management – Page 6

Living with your password strength head in the sand

Password audits, if you ask some security pros you will hear a million reasons why you would be insane to do them… ask me however and the answer is more nuanced. They are activities that must be handled with the upmost care, however…. they (in my experience) have been incredibly useful to help improve security postures and to enable organisations to understand risk! You are of course free to ignore what I think and live like an ostrich (or it really might not be suitable for your environment). I’m not going to talk about how to do a password audit today, I’m also not going to advise in this post on sourcing strategy (you may want to do in house or you might want to outsource, after all, you normally put all your hashes in someone else’s computer when you use cloud right!?), anyway enough rambling, year ago the NCSC UK did some password auditing research (it was good work – Spray you, spray me: defending against password spraying… – NCSC.GOV.UK) and now the DOI have also done similar, check out the report In the link below:

Strategy

When forming a strategy you must realise for starts that people view the word strategy differently. However, the general view is STRATEGY AS A PLAN. Without a PLAN a strategy is a DREAM.

The plan must be supported by a rang of factors, it must also be managed. It should be something which helps you go from where you are (CURRENT STATE) to where you want to be (FUTURE STATE) and should have a roadmap (TRANSITION PLAN/ROADMP) of how you will get there.

When we talk about can I see your strategy, you will need to have it documented, a strategy without a document isn’t a strategy that can be shared and communicated. As to what “THE STRATEGY” document must be… well there is no such thing as a MUST, but there’s some component that are largely and widely recognised to be useful.

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)

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.

Defense

Defending Against Direct Authentication Attacks in Microsoft Office 365

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!)

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:

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!

Leadership

How to not lose your job as a CISO

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?

Leadership

Red Team Readiness Assessment

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):