Strategy

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.

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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)

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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:

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Threat Intel

LastPass Breach – The danger of metadata

When an organisation suffers a data breach it’s usually bad. When an organisation that stores 25 million people’s passwords that’s really bad.

There are multiple risks here at play.

Firstly, when we give people our data, it’s our risk and our choice. I’m ok with that, I chose to give lastPass my data.

My vault data might be gone, but I have a strong master password, how we interpreted the theft of the basically cryptographic materials is a bit like when we full disk encrypt a drive.

If you lose a laptop that’s got FDE do you report this as a data loss to the ICO? Or do you say, it’s encrypted so actually I haven’t lost the data per say, I’ve just lost a random (ish) bunch of 0s an 1s so I don’t count that as an incident? I’m not here to be judge or jury.

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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!

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