Black Hawk Down I’m guessing a lot of us in the IT and Security space have experienced the gut wrenching feeling of not receiving that ICMP ping reply you were expecting from a production system, be it a firewall, switch, or server. Was there a recent configuration change that happened prior to the last reboot?…
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ADExplorer is a tool I have always had in my backpack. It can be useful for both offensive and defensive purposes, but in this post, I am going to focus more on its offensive use. The tool itself can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/adexplorer A typical scenario I often face on engagements is that I have…
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For many organizations, rapidly implementing work-from-home initiatives over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic required quickly rolling out new processes and deploying new technologies without adequate time for attention to Information Security standards. Perhaps your company recently acquired a new line of business, and you want to make sure the integration won’t adversely…
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While there is a wealth of free information intended to help larger organizations use the MITRE ATT&CKTM Framework, these resources often assume that the reader has dedicated security teams, deep technical skills, and/or a catalog of supporting security tools. But what if small organizations, compliance teams, or risk management professionals want to leverage ATT&CK? Never…
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An organization’s overall security posture can be viewed from multiple different angles, such as technical assessments, program assessments, controls assessments, and risk assessments. A number of different frameworks for each of these assessment types exist, intended to help both technical teams as well as leadership organize security program building activities. Some of these include: Penetration…
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Logging, monitoring, and alerting programs are some of the most critical elements of any security and compliance program, but traditional approaches for implementing and upgrading these capabilities are often noisy, expensive, and laborious. Traditional Alerting Approaches are Failing During program assessments, we find that a lot of clients are generating so many alerts that they…
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Why Does Strategy Matter? The term ‘security strategy’ can be ambiguous and often means different things to different people. Because of this, many organizations do not have a formalized security strategy and those that do may not have an effective one. This is understandable. Managing the day-to-day issues associated with a security program (alerts, audits,…
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The MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) Framework (https://attack.mitre.org/) is “a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques” that is “open and available to any person or organization for use at no charge.” One of the most beautiful parts of the MITRE ATT&CK™ Framework is that its information can be analyzed to…
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Too often organizations spend their security budget in ways that don’t necessarily make the most sense for them. Whether this be purchasing unnecessary appliances or securing an overly broad area, wasting valuable and often scarce security dollars isn’t good for anyone, except perhaps those providing the unnecessary services. A risk assessment, as the name suggests,…
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