Cyber Insurance: How would I decide to buy it…

Is Cyber Insurance right for you?

Wow a big question, right? I can’t answer this for you, obviously I’d recommend that you consider cyber insurance, however I’d also recommend that you:

Understand your business and it’s supply chain with regards to financials and linkages to cyber risk
Understand your current cyber asset, threat, vulnerability and therefore risk landscape
Ensure you have a good understanding to make informed decisions

I’m not going to write lots this evening on the subject, but I was reviewing a report and thought in line with some research that I started recently (but was side-tracked) and then have seen the report so purchased that instead! (Sometimes it’s easier to not do everything yourself right!)

Leadership

Vulnerability Management Concerns by Role Type

Have you ever thought about what kind of data/intelligence you may need with regards to vulnerability management? It tends to vary at levels of abstraction based on the audiance, but don’t think the person doing the patching may not be considernig upwards or that someone in a C level position won’t care about the zeros and ones (life doesn’t work that way!)

Anyway I was talking to a friend and came up with these so thought I’d share them with the world. Have I done a decent job? can you think of others? How do you measure and report? What are your concerns?

Let’s take a look at what I came up with (this wasn’t a very long time in the making 😉 )

Guides

How to use Putty as a SOCKS Proxy

Ever stuck in an environment where your internet access isn’t what you want it to be? Ever need to exfilrate data and bypass some DLP? Obviously I’m talking like a pentester (don’t use this if it beaks policies on anohers assets) so this is useful for some scenarios in testing but also in real life!

Education

Infrastructure Penetration Testing Realities

Penetration testing is just like being a cybercriminal, right?

Honestly, it feels weird writing this, however I feel there’s a real issue with penetration testing and some myths that (for understandable and obvious reasons) exist in some people’s minds. So I’ve taken to trying to explain to people what an external penetration test actually entails in the real world of business. So here goes!

Leadership

UK NCSC Active Cyber Defence (ACD)

Defending a single server is often far more complex than people apreciate, defending a single organisation is significantly harder than a single server, defending a country… a much more complex challenge than I think people actually realise.

What is ACD?

According to the NCSC:

The aim of ACD is to “Protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.” We do this through a wide range of mechanisms, which at their core have the ability to provide protection at scale.
ACD is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, rather than the highly sophisticated and targeted attacks, which NCSC deal with in other ways.
UK NCSC

NCSC Active Cyber Defence

What is included?

The UK NCSC offer and run a range of Active Cyber Defence capabilities which include the following:

Defence

Offensive KEV Alpha 0.1

Working out what exploits to care about is a tough job, kill chains, availability of exploits, complexity, data flows, controls etc. all play a part in understanding a vulnerability and how it affects your organisational risk. To support this effort I’ve started to compile a list of public exploits against CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). This may be useful for defensive and offensive security pros.

Education

Common Windows Services

Exploitation of common windows services is an important area of knowledge for both offense and defence.

Server Message Block (SMB)
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
Windows Remote Management (WinRM)
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Other common technology platforms in the Windows Stack Include

Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)
Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS)
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

For now I’m just going to look at a few of the common protocols and vectors.

Guides

SMB (Server Message Block) Protocol Basics

SMB in a CLI world

If you are new or like me forget the bazzilion command syntaxes in the world, the use of the man command will be super helpful as well as google foo! To help people on their way here are some example of basic SMB tools, these come with kali.

SMB Ports

SMB typically operated on TCP 445

Nmap Example

Education

Nmap & CrackMapExec (CME)

The swiss army knife of the cyber world, it can port scan, fingerprint, produce reports and run scripts using the nmap scripting engine (NSE).

Why do we care about NMAP, surely everyone knows how to NMAP?

Well, that’s simply not true, it’s always important to tech new people, to revise and hone existing skills and the world of nmap scripting is constantly evolving.

Port scanning and fingerprinting let alone leaking sensitive data and conducting “attacks” is all possible. You can do a basic vulnerability scan with nmap alone!

Leadership

Pew Pew Maps – Cool graphics bro

Ever want to be MORE cyber? Need to impress the board? Want to look 1337 AF? Worry not we have your back! Here is a collection of CYBER MAPS to project on your wall mounted displays!