Leadership

It’s 2023 and people’s passwords are still really really…

If you work in marketing you are probably walking around telling everyone that we all live in a ZERO trust era, that PASSWORDS are DEAD! Ransomware is DEAD and AI is the FUTURE and we should be doing that NOW!

Meanwhile back on CYBER PLANET EARTH, most organisation do NOT have or need AI, they use passwords and well they passwords they use are shockingly bad! Howe do I know this? I do password audits and security testing, but I also look at breach data! (and we have other people publish password audit reports etc.)

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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
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News

Royal Mail Cyber Incident

According to the Belfast Telegraph:

Royal Mail operations hub in Mallusk hit by ‘cyber attack’ as printer spurts out ransom demands – BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

The Incident is reported by them as “RANSOMWARE” and features Lockbit (Lockbit is RaaS, they recently (end of 2022 lost their ransomware payload builder) so the use of Lockbit software and the fact Lockbit is RaaS means this doesn’t prove attribution). (Attribution is hard, for most people what matters is their own network security posture, rather than who pwn3d royal mail)

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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!)

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Leadership

The Cyber Acid Test

I’ve been working with all kinds of different organisations over the years, and I keep running into similar scenarios.  The current state of the majority of organisations security postures are simply (as a broad-brush statement) far riskier than they need to be.

Conversely there are a range of common challenges I find in almost every org:

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Threat Intel

LastPass Breach – The danger of metadata

When an organisation suffers a data breach it’s usually bad. When an organisation that stores 25 million people’s passwords that’s really bad.

There are multiple risks here at play.

Firstly, when we give people our data, it’s our risk and our choice. I’m ok with that, I chose to give lastPass my data.

My vault data might be gone, but I have a strong master password, how we interpreted the theft of the basically cryptographic materials is a bit like when we full disk encrypt a drive.

If you lose a laptop that’s got FDE do you report this as a data loss to the ICO? Or do you say, it’s encrypted so actually I haven’t lost the data per say, I’ve just lost a random (ish) bunch of 0s an 1s so I don’t count that as an incident? I’m not here to be judge or jury.

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