OPSEC is Hard: Are you even trying?

OPSEC is hard! Doing things that are covert is expensive and time consuming. Being invisible in today’s digital age is very hard. Operating covertly in plain sight it also hard.

Everything about this “stuff” is hard, except sometimes maybe it’s just viewed as “it’s hard and expensive” so why even bother, or conversely… maybe the objective can be “we want people to know it was us.”

Either way there’s some interesting reading if we look at “cyber” and “opsec”. For the minute I’ve just started to collect a list of links to articles which show some of the ways opsec failures have occurred in the past in relation to the GRU.

Breach

ProxyLogon – A god mode backdoor even when used…

Imagine

Imagine being able to read emails from any mailbox from a corporation! But everyone uses office 365… don’t they? Well ok even if that was the case (It’s not) then the RCE would come into play. An RCE into system level access to Exchange which is so heavily tied to active directory they are almost joined at the hip) is a killer foothold. However, you pain the scenarios they aren’t good!

All knowing and all powerful

Imagine if you could read everyone’s email! What could you do with this?

Steal IP
Steal data
Steal credentials
Extort, blackmail and bribe

The SSRF vulnerability enabling a threat actor to gain unauthenticated read access to mailboxes would be a killer tool for both nation state spies and criminals alike. Read more “ProxyLogon – A god mode backdoor even when used with READ only” →

Defense

CyberChef Taster

A quick snack

Everyone knows about cyber chef, right? Well, I can tell you now that my misses knows so if you don’t now’s a great time to get to know! Cyber Chef is a tool created by GCHQ distrubted via an apache license that’s hosted on GitHub or you can download and run locally. Read more “CyberChef Taster” →