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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Guides

Practical Security Assurance

Penetration testing, adversary simulation, red teaming, purple teaming, rainbow teaming, call if what you like, the security outcome we are working towards is:

  • Improved Security Posture
  • Assurance of security investments and controls
  • Enablement of information sharing
  • Collaboration and Understanding
  • Identification of strengths and weaknesses
  • Optimization and Improvement Opportunities

This is to support the organisations mission, vision, goals, and objectives. Cyber security is to support and enable the organisation’s capability to execute digital services in a safe manner.

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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!

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Education

Enterprise Technology Generalisations

I’ve waked around one of two organisations, across a load of verticals and well I see people post things online about common technology generalisations and frankly it sometimes leaves me wondering what networks they have been in, but also am I just on another planet? So, I thought I would jot down some notes on common tech I see in orgs during my business travels but also on in the ciberz! It’s not a list of everything I see, it’s just what appears in my head as quite bloody common.

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