management – Page 8

Vulnerability Management Concerns by Role Type

Have you ever thought about what kind of data/intelligence you may need with regards to vulnerability management? It tends to vary at levels of abstraction based on the audiance, but don’t think the person doing the patching may not be considernig upwards or that someone in a C level position won’t care about the zeros and ones (life doesn’t work that way!)

Anyway I was talking to a friend and came up with these so thought I’d share them with the world. Have I done a decent job? can you think of others? How do you measure and report? What are your concerns?

Let’s take a look at what I came up with (this wasn’t a very long time in the making 😉 )

Education

Infrastructure Penetration Testing Realities

Penetration testing is just like being a cybercriminal, right?

Honestly, it feels weird writing this, however I feel there’s a real issue with penetration testing and some myths that (for understandable and obvious reasons) exist in some people’s minds. So I’ve taken to trying to explain to people what an external penetration test actually entails in the real world of business. So here goes!

Leadership

UK NCSC Active Cyber Defence (ACD)

Defending a single server is often far more complex than people apreciate, defending a single organisation is significantly harder than a single server, defending a country… a much more complex challenge than I think people actually realise.

What is ACD?

According to the NCSC:

The aim of ACD is to “Protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.” We do this through a wide range of mechanisms, which at their core have the ability to provide protection at scale.
ACD is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, rather than the highly sophisticated and targeted attacks, which NCSC deal with in other ways.
UK NCSC

NCSC Active Cyber Defence

What is included?

The UK NCSC offer and run a range of Active Cyber Defence capabilities which include the following:

Defence

Offensive KEV Alpha 0.1

Working out what exploits to care about is a tough job, kill chains, availability of exploits, complexity, data flows, controls etc. all play a part in understanding a vulnerability and how it affects your organisational risk. To support this effort I’ve started to compile a list of public exploits against CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). This may be useful for defensive and offensive security pros.

Leadership

Board Level Security Metrics

Everyone always asks what are the best security metrics to have? The answer is simple to me, use metrics that are valuable to your business governance and decision-making processes! Easy right.

Not so easy in real life right!

Leadership

Pew Pew Maps – Cool graphics bro

Ever want to be MORE cyber? Need to impress the board? Want to look 1337 AF? Worry not we have your back! Here is a collection of CYBER MAPS to project on your wall mounted displays!

CTF

Using CTFs for offensive and defensive training – Purple…

Pwning a legacy server on Hack the Box is good for a training exercise however what about if we want to think about how to use resrouces for red and blue. Looking at both sides of the coin when thinking about offense really should help people undesrand how to defend better. In the end of the day outside of a tiny tiny fraction of deployment types, you are going to need to be able to explain how to defend regardless of engagement type (vulnerability assessment, penetration test, purple team, red team etc.)

Getting access

I’m not going to talk through every step but here’s the commands you would need to run:

Threat Intel

Learn to SOC: Java Webshell via confluence

When running honeypots you never have to wait too long for something to drop!

This moring we had a new hit in the pot, so I decided to invesigate but also to blog and show how we could go about investigating the logs and paylods etc.

Hacking

Priviledge Escalation Hunting – Scheduled Tasks and Scripts

TLDR: If you have been hunting for privescs before you will know it’s normally not a fast task, you will have a shed ton of data to look at. Sure WINPEAS is good but it’s not a silver bullet.

Here is a really small script which focuses on system administration files/scripts, scheduled tasks and scheduled task history to help you hunt for weaknesses:

Education

Creating a tracker and dashboard for Cyber Essentials

I was talking to a friend about a requirement to “measure” cyber essentials compliance. Now if you know a thing or two about standards and applying standards to complex technology environments you might come up with:

Can’t we just script a checker?
Don’t we have all the audit data in the *checks notes* 1000 inventory systems we have?

Well sure, you could write a massive set of rules which ignore any context and try and cater for a huge number of different scenarios. You could use the Q&A approach as well (which is how the standard workbook works anyway so that already exists). But let’s say you are an IT manager, and you want to KNOW how your environment stacks up!

The question is simple, it’s easy to ask, look:

“How compliant are we against Cyber Essentials?”