Education
I was doing some testing with Cloudflare tunnels this weekend and I woke up this morning to see if funny honeypot messages I had, I quickly checked if the site was online and found a cloudflare error message. This is a just an IIS instance running on a windows 11 PC (with no WIFI or Bluetooth) plugged into a test network (so if it gets pwn3d, it’s not going to impact anything important).
Read more “Windows Defender at my tunnel”
Breach
Are we stuck in a cyber world that never learns? are we doomed to suffer the same fate over and over again? Well, not if you take action, you can totally prevent events like this!
This is a fast post using an LLM to analyse the Capita redacted ICO report. Hopefully it will help people think about things and take the lessons and apply them in their own organisations.
Read more “Ransomware kill chains are boring.. will we ever learn?”
Education
“Juice jacking” has become a modern cybersecurity myth — a catchy scare story built on a long-patched Android debugging issue and fueled by viral fear rather than facts. Despite years of warnings, there are no confirmed cases of real-world juice jacking attacks; the cost, effort, and low reward make it an impractical method for criminals. Yet the myth persists because it’s vivid, simple, and scary — everything our brains latch onto. The real danger is not the USB port at the airport, but the distraction such myths create. When people focus on imaginary threats, they waste precious attention that should go toward genuine risks like weak passwords, missing MFA, unpatched systems, and poor backups. So let’s take a bit of a deeper dive into this subject, because by it’s important to understand what to, and what not to focus on in my experience!
Read more “A threat to sanity – Cyber Myth: Juice Jacking”
News
Firewalls are often both a defended gate but also the front door to access corporate network. That is all lovely until it’s not! You see so many corporate network intrusion incidents occur from threat actors simply logging into the VPN (due to lack of VPN), and then we have the software vulnerabilities where they shell their way in, but did you think that another way could be from stealing all the backups from a ‘security’ provider? Well now you might! There’s been bit of an incident (one that started as it’s only 5% of customers but actually it was 100% of customers who used the backup feature! YIKES), but before that let’s look at the typical landscape!
Read more “‘Secure’ Firewall backups, until they are not!”
Education
In the world of cybersecurity, the term Security Operations Center (SOC) carries significant weight. It evokes images of highly skilled analysts working around the clock to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats. However, not all SOCs live up to this expectation. If a SOC lacks core functions like triage, analysis, assessment, and remedial action, it’s not truly a SOC—it’s merely a contact center masquerading as one. Let’s explore why these functions are non-negotiable for a SOC and why their absence undermines the entire purpose of cybersecurity operations.
Read more “Why a SOC Without Triage, Analysis, and Remediation Is Just a Contact Center”
Defence
If you are are a victim of unauthorised mailbox access and/or attempted fraud via mailbox compromise (BEC) then you know that one of the tasks outside of understanding how the compromise has occurred, what configurations have been tampered with, removing devices and resetting usernames/passwords (and tokens/MFA) etc. is to start to understand the data breach impact.
If someone has logged into a mailbox it’s very very unlikely that zero data has been accessed!
Leadership
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:
Read more “Cybercrime and data theft”
Threat Intel
Defending against different skilled threat classes is an important thing to consider when you are planning, designing and operating a business. I’ve used GROK (AI) to create an html page which has both information on the kill chains, but also looks at countermeasures. I’m experimenting lots with VIBE coding and LLM assisted content generation so hopefully this proves useful. I do feel it needs a more human touch added as well… but let’s see! life without experimentation would be dull would it not!
Read more “Defending Against Scattered Spider”
AI
Ok, it’s late, and well I wanted to look into cyber attacks where social engineering is a key component combined with technical hacking skills.
There’s been a growing number of these style events, so I tasked GROK to create an assessment for me, let’s see how it did! Let’s both try and answer the questions:
Can GROK replace intelligence officers and can GROK help us defend better against social engineering + technical attacks? What do you think? (please take all of this with a pinch of salt… LLMs are known to make mistakes/hallucinate/lie in a very convincing manner)….
they look nice…. but looks can as we know, be deceiving! (is the entire blog just a social engineering experiment by me?)
Read more “Can AI replace intelligence analysts?”
Defense
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.
Read more “Minimum Data Requirements for Investigating Email Mailbox Compromise”