Security Myths and Bad Advice

It must be good, someone posted about it on LinkedIn!

Ok this isn’t my normal jam, normally I’d just write something that’s hopefully good advice/practise and that would be that. But today let’s try something different!

This was inspired by a twitter convo which evolved into this: https://twitter.com/UK_Daniel_Card/status/1522138771789123584?s=20&t=dL9OkicTY2Orj5hfBtDvVQ

So… what are some cyber security myths that ended up being good practise or “good advice”? Well here’s what I came up with, supported by some awesome cyber community people!

Education

Real World Consumer Cyber Security

Cyber in the Consumer World

My focus normally is on business to business (B2B) environments and “Enterprise” computing and cyber security. However, I’ve been known to venture into the consumer world from time to time. I wondered whether people would be interested in exploring with me what cyber security in the consumer world look like?

Last week I set on an adventure to see what “hacking” myself might look like. I’m thinking that there might be more to this than a fleeting glance at Instagram hacking and a bit of fun on twitter with alts. Maybe we need to look at consumer security and how/if we have got a good user experience in this space?

Leadership

Cyber Events vs Incident vs Attack

Cyber Events

Yesterday I was asked about “attack volumes” I see in the PwnDefend HoneyNet and it reminded me about what people think an “ATTACK” is and therefore spring my brain into thinking about how we as an industry communicate. Far too often I see “number of ATTACKS” being used my marketing/sales etc. where the numbers are simply ridiculous and not reflective of how offensive cyber operations actually work.

Let’s look at some examples:

“Gov. Greg Abbott warns Texas agencies seeing 10,000 attempted cyber attacks per minute from Iran”
Gov. Greg Abbott – article in the Texas Tribune by CASSANDRA POLLOCK

Leadership

Why do “we” suck so badly at digital security…

Everything is fine until it’s not

I’ve been travelling to different organisations and visiting different networks for a while and whilst each organisation is unique (they really are) their operating models, technology challenges and weak security postures generally aren’t as unique as the organisational itself.

One thing that does spring to mind however is that there is a massively common pattern we find with organisations.

Those that invest well have better postures, better technology experiences and an improved security posture.
Those that don’t historically invest well, well they have quite the opposite:
- They don’t train staff
- They have very weak postures
- They carry an extraordinary volume of business risk

One thing that is common though, is that all of this tends to link to financial investments, so executives and boards usually have some idea if they are spending or not in this space, what they commonly don’t have a good view on is they getting what they “thought they were buying”. Sadly, too often what they assumed was “in the box” with the “IT provision” with regards to quality and cyber security just simply isn’t the case. Everything is fine, until you look… then it’s less than fine! So, what can we do about it?

Defense

CVE-2022-26809 – Critical Windows RPC Vulnerability

Vulnerability Information

Rating	Critical
CVE	cve-2022-26809
MITRE	CVE – CVE-2022-26809 (mitre.org)
CVSS	CVSS:3.1 9.8
Impact	Remote Code Execution (RCE)
Exploit in the wild	Currently not observed
Difficulty to Exploit (if PoC available)	Very Low
Network Position	TCP/IP Routable or Network Adjacent
Authentication Required to Exploit	No
Affected	Windows Client/Server OS
Typical Service Ports	TCP 135,139,445
Vendor Patch Available	Yes
Exploitable in Default OOB (out of the box) configuration	Unknown
Exploitable Client/Server	Believed to be client and server side exploitable

Leadership

Cyber Realities: Impacts of Cyber to Business

Introduction

This post stated out as a technical post about commonalities found in the field that vary based on business operating model, IT capability and vectors used by threat actors. Whilst writing this it led more into business leadership, governance and investment risks. How do these two subjects’ interface? Well to be honest they are the same thing from a different lens.

In this post we are going to look at:

Common Technology Deployment Models and the associated threats/risks/vulnerabilities
Common challenges I find in organisations
And finally, a question… is this the business outcome that you want

Guides

CISO – Getting Started Tool

Ok so this isn’t just for CISO’s but it’s a tool to help organisations think more holistically about cyber security and some of the foundational elements required to align cyber security capabilities with the business.

Architecture

The difference between what can be vs what often…

I’ve travelled all over the internet, I’ve worked with logs of organisations from banks through to small ISVs and one thing I would say is fairly universally true. What can be isn’t what is.

There’s a lot of different operating models and technologies in the world. There’s logs of differen’t specifics. This diagram here is not mean’t as a refrence architecture but more as an indicator.

There is also a massive reality people must understand, cyber good most definatley costs more at the point of deployment than cyber bad. Cyber bad’s ROI is truly variable and in mind mind is too hard to measure. For one org with cyber bad can experiance a significant breach (and cost) and another may have lady luck on their side.

Defense

Log4Shell exploitation and hunting on VMware Horizon (CVE-2021-44228)

TLDR

Go and run this on the connection servers:

https://github.com/mr-r3b00t/CVE-2021-44228

It’s crude so also look for the modified timestamps, recent unexpected blast service restarts and if you have process logging go and check for suspicious child processes over the period. Once you have checked, run a backup, then if they aren’t patched, patch the servers! (i know patching isn’t as simple as just patch!)

Defense

I’m the CEO, why should I care about Cyber…

Introduction

First and foremost, I’m going to start by saying if I include any cliché quotes it’s probably in an ironic context or used to show how they aren’t practically useful. Why are we here? Well, based on the title, it’s because you are either a CEO/MD or you are in a leadership position and want to learn a little more about cyber security.

I’m sure you have read the news, I’m sure you have seen vendor adverts explaining something like:

Zero Trust
The Security Skills Gap
How phishing can be solved through security awareness training (pro tip: it can’t)

And I’m sure someone on your LinkedIn feed you have seen people exclaim all kinds of crazy things like:

TLS Weaknesses Lead to Ransomware
Security is Simple (it, I’m afraid, is not)
Managed Security Service Providers ensure security