Defence

Planning to defend and respond to cyber threats

Everyone has a plan until they are cyber punched in the face! Or something like that!

People seem to have this misconception that you need to “do a pentest” or some other project based activity to do “security testing” or response planning.

Let’s be real here, you really don’t. But what you do need is a few things:

  1. Authorisation
  2. Time
  3. Some ideas for cyber incidents to plan for
Read more “Planning to defend and respond to cyber threats”
Education

Security Awareness Training Example

Introduction

There are tons of “products” for security awarenss training, however you might find that sitting and watching canned CBT videos isn’t your organisations thing or perhaps you want to see what other options there are available. Well for starts the UK NCSC has some free online security awarenss training (see further down the post), or you may want to actually spend time with your staff to make the learning a collaboarive experiance that drives engagement and communication. If the last one if your desired approach there are lots of ways to do this. One of which can be supported by a question based assessment, other ways include tabletop scenarios and incident simulations (i honestly would go with a blended appraoch if it was me!).

So to help people get thinking about this I’ve put together some example questions to drive the message about incident reporting, collaboration and education vs blame. So here we go, here’s some ideas for communication and some questions to get staff thinking about cyber security, sure they aren’t rocket science, but then it doesn’t need to be!

Read more “Security Awareness Training Example”
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

Understanding Penetration Testing Scopes

“Can I have a penetration test please” is about in line with saying “Can I have a car please?”. Why am I writing a blog about this? Well, where do I start, so I have been working on the technology world basically all my career and over the last 20 odd years one area of digital security management that I think a lot of organisations and people struggle with is understanding just what a penetration test is, how it should be used, how long they can take and what is involved. Read more “Understanding Penetration Testing Scopes”