education – Page 6

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

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)

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!

Threat Intel

Royal Mail Cyber Attack! What should you do?

breaking news: Royal mails international tracking services are down and have been for > 24 hours:

The ICO have been contacted! The NCSC and NCA have been contacted! What should you do?

Education

Password Spraying Office 365

Clearly this is for penetration testing, not for evil! So if you have to pentest Office 365 you might want to be attacking the authentication services. This will be aligned to the tenant you are testing, as always make sure you have authorisation.

Deploy to your favourite LINUX instance or WSL etc.

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:

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.

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.

Guides

Service Security Architecture and Assurance

Have you every tried to understand the risk level of a service? Ever wanted to provide assurance to someone that “it’s been well designed, is secure from common threats, likely risk scenarios and is securely operated” etc.? have you ever tried to conduct testing against a service that is relatively unknown? Ever needed to actually do more than throw some packets at the front door? Guess what, I have. Most orgs don’t have a decent level of documentation on service architecture and security controls. And as the NSA nicely put, the way they get into networks is to know them better than you do! So in my travels I see lots of different orgs and largely there’s one common similarity, most of them aren’t well documented (docs are boring right!) and if we then make another huge sweeping generalisation, about 90% of orgs have security postures you wouldn’t want to have to defend as a blue teamer, but you might fancy if you were a nation state actor or cyber criminal!