Leadership

Cyber Leadership

Myth: you must be a “techie” to lead in the CYBERS

Ok so you might be sitting here going… but Dan you send pews and do “techy” stuff… do you not lead? Well, I mean I do all kinds of things, I write business cases, I play with spreadsheets (fun right!), I integrate systems and look at data and sometimes write really bad code! (hey, the pews aren’t going to send themselves!) but… I want to talk about some realities here.

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Defence

CVE-2022-22972 & CVE-2022-22973

More VMware Workspace One Vulns

This is a fast publish

Vmware just released patches for two new vulnerabilities in Workspace One, followed by guidance from CISA to patch by May 23rd or remove the devices from the network/internet!

“All Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies must complete the following actions:

By 5:00 PM EDT on Monday, May 23, 2022:

Enumerate all instances of impacted VMware products [VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager] on agency networks.

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Education

The CYBER GANG Cookbook

Volume 1

Introduction

I am sitting here, and I need another cup of tea, but I thought I’d start to have a think about what common “CYBER GANGS” look like. This isn’t criminal or non-criminal. But you know there’s some commonality between both. I thought this was fun little thinking exercise to show the duality of life, what digital worlds look like but also to give a glimpse into the mysteryious (its not!) world of cyberz (including crime!)

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Defence

The Director of GCHQ speaks at CyberUK 2022

Sir Jeremy Fleming was speaking at CyberUK, the UK’s flagship cyber security conference this week.

The full presentation is here but I’ve picked out some key highlights.

“Of course, we can count ourselves lucky compared to those caught up in wars, but we are also seeing a heightened cyber risk. Cyber criminals are consistently evolving their tactics; the lines are blurring with hostile state activity and ransomware remains a real threat.”

“Cyber clearly matters to everyone.”

“At the global level, the UK has developed as a cyber power. Alongside the more traditional forms of diplomacy and statecraft, cyber now plays a vital role in our national security and prosperity.”

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Leadership

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!

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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?

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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
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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?

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Defense

CVE-2022-26809 – Critical Windows RPC Vulnerability

Vulnerability Information

RatingCritical
CVEcve-2022-26809
MITRECVE – CVE-2022-26809 (mitre.org)
CVSSCVSS:3.1 9.8
ImpactRemote Code Execution (RCE)
Exploit in the wildCurrently not observed
Difficulty to Exploit (if PoC available)Very Low
Network PositionTCP/IP Routable or Network Adjacent
Authentication Required to ExploitNo
AffectedWindows Client/Server OS
Typical Service PortsTCP 135,139,445
Vendor Patch AvailableYes
Exploitable in Default OOB (out of the box) configurationUnknown
Exploitable Client/ServerBelieved to be client and server side exploitable
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