management – Page 2

A threat to sanity – Cyber Myth: Juice Jacking

“Juice jacking” has become a modern cybersecurity myth — a catchy scare story built on a long-patched Android debugging issue and fueled by viral fear rather than facts. Despite years of warnings, there are no confirmed cases of real-world juice jacking attacks; the cost, effort, and low reward make it an impractical method for criminals. Yet the myth persists because it’s vivid, simple, and scary — everything our brains latch onto. The real danger is not the USB port at the airport, but the distraction such myths create. When people focus on imaginary threats, they waste precious attention that should go toward genuine risks like weak passwords, missing MFA, unpatched systems, and poor backups. So let’s take a bit of a deeper dive into this subject, because by it’s important to understand what to, and what not to focus on in my experience!

News

‘Secure’ Firewall backups, until they are not!

Firewalls are often both a defended gate but also the front door to access corporate network. That is all lovely until it’s not! You see so many corporate network intrusion incidents occur from threat actors simply logging into the VPN (due to lack of VPN), and then we have the software vulnerabilities where they shell their way in, but did you think that another way could be from stealing all the backups from a ‘security’ provider? Well now you might! There’s been bit of an incident (one that started as it’s only 5% of customers but actually it was 100% of customers who used the backup feature! YIKES), but before that let’s look at the typical landscape!

Guides

Bolting on security does not work

In my travels I have found it matters more how you do IT securely than how you ‘do security’. What I mean by this is, the prevailing themes of orgs recently is to bolt on SOCs/MDR and other services to a low maturity/low capability IT organisations with the hope that its magic’s all the security problems away. This sounds lovely, the salespeople will almost certainly productise your security improvement journey and make it sound like a dream.

Education

Why a SOC Without Triage, Analysis, and Remediation Is…

In the world of cybersecurity, the term Security Operations Center (SOC) carries significant weight. It evokes images of highly skilled analysts working around the clock to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats. However, not all SOCs live up to this expectation. If a SOC lacks core functions like triage, analysis, assessment, and remedial action, it’s not truly a SOC—it’s merely a contact center masquerading as one. Let’s explore why these functions are non-negotiable for a SOC and why their absence undermines the entire purpose of cybersecurity operations.

Leadership

Cybercrime and data theft

During an incident it’s one of the first questions people ask, what did the attacker do? Did they steal any data? How did they do it?

All of which are typically rather difficult to answer in the first, probably week of an incident (incidents vary, sometimes it’s very obvious, other times you can’t be 100% sure on some details!)

But recently I’ve been talking lots about the way organisations communicate during incidents to their customers and the public etc. I’ve been explaining that the day 0 comms of ‘no data was stolen’ followed by a ‘lots of data was stolen’ in say day zero plus five… well it doesn’t help with my my trust in the victim organisation. Which to me, seems like an odd strategy for organisations to take. They have options:

Threat Intel

The Com, 764, and Associated Groups

In evaluating capabilities for LLMs (AI) recently, I’m looking at the viability of creating more content with them. I’m explicitly calling out where I do, aside from my writing style, I’m also keen to show the pros and cons. Do LLMs replace humans? Not from my experience so far. I’ve been looking at combined physical + digital attacks recently and the associated threat classes… I’m trying to avoid the word group or gang, because collectives are slightly different and are dynamic, almost mission focused if you will.

Threat Intel

An evolution of threat actor

Motivation and a diverse network of people and capabilities can go a long way, then add in digital skills and winning steak… and you have: scattered spider!

There’s a big difference between zero day spraying the internet and planting webshells or copying someone’s open S3 bucket and say…. doxing staff, their families and attacking them and their assets in the real and digital worlds.

I think people won’t broadly grasp the effects that can be achieved (harm) when the adversary is motivated, dedicated, capable, resourced and has very little moral qualms.

There is no magic bullet to defend against an adversary like this, you need a whole of organisation defence (and to pursue even more than that!).

Threat Intel

Defending Against Scattered Spider

Defending against different skilled threat classes is an important thing to consider when you are planning, designing and operating a business. I’ve used GROK (AI) to create an html page which has both information on the kill chains, but also looks at countermeasures. I’m experimenting lots with VIBE coding and LLM assisted content generation so hopefully this proves useful. I do feel it needs a more human touch added as well… but let’s see! life without experimentation would be dull would it not!

Can AI replace intelligence analysts?

Ok, it’s late, and well I wanted to look into cyber attacks where social engineering is a key component combined with technical hacking skills.

There’s been a growing number of these style events, so I tasked GROK to create an assessment for me, let’s see how it did! Let’s both try and answer the questions:

Can GROK replace intelligence officers and can GROK help us defend better against social engineering + technical attacks? What do you think? (please take all of this with a pinch of salt… LLMs are known to make mistakes/hallucinate/lie in a very convincing manner)….

they look nice…. but looks can as we know, be deceiving! (is the entire blog just a social engineering experiment by me?)

Defense

Minimum Data Requirements for Investigating Email Mailbox Compromise

When a suspected email mailbox compromise is reported, initiating an investigation promptly is critical. However, to ensure the investigation is effective, certain minimum intelligence requirements must be met. This blog outlines the bare minimum data needed to start investigating a suspected email mailbox compromise, whether the intelligence comes from an internal team or a third-party source.