Cyber Security Tips – Keeping your digital self, safe!

Not even most of my digital life is in the enterprise security space, whilst this is great if you have access to technology budgets, security specialists and modern business class solutions, this doesn’t really fit into the general populations landscape of technology. I thought I’d take a high-level exploration of what digital security looks for people who aren’t security nerds! This is a bit of an experiment for me as it’s a journey into a world where although some things apply to me (obviously I’m human), some of this from a thinking/blogging point of view aren’t my comfort space. So, let’s see what a world outside of being a nerd look like!

Commons Risks

I’m thinking the risk landscape is still broad however when we think about risks, I reckon a general view model may look at some of the following scenarios:

Fraud/Scams
Sextortion
Phishing
Social Media Account Takeover
Device Theft
Device Loss
Equipment Failure/Data Loss
Threat from known individuals with physical access
Human Error

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” →

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?” →

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)” →

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” →

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!

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” →

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!)

What if not everyone is a cyber expert?

Developing a Cyber Roadmap

Ok so this topic comes up a fair bit, but organisations and their management are often looking to ensure they are doing the right thing (no really this is a common phrase I hear with organisations) with regard to cyber security. THe challenge I think quite a few people have is even understanding what that even means. Sure you have a firewall, and antivirus and you had a yearly peneration test of a site that isn’t even touching your corproate network. You thought you were fine, but you keep seeing organisations get ransomared in the news and the board keep asking “are we ok?” so this then leads to a common position of maybe buying more widgets or thinking, well we haven’t been “hacked” so we must be doing ok.

Vulnerability Management – Actually doing it!

Vulnerability Management, Assessments and Vulnerability scanning is sometimes treated a with distain in the Offensive security community, I personally don’t understand that. Vulnerability management is key to inputting into security strategy, architecture, and operations. It’s coupled heavily to many other processes such as:

Asset Management
Risk Management
Patch Management
Change & Release Management
Security Testing
Security Monitoring

Before we start deploying let’s think about some areas for consideration when performing vulnerability scans:

Scope
- Asset/Hosts
  - IP Ranges
  - Hostnames
- Connectivity
  - VPNs
  - LAN/WAN
- Device Types and Configuration
  - Domain
  - Workgroup
  - Appliance
  - ICS
  - Printers
  - Network Equipment
- Unauthenticated View
- Authenticated View
  - Auth Types
  - Protocols
- Scheduling
- Authority to execute
Impact
- Performance
- Availability
- Confidentiality
Objectives and Outcomes
Reporting
- Information Flow
- Report Storage and Confidentiality