Threat Intel
Thousands of ESXi hosts around (some of the) globe have been encrypted by cyber criminals. This post is a fast publish showing some of what has occurred, it’s impact and now includes limited remedial advice.
If you have been affected by this ransomware event there is an attempted recovery script by CISA
https://github.com/cisagov/ESXiArgs-Recover/blob/main/recover.sh
Read more “ESXiARGS Ransomware – Global Incident”
Leadership
Leadership
Whilst every marketing person will talk about the latest and greatest tech innovation and product, how much does that reflect the reality of technology deployed in the world? Everyone is running Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 right?! They also don’t use computers, because everything is cloud and mobile first right! and security, well everyone has that down as well! Great… let’s just go and check those statements out… oh wait…. no maybe err.. let’s take a look with our friends at shodan.io
Read more “Technology in the Wild”
Hacking
Ok this is going to be really short post, but expect more later! Did you ever want to run CME but you were stuck on a Windows machine? Well don’t worry you can! How do we do this?
First we download CME
Extract the zip file
Make sure you have python3 installed!
Read more “CrackMapExec (CME) on Windows”
Guides
Did you ever read about ransomware actors? They often use mega upload to exfiltrate data! So I figured, why would we not detect this with MDE?
I mean sure we should probably block this with a custom indicator using Web Content Filtering and sure it would probably get blocked by Protective DNS but let’s say for whatever reason you don’t have those in place, let’s look at a really simple query to find mega connections in MDE:
Read more “Ransomware + Mega = Mega Cyber Pain”
Threat Intel
Did you want to check out some of your detections? This isn’t everything of course but it’s a simple batch file to simulate a range of enumeration techniques used by actors like CONTI or LOCKBIT affiliates/operators:
Read more “Simulating Human Operated Discovery”
Leadership
If you work in marketing you are probably walking around telling everyone that we all live in a ZERO trust era, that PASSWORDS are DEAD! Ransomware is DEAD and AI is the FUTURE and we should be doing that NOW!
Meanwhile back on CYBER PLANET EARTH, most organisation do NOT have or need AI, they use passwords and well they passwords they use are shockingly bad! Howe do I know this? I do password audits and security testing, but I also look at breach data! (and we have other people publish password audit reports etc.)
Read more “It’s 2023 and people’s passwords are still really really bad!”
Uncategorized
Password audits, if you ask some security pros you will hear a million reasons why you would be insane to do them… ask me however and the answer is more nuanced. They are activities that must be handled with the upmost care, however…. they (in my experience) have been incredibly useful to help improve security postures and to enable organisations to understand risk! You are of course free to ignore what I think and live like an ostrich (or it really might not be suitable for your environment). I’m not going to talk about how to do a password audit today, I’m also not going to advise in this post on sourcing strategy (you may want to do in house or you might want to outsource, after all, you normally put all your hashes in someone else’s computer when you use cloud right!?), anyway enough rambling, year ago the NCSC UK did some password auditing research (it was good work – Spray you, spray me: defending against password spraying… – NCSC.GOV.UK) and now the DOI have also done similar, check out the report In the link below:
Read more “Living with your password strength head in the sand”
Strategy
When forming a strategy you must realise for starts that people view the word strategy differently. However, the general view is STRATEGY AS A PLAN. Without a PLAN a strategy is a DREAM.
The plan must be supported by a rang of factors, it must also be managed. It should be something which helps you go from where you are (CURRENT STATE) to where you want to be (FUTURE STATE) and should have a roadmap (TRANSITION PLAN/ROADMP) of how you will get there.
When we talk about can I see your strategy, you will need to have it documented, a strategy without a document isn’t a strategy that can be shared and communicated. As to what “THE STRATEGY” document must be… well there is no such thing as a MUST, but there’s some component that are largely and widely recognised to be useful.
Read more “Strategy”
News
According to the Belfast Telegraph:
The Incident is reported by them as “RANSOMWARE” and features Lockbit (Lockbit is RaaS, they recently (end of 2022 lost their ransomware payload builder) so the use of Lockbit software and the fact Lockbit is RaaS means this doesn’t prove attribution). (Attribution is hard, for most people what matters is their own network security posture, rather than who pwn3d royal mail)
Read more “Royal Mail Cyber Incident”