assessment – PwnDefend

OMG The Cyber SKY is falling down!

Ok a bit dramatic, but that’s often what you might feel if you spend lots of time in the vulnerability space (which if you work in cyber security.. you probably do!). We often hear about the NEXT: STUXNET, HEARTBLEED, WANNACRY/ETERNAL BLUE, LOG4J etc. but actually when it comes to it… the number of times we have word endangering unauthenticated remote code execution that is a danger to global society is far less than when we have other vulnerabilities. It’s the exception not the rule.

Defense

Cyber Security Assesments for Normal People

Ok so you might think I’m mad with the title but bear with me!

So, the world is in an interesting place, we’ve got a pandemic, we’ve got prolific cyber crime and we have all kinds of different views on how we should tackle this problem.

Now I love a framework and there’s ton’s of them. But the truth is they are complex, detailed, nuanced and generally require a level of nerd that a lot of organistaions do not have.

In 2020 during the pandemic I decided to try and write something to simplify this position, whilst I didn’t want to be too narrow, I wanted to try and capture the breadth of cyber security that is relevent to the general purpose organistaion. I came up with a set of 140 questions which I believe are a good take on things to consider and ask when conducting a security review at a high level. (yes 140 questions is a high level view, this stuff is complex as hell at the detailed end of things, and the devil is in the detail).