Education
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.
Read more “Password Spraying Office 365”
Defense
Whilst conducting security testing and assurance activities, I went looking to show logon events in Office 365. My first query was on IdentityEvents, this led to a view of a multi month attack by a threat actor/s against a tenent, followed by exploring the rabbit hole of logs and computer systems. This blog summarises some of the methods and findings when considering threat hunting and authentication defences for Office 365. (bear with me I am tired so this might need a bit of a tune up later!)
Read more “Defending Against Direct Authentication Attacks in Microsoft Office 365”
Leadership
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:
Read more “The Cyber Acid Test”
Guides
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!
Read more “Service Security Architecture and Assurance”
Leadership
A mRr3b00t Adventure
Join me on an adventure of rambling and exploring the idea that you can in fact not lose the security leadership game! This blog is WIP, it’s just my brain wondering around the question of: can we win the in the face of a seemingly insurmountable force? What do we do as a security leader to protect ourselves and the organisation? How do we start?
Read more “How to not lose your job as a CISO”
Leadership
I am seeing lots of “debate” about the value in red teaming, so I thought I would put together my thought process of how I look at as a broad stroke when I consider a generic starting position in an organisation. When I’m defending a business, I tend to ask myself (and the team/customers etc.) these kind of questions (they are not exhaustive):
Read more “Red Team Readiness Assessment”
Leadership
I am not a legal export! Haha get used to saying that a lot if you work in cyber and are not in fact a legal expert! I wanted to put together a list of common laws that people should be aware of when doing business in the UK, it’s just a starter for 10 and there are likely others, but this should get people started for their security awareness and security policy documentation:
Read more: UK laws and cyber security considerations for businesscan you think of any others that I should add?
Thanks Gary and Kevin and the other AVIS I can’t name for inputting!
Education
I wrote this in 2018 and don’t believe it ever made it to the interwebs, so I’m basically posting as is with an extra section for some useful links! Hopefully it still stands the test of time!
Risk assessments are complex, they require cross domain knowledge and generally do not deal in absolutes. Threats, vulnerabilities and asset intelligence is combined, weighed and assessed, leading to the construct of a risk assessment document. It can be easy to overcomplicate this process, which in turn (in my experience) often leads to far wider reaching consequences (the business starts to bypass security management or take short cuts), so I thought I would write a short post to clarify what I’ve seen work out in the field. So, to start with let’s try and align on what exactly a risk is.
Read more “Information Security Risk Management “
Leadership
How an organization approaches the challenge of technology and security management, well that’s the difference between leveraging technology to deliver value efficiently and effectively vs technical debt and inefficient deployment of technology which may hinder the organisation in its pursuit of its mission.
When we consider how technology is managed, we need to look at it from multiple viewpoints with different views:
Read more “Organisational Approach to Technology and Security”
Vulnerabilities
The latest guidance from Microsoft (released on the 02/10/2022) says to disable administrators from being able to execute remote PowerShell via the exchange PowerShell web endpoint /PowerShell
October 2, 2022 updates:
Obviously bear in mind this needs auth! but also auth isn’t always that hard..
Microsoft Research have just released (0825 30/09/2022) this: Customer Guidance for Reported Zero-day Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server – Microsoft Security Response Center
Microsoft have released a Exchange Server Emergency Mitigation (EMS) which includes URL re-write rules to HELP mitigate this (but likely don’t eliminate all risks due to potential bypasses)
Likely “Zero day” exploit in the wild being used to attack exchange servers via a simmilar endpoint to ProxyShell. A mitigation is to apply URL rewrite rules, or to disconect the service internet from untrsuted networks until a patch is available. The Exploit is reported to required AUTHENTICATION, which may significantly limit the volume of exploitation (however credentials are only a phish away). It’s also reported the exploitation in the wild used /Powershell after exploiting the autodiscover endpoint.
Yesterday it was reported there was a “new” zero day vulnerability being exploited in the wild. But there appears to be some confusion and a lack of speciifc evidence to showcase the vulnerability being “new” or simply being a differnt exploit path/approach for an existing CVE (e.g. ProxyShell).
The situation from my pov (at time of writing) is still unclear. It would be odd to not advise people ensure they are running the latest supported Exchange CU and Security update release (check both!) – if the exploits are 0-day (which it looks like they are) you will need to also patch when MS release a patch!
New Microsoft Exchange zero-days actively exploited in attacks (bleepingcomputer.com)
Upcoming | Zero Day Initiative
Upcoming | Zero Day Initiative
Read more: Exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Servers seen in the wild
https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=http.title%3Aoutlook+exchange
There are 201,995 Exchange Servers with Outlook Web Access Exposed (According to Shodan)
cve-2021-31206 (19,311)
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2021-31206
9.5% of the worlds Exchange attack surface is vulnerable to CVE-2021-31206
CVE-2021-34473 (4388)
CVE-2021-34523 (4388)
CVE-2021-31207 (4388)
2.1% of the worlds Exchange attack surface is vulnerable to ProxyShell CVEs (above) (based on the shodan data)
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/new-features/updates?view=exchserver-2019
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/new-features/updates?view=exchserver-2019
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=58392
The situation appears to be evolving, as always security vulnerabilities and in the wild exploitations can be a fast moving landscape, internet facing systems need suitable and adequate protections, that doesn’t include just exposing IIS on TCP 443 and walking away. It requires capabilities such as:
and many more things!
This post is a fast publish and may contain errors and/or the situation may change. I’ll try and keep it updated.