Last month, I mentioned the possibility of setting up a second virtual firewall in a lab environment to simulate a corporate network with mock internal and external spaces. I frequently do this for CTFs, student pentesting projects, and more. Offensive security training is rapidly moving towards realistic environments. Organizations like HackTheBox which historically have ... READ MORE
Defense
Building a Lab Network in Proxmox and Sophos UTM9
One of the best ways to acquire and maintain an offensive security skill set is to build a home lab and populate it with intentionally vulnerable machines. The most straightforward option is to simply spin up VMs in VirtualBox or VMWare Player and manage everything locally. To take things to the next level, however, you really need a hypervisor like ESXi or Proxmox. Nowadays, ... READ MORE
Using EDR as an Incident Response Tool
What is EDR? Endpoint detection and response (EDR) has been a buzzword in the world of cybersecurity for the last couple years, but what does that really mean? EDR tools are designed to continuously monitor systems for anomalous or malicious activity. A monitoring agent runs in the background, ideally on every endpoint in the environment, and the end user experiences little ... READ MORE
COVID-19 and Palo Alto’s GlobalProtect
With the recent issues involving COVID-19, and the recent closure announcements of college campuses, organizations are beginning to review their capacity to support a larger than normal remote workforce. In the event an office closing, is your organization prepared to support the influx of users attempting to gain access to the corporate network remotely. Can your organization ... READ MORE
Netscaler Still in the Wild
It has been two months since Cirtix released details about CVE-2019-19781, a vulnerability found in their NetScaler product. In that time, we here at RSM have been working with several of our clients to help mitigate this vulnerability and remediate the effects of any successful compromises on their systems. Unfortunately, it appears that many more networks are affected by this ... READ MORE
Solarwinds
How a Default SolarWinds Guest Account Can Facilitate Compromise – and How to Fix It The Problem SolarWinds is a leading provider of network monitoring and configuration management software. However, there’s a default feature on the SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor tool that could be putting your organization at big risk. The issue is a default guest account ... READ MORE
No More Mimikatz
Mitigating Windows Credential Flaws There’s a vulnerability in Windows systems that is leveraged time and time again while compromising a network. Though the technique is well known to attackers, it is rarely mitigated effectively. Bad combination. But it’s convenient… Windows systems will cache user credentials in system memory. In cleartext. This is a default feature in ... READ MORE
Stanford Password Policy
A creative solution for stronger passwords Rules, Rules, Rules Most of us are familiar with basic password rules: Don’t use ‘password’. Duh. Don’t use your username as your password. Got it. Don’t repeat the same password for multiple accounts. Don’t choose an easily guessable password combination, even if it looks complex, e.g. ‘Winter2016’. Ok… I know ... READ MORE
SMB Relay
SMB Relay Attack The SMB relay attack has been around for years, and publicly available tools make the attack easier to carry out. The attack can result in a full network compromise with relatively little effort or expertise on the part of the attacker, making this a very common technique. What’s worse, we’ve noticed many organizations are vulnerable to this attack and might ... READ MORE
Saurus’ Guide to Security+
Hello fellow security professionals and those aspiring to be! Saurus here and excited to write to you on a new blog post. Being a consultant keeps me fairly busy. In addition to managing my workload I recently obtained my COMPTIA Security+ certification. While the experience of taking the exam is still fresh in mind, I wanted to draft up a blog post about some of the ... READ MORE