Defense
We looked after about 3-3500 endpoint devices. We were running Windows servers/clients and we leveraged technologies such as:
Defense
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.
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”
Defense
Ok so you might think I’m mad with the title but bear with me!
So, the world is in an interesting place, we’ve got a pandemic, we’ve got prolific cyber crime and we have all kinds of different views on how we should tackle this problem.
Now I love a framework and there’s ton’s of them. But the truth is they are complex, detailed, nuanced and generally require a level of nerd that a lot of organistaions do not have.
In 2020 during the pandemic I decided to try and write something to simplify this position, whilst I didn’t want to be too narrow, I wanted to try and capture the breadth of cyber security that is relevent to the general purpose organistaion. I came up with a set of 140 questions which I believe are a good take on things to consider and ask when conducting a security review at a high level. (yes 140 questions is a high level view, this stuff is complex as hell at the detailed end of things, and the devil is in the detail).
Read more “Cyber Security Assesments for Normal People”
Guides
I’ve worked in technology a long time now (relatively for me). It’s now over 20 years professionally and when I was a kid, I used to remove malware from small business’s etc. I’ve travelled to some funky places and done some cool things, but I learn new things every day. I do however come across some repeating patterns in my adventures as a consultant. There is a hidden truth that many are scared to admit…
Most organisations are not very good at service design, let alone secure service design!
Ok so there it is, I hope that this blog doesn’t age very well, but I’m 20 years in and I chat with my dad about his past life in the corporate world and we both see the same things being repeated. So, what can we do about it? Well sharing is caring, so here’s some things to think about when planning and designing a new service. I’m going to focus on the technology and security aspects, clearly, I am not saying ignore the business and value alignment but for the purposes of this post I’m assuming that the functional service capabilities and alignment are in effect. I’m also assuming that business case is solid because you know, without £ it’s a bit hard to create an operate a service (that’s a whole new post!). Read more “Secure Service Design: Practical Solution Architecture”
CTF
I rarely get a chance to play HTB these days 🙁 but today I thought i’d get back on it.. then I had a three hour battle with a graphics driver and Vmware Workstation so that basically ruined that idea…. but I thouht I’d try and remember how to CTF again.. and boy do you get slow fast! Well to try and help people and myself I’ve started to write down some notes to get my mind back into the CTF world of HTB!
Ok this is the setup phase. Let’s grab the details
Defense
If you read a book about management theory or specifically cyber security management you will find lots of frameworks, methods, formulas, models etc. None of them really let you know how insanely hard it can be to defend a moving target where regardless of how many controls you have, all it takes it someone doing something which may seem bonkers to you but perfectly reasonable for them. Their objective is to do business in an efficient manner, your objective is to protect the business in an efficient manner. Fundamentally these two things are not at odds, but there are a lot of human factors that come into play on top of some serious technical challenges. Read more “Cyber Defence is Hard”
Defense
When connecting to Exchange online (there was a reason I needed to do this) I had the following error:
I did some googling that luckily someone has already posted how to fix this:
It turns out WINRM’s ability to use BASIC client authentication is disabled as part of the standard Windows 10 hardening baseline deployed via Intune.
To fix these we need to re-enable BASIC client side WINRM authentication. Read more “Modern Workspace: PowerShell OAuth Error”
Guides
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!
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.
Read more “Becoming a Cyber Criminal (Pro) – Basic External Attacks”
Defense
On March 2nd, 2021 at ~6pm GMT Microsoft released an out of band update to all version of exchange from 2010 through to 2019. This was in response to a range of vulnerabilities which had been abused (a 0-day) by a threat actor (coined by MS as HAFNIUM).
For more info from MS please see the following:
https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/03/02/hafnium-targeting-exchange-servers/
Key CVES include:
CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065. Read more “Checking for Hafnium or other groups impact from Exchange Abuse”
Defense
It is a blur so far, I figured after the last place the grass would be greener, surely no one else has that many security challenges. I did some due diligence during the interview process, they seemed very confident about having certifications and that they took security seriously. hell, that should have set some red flags off but even the cynical sometimes hope that it is as someone says.
I have started to work myself around the board and I am making friends with people, my diary is filled with zoom calls and my notebook is already many pages deep.
You cannot make this stuff up though, day two and I’ve dealing with a business email compromise incident, the phishing page was not even in good English but then it only takes a second or so whilst in a meeting to not quite realise your running on autopilot so you cannot blame people. Hell, the branding was copied so we know it was a targeted phish. It would have been nice to at least had centralised logs for the team to analyse though. Read more “The grass is always greener, until it is not”