There are so many lists of “tools” of “free resources” for “cyber” etc. Well I don’t want to make a list of stuff for social media, this isn’t the TOP x tools, this is simply some resources that I use on a regular basis that should give people a fairly good idea of where to start looking. Cyber sleuthing is a mixture of:
I was doing some WordPress foo on the site (I know right, shockingly I don’t want to hand craft a website and I’d rather be helping customers or really anything else really) and I came into this error when I was installing the wpforms plugins:
file_put_contents(/var/www/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wpforms/cache/addons.json): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpforms-lite/src/Helpers/CacheBase.php on line 215Did you ever read about ransomware actors? They often use mega upload to exfiltrate data! So I figured, why would we not detect this with MDE?
I mean sure we should probably block this with a custom indicator using Web Content Filtering and sure it would probably get blocked by Protective DNS but let’s say for whatever reason you don’t have those in place, let’s look at a really simple query to find mega connections in MDE:
Read more “Ransomware + Mega = Mega Cyber Pain”
If you are having fun today with Defender ASR deleting lnk files then you will see the MS Script has a v1.1 which looks to VSS to see if it can restore shortcuts from shadow copies, so whilst here I thought I’d note down a few different ways to list the Volume Shadow Copies.
You will need admin rights for these to work:
Read more “Volume Shadow Copy”
Clearly this is for penetration testing, not for evil! So if you have to pentest Office 365 you might want to be attacking the authentication services. This will be aligned to the tenant you are testing, as always make sure you have authorisation.
Deploy to your favourite LINUX instance or WSL etc.
Read more “Password Spraying Office 365”
Penetration testing, adversary simulation, red teaming, purple teaming, rainbow teaming, call if what you like, the security outcome we are working towards is:
This is to support the organisations mission, vision, goals, and objectives. Cyber security is to support and enable the organisation’s capability to execute digital services in a safe manner.
Read more “Practical Security Assurance”
I thought about doing a step by step bash script or CLI walkthrough but decided to go with the high levels steps. If we wanted to ensure our Linux servers are configured in alignment with Cyber Essentials what are the main areas we need to consider? For this I’m using Ubuntu Server as a base, I’ve not gone through every line in the standard but these should be in line with the 5 areas and fit within the Cyber Essentials theme. As always there are many ways to skin a cat! (don’t skin cats they are frens!). Anyway hope this is useful.
Read more “Cyber Essentials for Ubuntu Servers”
Having a plan for how you will respond to common incidents is key. It’s a good idea to have procedural level “playbooks” (we used to just call these procedures, maybe I’m old!) but let’s get taktic00l and call them:
Playbooks/Runbooks/Aide-mémoire etc.
That aside (words are fun right!) they key part here is to identify the people, roles and responsibilities and the systems/actions/decisions you will need to take. To start with let’s look at a common incident of Phishing with credential harvesting, this may lead onto business email compromise (BEC) and attempted or successful fraud or downstream supply chain attacks.
Read more “Phishing (Cred harvester) Response”
Have you every tried to understand the risk level of a service? Ever wanted to provide assurance to someone that “it’s been well designed, is secure from common threats, likely risk scenarios and is securely operated” etc.? have you ever tried to conduct testing against a service that is relatively unknown? Ever needed to actually do more than throw some packets at the front door? Guess what, I have. Most orgs don’t have a decent level of documentation on service architecture and security controls. And as the NSA nicely put, the way they get into networks is to know them better than you do! So in my travels I see lots of different orgs and largely there’s one common similarity, most of them aren’t well documented (docs are boring right!) and if we then make another huge sweeping generalisation, about 90% of orgs have security postures you wouldn’t want to have to defend as a blue teamer, but you might fancy if you were a nation state actor or cyber criminal!
Read more “Service Security Architecture and Assurance”
Recently I was helping a friend out when they were being targeted by a criminal online. I thought I’d put some notes down to try and help people. This isn’t a “how to” it’s more like thoughts and ideas. It’s UK centric, but probably works in lots of places.
One thing to note, preparation is greater than response, the more prepared you are, the less vulnerable you may be, the more prepared the smaller the attack surface.
You may for a variety of reasons become under heightened threat from an internet perspective. The information on here is not a catch all, a detailed guide to personal (PERSEC) and operational security (OPSEC). Read more “What to do when you think you are being targeted in cyberspace”