Threat Intel

The Com, 764, and Associated Groups

In evaluating capabilities for LLMs (AI) recently, I’m looking at the viability of creating more content with them. I’m explicitly calling out where I do, aside from my writing style, I’m also keen to show the pros and cons. Do LLMs replace humans? Not from my experience so far. I’ve been looking at combined physical + digital attacks recently and the associated threat classes… I’m trying to avoid the word group or gang, because collectives are slightly different and are dynamic, almost mission focused if you will.

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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!

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AI

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?)

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Defence

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.

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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!).

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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)
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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)

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