People and Passwords, why passkeys might change the game

This weekend at BSIDES London it was great to have the UK National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) (the UK’s technical authority on cyber security) give a talk about passkeys!

A brief history of AI being used for Defensive…

There’s lots of talk from some people about how AI is going to destroy the world and needs to be regulated, like some kind of SkyNet has been created… Well I thought, aside from this being largely not reality, I would look into a history of ‘AI’ being used in cyber defence.

Suspected Fortinet Zero Day Exploited in the Wild

This weeks been an interesting one, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research recently with my friend Simo from Defused defusedcyber.com. Simo has built a new emulated honeypot platform, and anyone that know’s me knows I love honeypots, deception and intel sharing to help defenders and to impose cost on the baddies! (technical terms here ok!)

Password Reset Defence Check List

Using AI feels great sometimes and then empty others, this was created in seconds, it’s fine, it works.. but it has no soul! But who cares about soul when it’s a check list right? The more fundamental question is, do you have the policies, processes and procedures to defend against social engineering attacks against password resets? If not, perhaps this may help.

Minimum Data Requirements for Investigating Email Mailbox Compromise

When a suspected email mailbox compromise is reported, initiating an investigation promptly is critical. However, to ensure the investigation is effective, certain minimum intelligence requirements must be met. This blog outlines the bare minimum data needed to start investigating a suspected email mailbox compromise, whether the intelligence comes from an internal team or a third-party source.

Defending Against Direct Authentication Attacks in Microsoft Office 365

Whilst conducting security testing and assurance activities, I went looking to show logon events in Office 365. My first query was on IdentityEvents, this led to a view of a multi month attack by a threat actor/s against a tenent, followed by exploring the rabbit hole of logs and computer systems. This blog summarises some of the methods and findings when considering threat hunting and authentication defences for Office 365. (bear with me I am tired so this might need a bit of a tune up later!)

Broadband Routers

When it comes to digital technology, we have to consider many things.

Availability, Confidentiality, and Integrity are good building blocks for considerations. We can probably split this into two major views to start with:

What does a typical consumer care about?
What security and privacy considerations could be made?

A typical consumer may be about:

Availability
Cost
WIFI Coverage
Performance
Ease of Use
Ease of Support/Troubleshooting
Style/Looks
What happens if it breaks?
Can I stop my kids messing with it? (Probably not so why bother)

CVE-2022-26809 – Critical Windows RPC Vulnerability

Vulnerability Information

Rating	Critical
CVE	cve-2022-26809
MITRE	CVE – CVE-2022-26809 (mitre.org)
CVSS	CVSS:3.1 9.8
Impact	Remote Code Execution (RCE)
Exploit in the wild	Currently not observed
Difficulty to Exploit (if PoC available)	Very Low
Network Position	TCP/IP Routable or Network Adjacent
Authentication Required to Exploit	No
Affected	Windows Client/Server OS
Typical Service Ports	TCP 135,139,445
Vendor Patch Available	Yes
Exploitable in Default OOB (out of the box) configuration	Unknown
Exploitable Client/Server	Believed to be client and server side exploitable

Rapid Active Directory Hardening Checklist

Ok this is not a small subject areas and it’s not a HOW TO guide but it should at least give you some ideas for tools to deploy and areas to check that are abused by Ransomware gangs and ATPs etc. Thanks to people who contributed!

This is not everything but it’s some common low hanging weaknesses:

Log4Shell exploitation and hunting on VMware Horizon (CVE-2021-44228)

TLDR

Go and run this on the connection servers:

https://github.com/mr-r3b00t/CVE-2021-44228

It’s crude so also look for the modified timestamps, recent unexpected blast service restarts and if you have process logging go and check for suspicious child processes over the period. Once you have checked, run a backup, then if they aren’t patched, patch the servers! (i know patching isn’t as simple as just patch!)