Security – PwnDefend

Supporting the Cyber Leadership Challenge

Earlier this year I had the honour of supporting the Cyber Leadership Challenge as a judge at the BT Tower! I’ve been a judge at Cyber 912 previously but I’ve always been doing that virtually, so it was great to be able to goto the event not via a webcam! The Cyber Leadership challenge is a national cyber emergency competition for UK university students. The students work in teams through an evolving national major cyber incident, so they will likely be thinking through areas many don’t give two seconds thought to, such as:

Leadership

Cybercrime and data theft

During an incident it’s one of the first questions people ask, what did the attacker do? Did they steal any data? How did they do it?

All of which are typically rather difficult to answer in the first, probably week of an incident (incidents vary, sometimes it’s very obvious, other times you can’t be 100% sure on some details!)

But recently I’ve been talking lots about the way organisations communicate during incidents to their customers and the public etc. I’ve been explaining that the day 0 comms of ‘no data was stolen’ followed by a ‘lots of data was stolen’ in say day zero plus five… well it doesn’t help with my my trust in the victim organisation. Which to me, seems like an odd strategy for organisations to take. They have options:

Threat Intel

An evolution of threat actor

Motivation and a diverse network of people and capabilities can go a long way, then add in digital skills and winning steak… and you have: scattered spider!

There’s a big difference between zero day spraying the internet and planting webshells or copying someone’s open S3 bucket and say…. doxing staff, their families and attacking them and their assets in the real and digital worlds.

I think people won’t broadly grasp the effects that can be achieved (harm) when the adversary is motivated, dedicated, capable, resourced and has very little moral qualms.

There is no magic bullet to defend against an adversary like this, you need a whole of organisation defence (and to pursue even more than that!).

Threat Intel

Defending Against Scattered Spider

Defending against different skilled threat classes is an important thing to consider when you are planning, designing and operating a business. I’ve used GROK (AI) to create an html page which has both information on the kill chains, but also looks at countermeasures. I’m experimenting lots with VIBE coding and LLM assisted content generation so hopefully this proves useful. I do feel it needs a more human touch added as well… but let’s see! life without experimentation would be dull would it not!

Can AI replace intelligence analysts?

Ok, it’s late, and well I wanted to look into cyber attacks where social engineering is a key component combined with technical hacking skills.

There’s been a growing number of these style events, so I tasked GROK to create an assessment for me, let’s see how it did! Let’s both try and answer the questions:

Can GROK replace intelligence officers and can GROK help us defend better against social engineering + technical attacks? What do you think? (please take all of this with a pinch of salt… LLMs are known to make mistakes/hallucinate/lie in a very convincing manner)….

they look nice…. but looks can as we know, be deceiving! (is the entire blog just a social engineering experiment by me?)

News

Using AI to analyse cyber incidents

Currently there appears to be a relatively significant cyber security incident at Marks and Spencer. So I thought I would give a demo of using AI (LLM, GROK) to create a timeline:
(since this is generated by an LLM please take this with a health pinch of salt, I wanted however to show the actual content and method I’ve used so people can understand it)

Education

Unravel the Mystery of Cyber Noir Detective: A Thrilling…

[This is why we need humans and not AI to write things!]

This is what an LLM said about my Cyber Noir game…. I think this is going to need me to write something! But that will come another day, today you can enjoy how humans are, not entirely replaced yet!

Enjoy! (perhaps just play the game!)

https://mr-r3b00t.github.io/cyber-detective

In the neon-drenched streets of Neon City, where high-tech crime and shadowy conspiracies collide, a new kind of detective story awaits. Cyber Noir Detective, an innovative choose-your-own-adventure game, invites players to step into the shoes of Riley Voss, a seasoned investigator tasked with thwarting a catastrophic cyber breach at NexCorp. This browser-based experience, crafted by cybersecurity experts at PwnDefend, blends immersive storytelling with subtle educational insights, making it a must-play for fans of interactive fiction, cyberpunk aesthetics, and digital security.

Education

A Cyber Noir Detective Game

Recently vibe coding has been the name of the game! So whilst dealing with an incident I was thinking about some of the common challenges organisations face when it comes to incident response, which led onto the broader topics of why do so many orgs either have no policies or defined processes but even when they do, people don’t follow them.

So much focus is given to cyber awareness training for ‘end users’ but not so much about training IT and business teams in how to manage incidents.

Enter: Gamified training + comic books + detectives!

Leadership

Using cyber security investments as a business enabler

Making security both an organisational support capability but also enabling business is not easy. Lots of the security activity is for obvious reasons not totally transparent. However one thing I want to show people is how you might want to tell existing and prospective customers about the way you approach security within your organisation. One way to do this is to show people how you align to the NCSC 14 Cloud Security Provider Principles.

Education

Making cyber security relatable to people

If we look at the reality of cyber security on a personal level, it’s insanely complex. There are hundreds if not thousands of details that matter, under the microscope security is incredibly complex and contextual. Which makes it a nightmare outside of simple abstractions, because things get complex fast.