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:

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Snake Oil Threat Intel

DNSSEC – why not having a signed zone is…

Firstly, what is DNSSEC?

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/dnssec-what-is-it-why-important-2019-03-05-en

Ok read all that good. What we are talking about here is signing a DNS zone to “assure” that the client is getting DNS responses from the right ZONE data. DNSSEC does not encrypt the conversation between DNS client and DNS server. It does enable the client to be able to check if the data it gets back is valid. In short what we are doing is validating that the “data” being returned is authorized and not tampered with.

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Leadership

Why is security so hard?

  • It requires being thorough.
  • It required documenting things.
  • It requires conducting training and drills.
  • It adds what can be viewed as additional effort/cost to the primary goals (sell widgets/services/time)
  • It involves weird and wonderful ways of abusing functionality that is not always apparent or expected, thus to the typical consumers/user of a service, the idea that it might be abused actually seems very unlikely (to a criminal or security pro, the idea it will be abused seems far more likely based on threat intelligence etc.)
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Leadership

Technology in the Wild

Whilst every marketing person will talk about the latest and greatest tech innovation and product, how much does that reflect the reality of technology deployed in the world? Everyone is running Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 right?! They also don’t use computers, because everything is cloud and mobile first right! and security, well everyone has that down as well! Great… let’s just go and check those statements out… oh wait…. no maybe err.. let’s take a look with our friends at shodan.io

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Guides

Ransomware + Mega = Mega Cyber Pain

Did you ever read about ransomware actors? They often use mega upload to exfiltrate data! So I figured, why would we not detect this with MDE?

I mean sure we should probably block this with a custom indicator using Web Content Filtering and sure it would probably get blocked by Protective DNS but let’s say for whatever reason you don’t have those in place, let’s look at a really simple query to find mega connections in MDE:

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