CVE-2021-38647 – Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) RCE – Linux…

Situation

Ok so the situation is as per usual a bit fluid, when this first dropped I was looking at this with a “azure” lense, however as time goes on it appears this likely also covers any Linux distro with the Azure/SCOM/OMS agents installed. This may change the profile of risk considerable, not only from a public facing attack surafce but highly likely from a lateral movement persspective. I’m going to keep updating this as more intel comes in. (sorry I’d be clearer if I had a clearer picture myself)

This week 4 vulnerabilities were disclosed which affect ~~Azure~~ virtual machines running the Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) agent (think PowerShell remoting). As above the scope seems to be slightly wider with regard to SCOM/AZURE and OMS/Sentinel etc. agents for Linux (I want to confirm all of this but for now it seems this is the position)

Essentially these vulnerabilities allow for both network-based remove code execution (RCE) and local privilege escalation (LPE).

There is evidence of exploitation in honeypots.
There is a public proof of concept available for the RCE.
The internet facing attack surface from a global perspective seems low based on the data in Shodan and Censys however I’m not convinced this is currently giving a clear picture.
- So, check your azure networks, Vms and firewalls would be a sensible idea

CTF

Installing Kali 2021.3

Hax fun with the Dragon distro

Ok today we are going to look at deploying Kali 2013.3. The install process for this is fairly standard and familiar from previous version but for those new to this world, it seems like a good place to start.

Install Procedure (Virtual Machine)

Boot from the ISO

Read more “Installing Kali 2021.3” →

Defense

Post Compromise Active Directory Checklist

Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure!

Ok, in an ideal world you can re-deploy your entire environment from scratch, but back in the most people’s real world’s that’s not that simple. So, what do we do if we can’t nuke from orbit in a post compromise situation? Well, we need to clean up! This isn’t an exhaustive list, not a total guide. it’s a quick list to make you think about some key common areas and actions that might need to be taken! after all if someone got r00t, who knows what they did! (trust me, most orgs monitoring is a bit naff!)