It is no secret that one of the major attack vectors is phishing. While some of the success of this is due to a lack of user education and awareness, the other side of the coin are missing basic controls. There is no shortage of enterprise level phishing controls out there, Mimecast and Proofpoint for example. However, these are not silver bullets when it comes to protecting ... READ MORE
Defense
Prevent GPO from applying to your attack VM
You’re on an engagement and just obtained your first set of credentials. Score! You attempt to join your Windows VM to the domain and you are greeted with a warm message: “Welcome to the __ domain”. You’re excited to have your initial foothold in the network but you quickly realize these credentials don’t provide much access. We need to go deeper! You start looking for ways ... READ MORE
Interior Routing Protocols: The Basics
Being part of the blue team it is helpful to have familiarity with routing protocols as they help you move traffic throughout the network and if you don’t well, then you have come to a good place to start. Routing protocols can be classified into two different categories: exterior and interior. Exterior routing protocols focus on routing from a network to the internet while ... READ MORE
Segmenting, Subnetting and You
I completed a week of Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) training and passed the exam. I learned an interesting bit about how to quickly subnet. I would like to focus on how to subnet quickly without a calculator. For blue teamers, this skill is useful for implementing and evaluating segmentation. For red teamers, it can be useful for determining the number of potential ... READ MORE
Block Cipher Modes of Operation: A Primer
Block ciphers, as the name suggests, encrypt a cleartext by splitting it into individual blocks. Therefore, a key property of a block cipher is its block size which describes how much data that cipher encrypts at a time. For example, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has a block size of 128 bits regardless of key size. AES128, AES192, and AES256 all describe the key size ... READ MORE
Flash….Thunder!
So another year has passed and what an active year it was, chocked full of security events, breaches, and account dumps! Accounts that have been breached continue to pop up on multiple sale sites and we continue to see a trend that has plagued the industry for years and years... password reuse. I know what you're thinking, oh boy another blog about password reuse and why ... READ MORE
Defending Web Apps: WAFs versus RASPs
Edsger Dijkstra once famously stated, "Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs." Accordingly, even well-tested web applications written by the most security conscious developers are still likely to contain security flaws. In light of this reality, defense-in-depth is a wise strategy. A common means of defending web applications in production is through the use of a ... READ MORE
Encryption Basics: HMAC
We have covered a method for key exchange, and we have covered a way to implement public key encryption and message signing. Our topic today is hash-based message authentication codes or HMAC (a subset of message authentication codes). An HMAC provides us with most of the features of message signing, but it is quicker. There are times when you will use one over the other, and ... READ MORE
Penetration Panel Follow-Up: Defensive Best Practices
We recently held a Penetration Panel webinar that consisted of a nice mix of our attack and defense teams. The event afforded participants an opportunity to submit questions to the experts prior to the start of the webinar. One of the questions that I was slated to answer was "Describe the best practice methods you've discovered work best to prevent/detect unauthorized access." ... READ MORE
Encryption Basics: RSA
Number two in our encryption basics series. This time we are going to get into a well-known form of public key encryption, RSA. I plan on giving the same boiler plate warning for each of these; if you promise not to use this for encrypting anything truly important, you are allowed to skip the next couple of lines. The programs contained herein (obligatory lawyer speak) are for ... READ MORE