The problem with gatekeeping in the cyber security industry

Stark Realities

Imagine having an industry where you can’t be in it without already being an expert in all fields, imagine having to be able to command policy and drive strategy but not having anyone having ever helped you learn how to do this, imagine that if you did all the activities involved with secure service and yet people say you aren’t part of the industry because your job title doesn’t have the word “security” in it and imagine if that you are told you aren’t part of the cyber security industry because you also have to worry about budgets, sales, marketing, new business initiatives, IT services and well anything else!

What would happen if we had this as our cyber security industry principles… well that’s simple?

Defense

Ransomware Defence Checklist – Part 1 : Initial Access

Defending the Realm

We keep seeing organization get hit, in some kind of a sick way I think me and some of my friends in the industry are bored with the over dramatic responses of “sophisticated” “advanced” and “unpreventable” because most times the kill chains simply are not like this. But still the onslaught keeps coming. Well I know this much, whilst I would love to deploy with the team and harden everyone’s networks that simply isn’t possible. So what we thought we would do is write something to try and spread the knowledge a bit further and hopefully have some positive impact.

Ransomware 101

It’s not just that your data will be encrypted, it will likely be exfiltrated and sold. You will likely have access sold, data sold and be extorted. The Ransomware business model is adapting to defender responses. Even if you can restore from backup they will likely try and attempt to extort. This brings a key point in this equation, the best position is to NOT get pwn3d to start with. Ok that might sound silly to say but when we look at these kill chains you might start to see the world from my perspective a little. Read more “Ransomware Defence Checklist – Part 1 : Initial Access” →

Guides

Becoming a Cyber Criminal (Pro) – Basic External Attacks

This is an experiment to combine a near real time thread on twitter and a blog… I have no idea if this will work. The premise is, we are conducting a adversary simulation against a target and want to see how this translates into a ‘plain language’ blog/story about how these things work. (I’ve also not included sales/scoping/documentaiton and clearly not all of this is in real time) but it is real!

The Fundamental Steps

Ok so first thing is first – the criminal part is a joke! We are here to help people. What we are going to do however is consider the general cyber threat landscape, look at the organisation from an ‘external threat actor’ perspective and then see what we can map out from an attack surface point of view.

Defense

WordPress Security Considerations

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems in the world today. I believe it is about 35% of the market share globally. That is a lot of sites.

I have been using WordPress for years myself; some people give it some stick for being vulnerable but that is usually them referring to third party plugins. I like it because you can build a site easily, without having to spend ages and you can deploy it and migrate etc. without having a huge headache. Read more “WordPress Security Considerations” →

Defense

Aggressively Defending Information Systems

Taking a more active approach

You may have seen my post on hacking back and how it’s a nightmare that screams inexperience when I hear it (don’t get me wrong there are very limited times when it might be useful from a national defence perspective/intelligence services but that isn’t really ‘hacking back’ in my book, they are already working that space so it’s not a retaliation) however I’ve been spurred on this morning by a tweet I saw from @1njection:

After tweeting a quick reply, I thought I had put together a quick blog on aggressive active defences! (not wordy much). Read more “Aggressively Defending Information Systems” →

Breach

Extortion and Ransomware – A lethal Combination

A Brief History of Ransomware

Ransomware is not that new, I remember back during the msblaster incident I said to a friend, it is a good job whoever wrote this worm was not evil because they would have simply encrypted or deleted all the data post infection. Hell, I can barely remember when that was, I think it was late 2003. Ransomware has been around since the 1980s but not quite in its modern form (it started with the AIDS malware scam). Fast forward to the mid 2000’s and criminals were using encryption but that wasn’t a norm and things only really started to take a bad turn around 2012/2013 with Cryptolocker. The next major global events were WannaCry, NotPetya and Badrabbit. Read more “Extortion and Ransomware – A lethal Combination” →

Defense

Make Logging Great Again (MLGA)

Ok so i’ve been showing how alot of things do NOT get audited in Windows out of the box (on Twitter obviously) so I thought I’d export the CSV which you can import to enable some of the advanced logging features into a GPO without so many clicks (RSA sucks!)

So here is a CSV file that you can use to import! this isn’t everything you need to do, but it’s a start!

Defense

Things to do before you conduct a ‘red team’…

Introduction

‘Red Teaming’ the latest phrase in the cyber security world that brings a shudder down my spine! Now don’t get me wrong, adversary simulation is awesome, it’s a great tool and when wielded correctly brings massive value to enhancing your security posture… but alas, they aren’t always deployed in a business aligned and value driven position.

They sound ‘sexy’ and any pentester is going to jump at the chance to do one, let alone the sales and marketing teams will be grinning as they will come in with higher revenue but also will increase their case study portfolio for delivered red teams! (I’m not knocking this, it’s the reality of doing business).

Having witnessed a number of these take place against organizations who I don’t feel are ready for them, I thought I would write a piece on things I would recommend having in place before conducting a ‘red team’ assessment. Read more “Things to do before you conduct a ‘red team’ assessment” →