News
According to the Belfast Telegraph:
The Incident is reported by them as “RANSOMWARE” and features Lockbit (Lockbit is RaaS, they recently (end of 2022 lost their ransomware payload builder) so the use of Lockbit software and the fact Lockbit is RaaS means this doesn’t prove attribution). (Attribution is hard, for most people what matters is their own network security posture, rather than who pwn3d royal mail)
Read more “Royal Mail Cyber Incident”
Threat Intel
breaking news: Royal mails international tracking services are down and have been for > 24 hours:
The ICO have been contacted! The NCSC and NCA have been contacted! What should you do?
Read more “Royal Mail Cyber Attack! What should you do?”
Defense
Whilst conducting security testing and assurance activities, I went looking to show logon events in Office 365. My first query was on IdentityEvents, this led to a view of a multi month attack by a threat actor/s against a tenent, followed by exploring the rabbit hole of logs and computer systems. This blog summarises some of the methods and findings when considering threat hunting and authentication defences for Office 365. (bear with me I am tired so this might need a bit of a tune up later!)
Read more “Defending Against Direct Authentication Attacks in Microsoft Office 365”
Leadership
I’ve been working with all kinds of different organisations over the years, and I keep running into similar scenarios. The current state of the majority of organisations security postures are simply (as a broad-brush statement) far riskier than they need to be.
Conversely there are a range of common challenges I find in almost every org:
Read more “The Cyber Acid Test”
Threat Intel
When an organisation suffers a data breach it’s usually bad. When an organisation that stores 25 million people’s passwords that’s really bad.
There are multiple risks here at play.
Firstly, when we give people our data, it’s our risk and our choice. I’m ok with that, I chose to give lastPass my data.
My vault data might be gone, but I have a strong master password, how we interpreted the theft of the basically cryptographic materials is a bit like when we full disk encrypt a drive.
If you lose a laptop that’s got FDE do you report this as a data loss to the ICO? Or do you say, it’s encrypted so actually I haven’t lost the data per say, I’ve just lost a random (ish) bunch of 0s an 1s so I don’t count that as an incident? I’m not here to be judge or jury.
Read more “LastPass Breach – The danger of metadata”
Defence
Everyone has a plan until they are cyber punched in the face! Or something like that!
People seem to have this misconception that you need to “do a pentest” or some other project based activity to do “security testing” or response planning.
Let’s be real here, you really don’t. But what you do need is a few things:
Education
I’ve waked around one of two organisations, across a load of verticals and well I see people post things online about common technology generalisations and frankly it sometimes leaves me wondering what networks they have been in, but also am I just on another planet? So, I thought I would jot down some notes on common tech I see in orgs during my business travels but also on in the ciberz! It’s not a list of everything I see, it’s just what appears in my head as quite bloody common.
Read more “Enterprise Technology Generalisations”
Leadership
A mRr3b00t Adventure
Join me on an adventure of rambling and exploring the idea that you can in fact not lose the security leadership game! This blog is WIP, it’s just my brain wondering around the question of: can we win the in the face of a seemingly insurmountable force? What do we do as a security leader to protect ourselves and the organisation? How do we start?
Read more “How to not lose your job as a CISO”
Leadership
I am seeing lots of “debate” about the value in red teaming, so I thought I would put together my thought process of how I look at as a broad stroke when I consider a generic starting position in an organisation. When I’m defending a business, I tend to ask myself (and the team/customers etc.) these kind of questions (they are not exhaustive):
Read more “Red Team Readiness Assessment”
Education
I wrote this in 2018 and don’t believe it ever made it to the interwebs, so I’m basically posting as is with an extra section for some useful links! Hopefully it still stands the test of time!
Risk assessments are complex, they require cross domain knowledge and generally do not deal in absolutes. Threats, vulnerabilities and asset intelligence is combined, weighed and assessed, leading to the construct of a risk assessment document. It can be easy to overcomplicate this process, which in turn (in my experience) often leads to far wider reaching consequences (the business starts to bypass security management or take short cuts), so I thought I would write a short post to clarify what I’ve seen work out in the field. So, to start with let’s try and align on what exactly a risk is.
Read more “Information Security Risk Management “