cyber – PwnDefend

The danger of internet exposed RDP

There’s lots of things in cyber security to consider when looking at how to defend a network, and whilst the world goes mad about public wifi and juice jacking, the real threats are often far simpler. Imagine having say an Active Directory domain member, or even controller exposed to the internet with Remote Desktop Protocol? Might sound insane but this is a common route for entry for ransomware actors.

Threat Intel

Fortiweb – CVE-2025-64446

Another day another exploit in the wild it seems! (ok I’m a bit slow to this one). Using Defused Cyber’s Honeypots we have another packet to analyse:

Vulnerabilities

Fortiweb Vulnerabilities 2025

Given the recent discovery of a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-64446) in the Fortiweb appliances (exploitable via the management interfaces) I thought I would have a look at what other vulnerabilities have been discovered/published and what Proof of Concept (PoC) exploits exist in 2025.

Threat Intel

Analysing 1 Million Honeypot events with Defused Cyber Deception

A common perimeter firewall in organisations is the CISCO ASA. Back when I started in the industry we used to have CISCO PIX firewalls, the ASA was the next generation of these! Why is this important? Well its important to understand how common threat actors work, you will see from a while ago I wrote a review of the manual 2.0 by Bassterlord (a known cybercriminal), this is to help understand how attackers work, what real world cybercrime looks like so that we can enable people to help defend against these threats.

Defense

Suspected Fortinet Zero Day Exploited in the Wild

This weeks been an interesting one, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research recently with my friend Simo from Defused defusedcyber.com. Simo has built a new emulated honeypot platform, and anyone that know’s me knows I love honeypots, deception and intel sharing to help defenders and to impose cost on the baddies! (technical terms here ok!)

Education

Windows Defender at my tunnel

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).

Breach

Ransomware kill chains are boring.. will we ever learn?

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.

Threat Intel

Shiny Hunters / Scattered Spider Alleged Victims

Shiny Hunters/Scattered spider have published a leaked download site (DLS)/extortion site etc.
This is a fast publish with content mainly generated using an LLM (GROK). This appears to relate to victims who have been victims of social engineering, it does not appear to be related to the Salesforce, SalesLoft Drift breach: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=005134951&type=1

Education

Why a SOC Without Triage, Analysis, and Remediation Is…

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.

News

Japan goes on the Cyber Offensive

Ok with my AI companion GROK I’ve gone exploring on the differences between Japan’s new cyber laws and the UK! This is more GROK than me, but I thought people might find this interesting!