No one is responsible for your OWN Cyber Defences…

Introduction

I talk to hundreds or maybe even thousands of people online. I work in the Cyber security industry, I worked previously with central government, local authorities, finance, third sector, healthcare, defence and well most verticals of business. I often see people comment online about how “GCHQ has failed” or some other silly nonsense when it comes to an organisation (not GCHQ) being victim to a cyber incident.

I fear the world has watched a few too many Bond and Bourne films and let’s their imaginations run wild! The true reality of defending cyberspace is frankly vastly different to what I think people believe it is.

Hacking

The Manual Version 2.0

Working in Cyber security can expose you to all kinds of information. I’m an offensive and defensive security architect and occasional (haha that’s daily right!) pew pew slinger (pentester) and I am also a threat intelligence practioner (CTI) (we need The Many Hats Club back!). Which is why sometimes when things appear on the internet I think I decide to take a look.

Education

Cyber Security for PC Gamers

Introduction

The other day there was a lot of focus on “ATLASOS” a rather oddly branded project, just to be clear:

ATLASOS is NOT AN Operating System (OS) (despite it’s name!)

ATLASOS (at the time of writing) disables basically the majority of Windows Security features including:

Defender
Smart Screen
Windows Update
Spectre/Meltdown Mitigations

Basically, if you can think of “nightmare” in the cyber world, ATLASOS’s security posture is basically that (in my opinion)! That said, it’s cool from a nerd Windows customization/build pov, however based on my initial investigations I would strong recommend NOT using it on a “PRODUCTION” system (or anything that’s connected to the internet!).

Education

Active Directory Attacks – “It’s cold out here”

Scenario

In this scenario it is assumed you do not have credentials, but you do have either adjacent or routable access to an Active Directory Domain Controller and can access common ports/services such as: LDAP, LDAPS, SMB, NETBIOS, KERBEROS, DNS

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?

Vulnerabilities

Microsoft Outlook Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397)

Regarding: CVE-2023-23397

This is a fast publish, use at own risk.

See guidance from Microsoft: CVE-2023-23397 – Security Update Guide – Microsoft – Microsoft Outlook Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability

If you need to mitigate the latest Outlook vulnerability which abuses an SMB/WebDav call using the Calendar invite feature you can consider the following:

Leadership

Adopting an Attacker Mindset to Defend Healthcare

This post started as a reply to a great topic on LinkedIn, but I hit the character limit so now it’s a blog post!

Years ago I simulated attacks (authorized obviously for the people that have wild imaginations) on a customer which included a physical attack where I walked into a healthcare organization, armed with a suit a smile (and a USB key) I needed to gain access and attempt to move laterally and escalate privileges.

Hacking

Active Directory Security Cheat Sheet

Ok you need to do some AD Security Auditing or Security Testing/Exploitation, great. Let’s look at some of the common misconfigurations and some tools to help you, a list of things will obviously not be the answer, you will need a method and process to go through from recon/enumeration through to exploitation and impact (effects), but that’s what google is for (and CTFs/Labs)! This post is just me jotting down some notes, hopefully they help defenders think about improving their posture.

Guides

Cyber Threat Intelligence Resources

There are so many lists of “tools” of “free resources” for “cyber” etc. Well I don’t want to make a list of stuff for social media, this isn’t the TOP x tools, this is simply some resources that I use on a regular basis that should give people a fairly good idea of where to start looking. Cyber sleuthing is a mixture of:

HUMINT
OSINT
CSINT
RUMINT
SIGINT
SOCMINT

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.