No one is responsible for your OWN Cyber Defences…

Introduction

I talk to hundreds or maybe even thousands of people online. I work in the Cyber security industry, I worked previously with central government, local authorities, finance, third sector, healthcare, defence and well most verticals of business. I often see people comment online about how “GCHQ has failed” or some other silly nonsense when it comes to an organisation (not GCHQ) being victim to a cyber incident.

I fear the world has watched a few too many Bond and Bourne films and let’s their imaginations run wild! The true reality of defending cyberspace is frankly vastly different to what I think people believe it is.

Education

Cyber Security for PC Gamers

Introduction

The other day there was a lot of focus on “ATLASOS” a rather oddly branded project, just to be clear:

ATLASOS is NOT AN Operating System (OS) (despite it’s name!)

ATLASOS (at the time of writing) disables basically the majority of Windows Security features including:

Defender
Smart Screen
Windows Update
Spectre/Meltdown Mitigations

Basically, if you can think of “nightmare” in the cyber world, ATLASOS’s security posture is basically that (in my opinion)! That said, it’s cool from a nerd Windows customization/build pov, however based on my initial investigations I would strong recommend NOT using it on a “PRODUCTION” system (or anything that’s connected to the internet!).

Guides

Cyber Threat Intelligence Resources

There are so many lists of “tools” of “free resources” for “cyber” etc. Well I don’t want to make a list of stuff for social media, this isn’t the TOP x tools, this is simply some resources that I use on a regular basis that should give people a fairly good idea of where to start looking. Cyber sleuthing is a mixture of:

HUMINT
OSINT
CSINT
RUMINT
SIGINT
SOCMINT

Defense

Broadband Routers

When it comes to digital technology, we have to consider many things.

Availability, Confidentiality, and Integrity are good building blocks for considerations. We can probably split this into two major views to start with:

What does a typical consumer care about?
What security and privacy considerations could be made?

A typical consumer may be about:

Availability
Cost
WIFI Coverage
Performance
Ease of Use
Ease of Support/Troubleshooting
Style/Looks
What happens if it breaks?
Can I stop my kids messing with it? (Probably not so why bother)

Guides

What to do when you think you are being…

Planning is key but you can also respond

Recently I was helping a friend out when they were being targeted by a criminal online. I thought I’d put some notes down to try and help people. This isn’t a “how to” it’s more like thoughts and ideas. It’s UK centric, but probably works in lots of places.

One thing to note, preparation is greater than response, the more prepared you are, the less vulnerable you may be, the more prepared the smaller the attack surface.

You may for a variety of reasons become under heightened threat from an internet perspective. The information on here is not a catch all, a detailed guide to personal (PERSEC) and operational security (OPSEC). Read more “What to do when you think you are being targeted in cyberspace” →

Guides

Defending against Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks

What is a DoS Attack?

According to NIST, a denial of service (DoS) is:

“The prevention of authorized access to resources or the delaying of time-critical operations. (Time-critical may be milliseconds or it may be hours, depending upon the service provided).”

denial of service (DoS) – Glossary | CSRC (nist.gov)

a distributed denial of service (DDoS) is:

“A denial of service technique that uses numerous hosts to perform the attack.”

distributed denial of service (DDoS) – Glossary | CSRC (nist.gov)

Defence

CVE-2022-22972 & CVE-2022-22973

More VMware Workspace One Vulns

This is a fast publish

Vmware just released patches for two new vulnerabilities in Workspace One, followed by guidance from CISA to patch by May 23^rd or remove the devices from the network/internet!

“All Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies must complete the following actions:

By 5:00 PM EDT on Monday, May 23, 2022:

Enumerate all instances of impacted VMware products [VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager] on agency networks.

Defense

Ransomware Defence: Part 2a – Persistence, Privilege Escalation and…

Recap

In Part 1 (Initial Access Defence and Checklist) we looked at ways of hardening your attack surface to defend against initial access. When it comes to ransomware there is a range of elements and variables in the kill chain that need to be successful for the outcomes to be achieved by the criminals. Here we are going to move further into the kill chain to look at further defences. Remember you need to have an “Assume Breach” mindset if you are going to be able to defend against ransomware, that being said, there is a hell of a lot of things you can do for 0 to low investment costs that provide a great ROI. Now some of this is going to be repeated guidance from part 1, that’s ok repetition is good (make sure you are covered from multiple perspectives). Ok let us get to it! Read more “Ransomware Defence: Part 2a – Persistence, Privilege Escalation and Lateral Movement” →

Defense

Thoughts on IOCs for Exchange Hafnium/ProxyLogon

Intro

This isn’t a rant, far from it but I’ve been working on this for over a week now and some major questions are sprining to mind with regard to how the IOCs and detection details released may have hindered response efforts. These vulnerabilities were known about since at least December 2020, there were months to get detection intel and scripts/tools ready for people (that’s if you don’t question why did it take so long). So I’ve put some of my thoughts down here on some of the challenges with the IoCs initially released and the detection tools etc. I’ll probably update this later but wanted to publish it before it becomes virtual dust! Read more “Thoughts on IOCs for Exchange Hafnium/ProxyLogon” →

Defense

Checking for Hafnium or other groups impact from Exchange…

Introduction

On March 2^nd, 2021 at ~6pm GMT Microsoft released an out of band update to all version of exchange from 2010 through to 2019. This was in response to a range of vulnerabilities which had been abused (a 0-day) by a threat actor (coined by MS as HAFNIUM).

For more info from MS please see the following:

https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/03/02/hafnium-targeting-exchange-servers/

Key CVEs

Key CVES include:

CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065. Read more “Checking for Hafnium or other groups impact from Exchange Abuse” →