cyber – Page 5 – PwnDefend

Living with your password strength head in the sand

Password audits, if you ask some security pros you will hear a million reasons why you would be insane to do them… ask me however and the answer is more nuanced. They are activities that must be handled with the upmost care, however…. they (in my experience) have been incredibly useful to help improve security postures and to enable organisations to understand risk! You are of course free to ignore what I think and live like an ostrich (or it really might not be suitable for your environment). I’m not going to talk about how to do a password audit today, I’m also not going to advise in this post on sourcing strategy (you may want to do in house or you might want to outsource, after all, you normally put all your hashes in someone else’s computer when you use cloud right!?), anyway enough rambling, year ago the NCSC UK did some password auditing research (it was good work – Spray you, spray me: defending against password spraying… – NCSC.GOV.UK) and now the DOI have also done similar, check out the report In the link below:

Strategy

When forming a strategy you must realise for starts that people view the word strategy differently. However, the general view is STRATEGY AS A PLAN. Without a PLAN a strategy is a DREAM.

The plan must be supported by a rang of factors, it must also be managed. It should be something which helps you go from where you are (CURRENT STATE) to where you want to be (FUTURE STATE) and should have a roadmap (TRANSITION PLAN/ROADMP) of how you will get there.

When we talk about can I see your strategy, you will need to have it documented, a strategy without a document isn’t a strategy that can be shared and communicated. As to what “THE STRATEGY” document must be… well there is no such thing as a MUST, but there’s some component that are largely and widely recognised to be useful.

Leadership

Cloud Adoption Security Review

Anyone that knows me, knows I love maturity assessments and tools (I’ve built a few, and run LOADS more) so this morning when I saw this on LinkedIn I had to start to get some understanding! I’ve not even had a cup of tea, but let’s see what this looks like!

Leadership

Current State Cyber Challenges and why communication is important

Currently I’d list some of the major challenges we face as a civilisation as the following (clearly not exhaustive etc.)

The general population largely don’t understand cyber
Lots of people think there is nothing they can really do
People have shockingly bad personal cyber security
A large number of organisations have shockingly poor cyber security postures
People’s passwords are often ridiculously weak
People re-use passwords all the time
People seem to believe we have “magic nation state cyber shields”
Organisation’s largely do not invest adequately in cyber security

News

Cyber News Today

Another day in the life o’cyber! There’s probably new exploits, new vulnerabilities, new updates and industry changes galore but here’s some highlights from the day!

Hacking

Office 365/Azure Pentest Tools

I’m not going to talk about these… yet… and there’s duplicates because I think it’s useful to see where they can be used in different scenarios. Expect this list to grow!

Defense

Defending Against Direct Authentication Attacks in Microsoft Office 365

Whilst conducting security testing and assurance activities, I went looking to show logon events in Office 365. My first query was on IdentityEvents, this led to a view of a multi month attack by a threat actor/s against a tenent, followed by exploring the rabbit hole of logs and computer systems. This blog summarises some of the methods and findings when considering threat hunting and authentication defences for Office 365. (bear with me I am tired so this might need a bit of a tune up later!)

Guides

Cyber Essentials for Ubuntu Servers

I thought about doing a step by step bash script or CLI walkthrough but decided to go with the high levels steps. If we wanted to ensure our Linux servers are configured in alignment with Cyber Essentials what are the main areas we need to consider? For this I’m using Ubuntu Server as a base, I’ve not gone through every line in the standard but these should be in line with the 5 areas and fit within the Cyber Essentials theme. As always there are many ways to skin a cat! (don’t skin cats they are frens!). Anyway hope this is useful.

Leadership

What is a “Winning Cyber Security Strategy”?

A winning cyber security strategy should have several key components.

First, it should involve a thorough assessment of your organization’s current security posture, including identifying any potential vulnerabilities or weaknesses. This assessment should be ongoing, with regular updates to ensure that your security measures are keeping pace with the evolving threat landscape.

Education

Enterprise Technology Generalisations

I’ve waked around one of two organisations, across a load of verticals and well I see people post things online about common technology generalisations and frankly it sometimes leaves me wondering what networks they have been in, but also am I just on another planet? So, I thought I would jot down some notes on common tech I see in orgs during my business travels but also on in the ciberz! It’s not a list of everything I see, it’s just what appears in my head as quite bloody common.