Leadership
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:
Read more “Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) & Cyber Essentials”
Guides
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”
Guides
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”
Leadership
I’ve been conducting sales and assurance-based activities for some while (I’m not counting it will make me feel old!) and I have started looked at a range of supplier management tools which leverage tool-based OSINT, attack surface mapping and manual data inputs and I have to say this:
Guides
Ok, another post on cyber essentials! I talk about this quite a lot (mainly driven by procurement requirements rather than orgs expressing a deep desire to “have better security” (which is a shame)) however, I want to show people what the real world is like and that meeting cyber essentials is a good thing, but also to look at real world challenges of meeting the standards. In this post we look at some thought provoking questions, then we look at an out of the box Windows and MAC device to see if they meet the standard!
Read more “Cyber Essentials – Out of the Box”
Defense
“Can I have a penetration test please” is about in line with saying “Can I have a car please?”. Why am I writing a blog about this? Well, where do I start, so I have been working on the technology world basically all my career and over the last 20 odd years one area of digital security management that I think a lot of organisations and people struggle with is understanding just what a penetration test is, how it should be used, how long they can take and what is involved. Read more “Understanding Penetration Testing Scopes”
Defense
We often talk about not selling using fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). It is quite a big thing in the cyber security industry where the entire purpose of existence is to help people and organisations manage risk to prevent, detect and respond to impact to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. A key foundational component is that we operate using science, trust, and integrity.
This does however become quite interesting when you look at some rather dubious sales and marketing techniques employed by a few.
What I have noticed are there are a range of patterns that are similar (it is like they all went on the same con artist course!) so I thought I would look at some of the indicators I see which bring up flags to me. Read more “Snake Oil Defence: Defending against lies and false claims”