Defense

Ransomware Defence Checklist – Part 1 : Initial Access

Defending the Realm

We keep seeing organization get hit, in some kind of a sick way I think me and some of my friends in the industry are bored with the over dramatic responses of “sophisticated” “advanced” and “unpreventable” because most times the kill chains simply are not like this. But still the onslaught keeps coming. Well I know this much, whilst I would love to deploy with the team and harden everyone’s networks that simply isn’t possible. So what we thought we would do is write something to try and spread the knowledge a bit further and hopefully have some positive impact.

Ransomware 101

It’s not just that your data will be encrypted, it will likely be exfiltrated and sold. You will likely have access sold, data sold and be extorted. The Ransomware business model is adapting to defender responses. Even if you can restore from backup they will likely try and attempt to extort. This brings a key point in this equation, the best position is to NOT get pwn3d to start with. Ok that might sound silly to say but when we look at these kill chains you might start to see the world from my perspective a little. Read more “Ransomware Defence Checklist – Part 1 : Initial Access”

Guides

Becoming a Cyber Criminal (Pro) – Basic External Attacks

This is an experiment to combine a near real time thread on twitter and a blog… I have no idea if this will work. The premise is, we are conducting a adversary simulation against a target and want to see how this translates into a ‘plain language’ blog/story about how these things work. (I’ve also not included sales/scoping/documentaiton and clearly not all of this is in real time) but it is real!

The Fundamental Steps

Ok so first thing is first – the criminal part is a joke! We are here to help people. What we are going to do however is consider the general cyber threat landscape, look at the organisation from an ‘external threat actor’ perspective and then see what we can map out from an attack surface point of view.

Read more “Becoming a Cyber Criminal (Pro) – Basic External Attacks”
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”