Defense

Phishing your own people – path to eroding trust…

Introduction

“Security education and awareness darling, it’s all the rage! It’s simply to hot right now.” Ok stop, let’s take a minute to get some context. It’s the year 2021, organisations are taking a battering round the globe from cyber criminals who are deploying ransomware, extortion, and fraud via a range of methods but one you can’t not have heard of is phishing.

In this post today, I’m going to look at realities of initial access, phishing and some questions I think people should be asking themselves about the idea of phishing their own userbase. I try and look at this from multiple perspectives because I think it’s a complex subject. Let’s start with initial access methods!

Common Patterns of Access

If we look at the world of technology and cyber security, you will see logs of references to frameworks and language that is enough to send even the committed to sleep! However, let’s abstract from our TTPs, our MITRE ATT&CK frameworks and our “threat actors” and let’s talk in normal English. Read more “Phishing your own people – path to eroding trust or a useful tool?” →

Defense

Password Auditing with L0phtcrack 7 – A quick intro

If you know me that one of the first things, I recommend organisations do is conduct password audits against active directory on a regular basis. There are a ton of ways to do this and depending upon size of directory and budget you will likely want to do this with more than a CPU however the process remains the same. So, with the news that a new release of L0phtcrack (open source) is online let’s take a look at how we can deploy and start cracking those hashes! This isn’t an end to end guide to cracking with l0phtcrack – but it does show the install process and provide considerations for your cracking adventures. Remember, only do this where you have authorisation. Read more “Password Auditing with L0phtcrack 7 – A quick intro” →

Guides

Reporting an email as phishing in Office 365 with…

Did you ever just ignore or delete a phishing email? I mean that’s great in one sense that you won’t have any negative impact. But if the email did get past the mail security filters, you can report it using the “Mark as phishing” option.

What if as well you wanted to not only enable users to report but also pass the intelligence onto the NCSC Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS)? How cool would that be! Well, have no fear people, we are going to show you how easy this stuff is to deploy and configure. Read more “Reporting an email as phishing in Office 365 with NCSC SERS” →

Leadership

The Art of Cyber

Cyber Security is an intersection of different activities, processes and capabilities. It uses skills from multiple traditional roles. As such the definition of it, often seems to lie in the reader. I did a poll the other day on twitter where ~30% of people thought a scenario I described wasn’t cyber because basically an “IT” person did the activity or they made assumptions that the IT person was told to do it (they were not). This led me to try and describe what Cyber means to me:

Read more “The Art of Cyber” →
Defense

Can Cyber Deception be used as a force for…

Scams, Disinformation & Supply Chain Compromise

Now this might come to a shock to some of you but I’m not actually (as my LinkedIn profile currently says) Tony Stark! I know, shocking but it’s true. Why I’m experimenting with this will hopefully be apparent after reading this post (although this isn’t an explanation specifically). What I’m looking at is how deception is used from a range of perspectives from marketing, cybercrime and how we can use deception in a positive way, to actively defend ourselves from the cyber criminals! Read more “Can Cyber Deception be used as a force for good?” →

Defense

Cloud Security – 26 Foundational Security Practises and Capabilities…

That is quite the catchy title don’t you agree? Ok so that needs some work and when we think about cloud security, we need to realise that Computing as a Service isn’t a silver bullet.

One Cloud to Rule them all and in the darkness bind them

Ok so the cloud was promised as the saviour of IT and Cyber security but the promise vs the reality. Well, let’s be frank, they don’t really match up. But have no fear – secure cloud design is here (omg cringe)! Ok now we have that out of my system let’s look at some basic cloud security considerations to make when thinking about cloud services.

Checklist

Ok so the world doesn’t work with a checklist however, if you are like me you will want to use lists and aides to jog the little grey cells into action. Let’s think about cloud services and security: Read more “Cloud Security – 26 Foundational Security Practises and Capabilities Checklist” →

Defense

Defending against authentication attacks

Ok so my most popular blog on pwndefend is about using Hydra… so I guess that’s all the goodies using it for good things, right? Probably not but it does help people understand the weaknesses of single factor authentication systems without supplementary controls.

So, let’s look at authentication defences, but let’s do this from an attacker perspective! (The opposite of what helps an attacker usually helps defend). Crazy madness right, let’s get to it!

Foundations of Sand

Ok so authentication is a key security control in computer systems. To understand the challenge around authentication and think it’s all a technical problem is to error.

See most modern computer systems require at least two things to authenticate:

  • A Username
  • A Password

Read more “Defending against authentication attacks” →

Guides

Cyber Security Design Review

Purpose

To conduct a solution review we need to consider multiple perspectives. Cyber security can be described as (from the NCSC):

“Cyber security’s core function is to protect the devices we all use (smartphones, laptops, tablets and computers), and the services we access – both online and at work – from theft or damage. It’s also about preventing unauthorised access to the vast amounts of personal information we store on these devices, and online.”

Cyber Security is concerned with risks, threats, vulnerabilities, and controls. This really means the breadth and depth of cyber security is vastly wide and terribly deep. Read more “Cyber Security Design Review” →

Defense

Risk management is easy! Isn’t it?

Information security theory and practises use a commonly understood and simple range of tools, methods, and practises to help organisations understand their risk portfolio and to enable them to make both strategic and tactical investment decisions….

Ok someone pinch me. this simply isn’t the reality I see on the ground. The theory is vast, complex and there are a multitude of good/best/insert phrase frameworks and tools that you can leverage to map, model, and communicate risks, vulnerabilities, controls, threats etc.

I’m not going to do a detailed analysis and comparison of different models here, but I am going to at least give people a view of some of the tools and frameworks that you can and may likely experience in the cyber security world. Read more “Risk management is easy! Isn’t it?” →

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