cyber – Page 2 – PwnDefend

The business ‘value’ of Cyber Investments

A massively common analogy I see in security is the idea that security is like paying for insurance incase something goes wrong. I think this is great if you have 3 seconds only to describe security, but that’s not really how I have conversations with people. A sound bite isn’t reality, and to be honest I personally find that rather meaningless. I also know that many people don’t like or even pay for a range of insurance so when we look at how we try and improve digital security from a whole of society perspective, I think this phrase doesn’t work, it’s too narrow…

Defence

What are the top Active Directory Security vulnerabilities I…

Ok so here’s the thing, I do NOT like getting pwn3d! I think you probably would rather your organisation does not too!

What I really don’t want to occur is a ransomware event! They suck, they are like a digital bomb going off.

So I’ve knocked up a quick list to get people thinking (these are NOT all the vulnerabilities I networks you should care about.. but they are some that could lead to a ransomware event!)

Threat Intel

Threat Analysis Tools

I’ve not blogged in a while, but I wanted to put down a note of some useful tools people can use to help them combat cyber crime.

This isn’t going to be an in depth look at each tool, however I do want to, in the near future, try and do some demos/videos etc. of how to investigate potential/suspected or identified threats. I’ll drop a list of some of the useful tools below and also do a quick demo of investigating an event (from this blog)

Education

Port Forwarding with WSL2

have you ever wanted to port forward from a Windows Host to a WSl2 KALI VM when you are using a NAT’d virtual switch configuraiton with WSL2?

Hacking

Stealthy Active Directory Username Enumeration with LDAPNomNom

My friend Lars and I were just talking about some of the research areas we are working on and randomly the conversation turned into “what shall we call it?” and then LDAPNomNom came up! So I whilst laughing (coz the name is lulz) with my buddy I downloaded and ran LDAPNomNom against a lab vm quickly! (Lars also fixed an error with readme.md that I pointed out coz my debug skillz ROCK! )

So here we have me doing username enumeration via LDAP Ping using LDAPNOMNOM!

Fiction

Caught: A Hacker Adventure

It was a dark and stormy night, and a lone figure sat hunched over their computer screen, typing away at lightning speed. This was no ordinary person – this was a hacker, one of the most skilled and dangerous in the world.

Education

Am I a criminal or am I a cybersecurity…

Whilst the common person will largely link the words “hacker/hackers” to criminal the reality is hackers are scientists/artists/creators/ComputerOperators and the choice of being a criminal or not is down to actions and consequences. So the debate about if you identify as “hacker” does that make you a criminal, well it’s nonsense isn’t it. I could call myself a pony but it won’t make me one, much like I could call myself a criminal and I could be entirely law abiding.

Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-39952 Fortinet Global Exposure

There appears to be a new RCE out for Fortinet devices as per this post (it’s against FortiNAC as far I am aware so this is probably a much smaller exposure footprint than all fortinet devices):

https://www.fortiguard.com/psirt/FG-IR-22-300

There’s also this in FortiWeb (and well they released 40 odd fixes to various bits)

https://www.fortiguard.com/psirt/FG-IR-21-186

When we consider security edge devices and the risks these may pose to organizations and society as a whole it’s important to understand that these are no trivial matter. These are “security” appliances that are there to protect your organizations, to provide remote access as well as protect network egress etc.

Fortinet are not the only vendor to suffer from these types of vulnerability (Remote Code Execution – RCE) however there do appear to have been quite a few of these when looking historically.

Guides

failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/wordpress

I was doing some WordPress foo on the site (I know right, shockingly I don’t want to hand craft a website and I’d rather be helping customers or really anything else really) and I came into this error when I was installing the wpforms plugins:

 file_put_contents(/var/www/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wpforms/cache/addons.json): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpforms-lite/src/Helpers/CacheBase.php on line 215

Education

How would I apply to the role of “Head…

I was pottering about (not like a wizard, more like a cold infected zombie!) and an email hit my mailbox with the “Head of Cyber Architecture” at BA. I have no intention of applying but I thought.. I wonder if this is a good exercise to show people how I would go about the exercise? Well to even begin this I need to write down some notes. So I guess here we go… how far I get into this “fantast football” style scenario who knows, but hopefully it will show some people how I might do things! First up let’s look at the raw requirement: