Cybercrime and data theft

During an incident it’s one of the first questions people ask, what did the attacker do? Did they steal any data? How did they do it?

All of which are typically rather difficult to answer in the first, probably week of an incident (incidents vary, sometimes it’s very obvious, other times you can’t be 100% sure on some details!)

But recently I’ve been talking lots about the way organisations communicate during incidents to their customers and the public etc. I’ve been explaining that the day 0 comms of ‘no data was stolen’ followed by a ‘lots of data was stolen’ in say day zero plus five… well it doesn’t help with my my trust in the victim organisation. Which to me, seems like an odd strategy for organisations to take. They have options:

What if breach communications were honest?

Armed with my trusty sidekick, this morning I thought I would see what an LLM would make if I asked it to create public comms for common cyber incidents…. for basically every scenario… it really wanted to tell everyone no data was accessed! Which is amazing, because in almost every incident I’ve seen: Data is accessed!

In a business email compromise (BEC) scenario…. the clue is in the name, it’s already a compromise of confidentiality!

Using cyber security investments as a business enabler

Making security both an organisational support capability but also enabling business is not easy. Lots of the security activity is for obvious reasons not totally transparent. However one thing I want to show people is how you might want to tell existing and prospective customers about the way you approach security within your organisation. One way to do this is to show people how you align to the NCSC 14 Cloud Security Provider Principles.

Cyber Leadership – Real Life Incidents over the years!

Introduction

I’ve been around a bit now, I started ‘playing’ with technology very young as a kid! Wolf 3D/Doom era etc (ok even before that but whatever) …

In my professional career I’ve worked with literally hundreds of companies, from mega to small, from household names that sell games consoles through to orgs that sell you yummy food! I’ve worked across loads of industries from government through to manufacturing. I’ve dealt with major incidents for the finance sector, healthcare but also, I’ve been inside a range of networks for some time.

OMG The Cyber SKY is falling down!

Ok a bit dramatic, but that’s often what you might feel if you spend lots of time in the vulnerability space (which if you work in cyber security.. you probably do!). We often hear about the NEXT: STUXNET, HEARTBLEED, WANNACRY/ETERNAL BLUE, LOG4J etc. but actually when it comes to it… the number of times we have word endangering unauthenticated remote code execution that is a danger to global society is far less than when we have other vulnerabilities. It’s the exception not the rule.

The business ‘value’ of Cyber Investments

A massively common analogy I see in security is the idea that security is like paying for insurance incase something goes wrong. I think this is great if you have 3 seconds only to describe security, but that’s not really how I have conversations with people. A sound bite isn’t reality, and to be honest I personally find that rather meaningless. I also know that many people don’t like or even pay for a range of insurance so when we look at how we try and improve digital security from a whole of society perspective, I think this phrase doesn’t work, it’s too narrow…

Adopting an Attacker Mindset to Defend Healthcare

This post started as a reply to a great topic on LinkedIn, but I hit the character limit so now it’s a blog post!

Years ago I simulated attacks (authorized obviously for the people that have wild imaginations) on a customer which included a physical attack where I walked into a healthcare organization, armed with a suit a smile (and a USB key) I needed to gain access and attempt to move laterally and escalate privileges.

Why is security so hard?

It requires being thorough.
It required documenting things.
It requires conducting training and drills.
It adds what can be viewed as additional effort/cost to the primary goals (sell widgets/services/time)
It involves weird and wonderful ways of abusing functionality that is not always apparent or expected, thus to the typical consumers/user of a service, the idea that it might be abused actually seems very unlikely (to a criminal or security pro, the idea it will be abused seems far more likely based on threat intelligence etc.)

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) & Cyber Essentials

Do you have a VDI solution in use at your business? Be that something like CITRIX, VMware View or Remote Desktop Services (VDI mode or Server Based Computing SBC) mode?

Well let’s consider this with regard to cyber essentials.

In a recent update post:

The January changes to the Cyber Essentials scheme reflect the changing cyber threats in today’s digital environment – Iasme

Technology in the Wild

Whilst every marketing person will talk about the latest and greatest tech innovation and product, how much does that reflect the reality of technology deployed in the world? Everyone is running Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 right?! They also don’t use computers, because everything is cloud and mobile first right! and security, well everyone has that down as well! Great… let’s just go and check those statements out… oh wait…. no maybe err.. let’s take a look with our friends at shodan.io