What do you need to be Cyber Leader?

Introduction

What does it take to be a cyber leader? How do we address a broad challenge we have in today’s business world?

There are a huge number of organisations whereby the leadership do not have domain expertise in cyber and related disciplines. There are decision makers who are having to best guess. On the other end of the spectrum, we have thousands and thousands of people trying to “break into cyber” yet they face largely insane entry requirements with the forementioned adding things to junior and entry level role which include:

Must have a CISSP (CISSP requires 5 years’ experience and is an Information Security certificate that is very broad and not very deep, it also covers a range of areas that in my opinion aren’t even required for many cyber security capabilities inside organisations)
Must have a Certified Ethical Hacker (this exam includes remember historic malware dates, is that really what we need from our leaders?)
Must have a very large level of experience of be from an existing cyber role

Leadership

There’s never any time – A mRr3b00t Adventure

Introduction

I’ve been working with technology and its security for a while, I have travelled to different parts of the world, I’ve worked with major organisations, and I’ve worked with a whole range of organisations both from strategic advisory and at the coal face perspective. Now over the last twenty years I thought about how much has changed… and honestly, I don’t think much has.

Technology innovation, miniaturisation and adoption rates are through the roof, but I still see massively similar patterns. I’m not going to try and quote statistics, but I think it’s a fair to say the threat landscape has changed somewhat (for the worse!)

Back in the 2000s era we had networks running Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000/2003, we had clients with open services which could largely be accessed from anywhere on the network. We had host-based firewalls from third party vendors, but these were rarely implemented, MSBlaster and Windows XP changed this dynamic somewhat, to say things haven’t improved on one front would be a lie, however the level of crime and access to technology globally has changed massively. Read more “There’s never any time – A mRr3b00t Adventure” →

Defense

Why are ransomware attacks so devastating? – Part 1

Introduction

“Ransomware is a major issue!”

Hang on maybe we need to re-phrase that:

“Weak security postures are a major issue!”

or perhaps.. why not both!

I’ve been working with digital technology management for over 20 years, I started out when I was a kid (literally) fixing people’s PCs in their offices, removing malware, improving configurations, writing batch file menus, and playing games. As time has gone on technology has shrunk and continually become more and more of our everyday lives.

Back in 2003 I responded internally to MSBlaster, an SMB worm that had a devastating effect for the time, by today’s standards it was child play, however I remember saying “it’s a good job it didn’t delete everything whilst it was here.” (Or something very similar. Post NACHI/Blaster my friends and I were talking about how worse it could get. Fast forward in time and it’s much worse. Yet when I look at networks, they don’t look very different to how they did back in the 2000s.

Despite a multi-billion-dollar cyber security industry, it seems daily that organisations are succumbing to “cyber-attacks” which commonly include ransomware. Why are they successful and why are they so impactful? Well, let’s take a look! Read more “Why are ransomware attacks so devastating? – Part 1” →

Defense

Audit NTDS.DIT using DSINTERNALS

Ok this assumes you know how to get the NTDS.DIT and SYSTEM registry hive out from a domain controller, if you don’t go looking, we might have blogged a few ways to do that! Now then, firstly, let’s Install DSInternals. From PowerShell 5 onwards you can simply run:

Install-Module -Name DSInternals -Force

You will likely need to set your execution policy:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Now to dump the hashes we use: Read more “Audit NTDS.DIT using DSINTERNALS” →

Defense

Dumping Credentails with MIMIKATZ and Passing the Hash (PTH)

I kid you not, I forget the commands, so I thought, hey let’s write a small blog post on credential dumping and pass the hash.

To achieve this we need: Debug privileges on a single machine or we need access to a disk that does not have full disk encryption. We also need the password to be re-used.

Mimikatz

Ok for this demo I’m going to run with the out of the box release for Mimikatz on a domain joined windows PC with Defender disabled.

To gain system we launch mimikatz from an admin shell and run:

privilege::debug

token::elevate

Now we are SYSTEM we access a range of high privilege level areas. Read more “Dumping Credentails with MIMIKATZ and Passing the Hash (PTH)” →

Defense

Hacking Guide – AESREPRoast and Kerberoasting

Kerberos Pre-Authentication Hash Retrieval and Cracking

We can enumerate active directory to find accounts that do not require pre-authentication. There’s a simple way of doing this using Rubeus:

.\Rubeus.exe asreproast /format:hashcat

We can see there is a vulnerable account that has Kerberos Pre-Authentication disabled.

This hash can be loaded into hashcat and possibly cracked (the hash in the screenshot is weak on purpose) Read more “Hacking Guide – AESREPRoast and Kerberoasting” →

Defense

Executing/Creating a process via WMI Methods

WMI is an awesome technology capability for Windows administration, I’ve been using WMI since the Windows 2000 era, I’ve written WMI based scripts/tools to defeat malware, yay, however with any tool the use can be for good and for evil!

This post is going to focus on Win32_Process:Create (there are other methods as well!) Read more “Executing/Creating a process via WMI Methods” →

Guides

From Zero to DA using ‘PetitPotam’

Introduction

Whilst I was on ‘holiday’ (seriously even when on holiday I almost always must do some work!) a few Windows vulnerabilities were published. Great work by Gilles Lionel, Benjamin Delpy and many many others!

Lab Setup

A Domain Controller
A Separate ADCS Install with Web Enrolment or two DCs one with ADCS installed.
A windows Client Device (non-domain joined)
An attacker device (I used Kali)

You do not need any domain credentials to conduct this exploit chain, so from a network adjacent unauthenticated position you can get DA with the right circumstances (default configuration). Read more “From Zero to DA using ‘PetitPotam’” →

Defense

Changing a security posture requires changing your own behaviours

I’m sure you will have had a marketing firm or some random sales person on Linkedin tell you that security should be simple and that their product will save you from all the ATPs and nation state hax0rs under the sun. However let’s get real, thats almost certainly not true and also security isnt simple or we’d all be out of jobs and everyon woulndn’t be getting owned all the time.

Getting real

Defense

Ransomware Realities

Everything is much worse now, or is it?

”The world is burning, the world is burning but then if you look around, it always has been…”

Computer systems and security go together much like chalk and cheese! Probably sounds a bit odd but miniaturization, consumerization and mobility have put more technology out in the world than we can really comprehend, yet technology security is still dramatically overlooked by most organizations.

The insane pace of change, the drive for faster, better, cheaper and the reality that it probably isn’t a stretch to say most people (and organizations) do not really understand what ‘secure’ or ‘hardened’ looks like.