Another year and another record topping year of even higher ransomware payments; something has to change if we want this to get any better. Some stats first: 51% of all businesses in 2020 were targets of ransomware Overall 40% surge in global ransomware hits in 2020 Average ransomware payments in Q3 of 2020 were over $233,000. A new 2021 report shows that average is up ... READ MORE
Defense
Microsoft Exchange – CVE-2021-26855+
On March 2, 2021, Microsoft released several security updates to address at least seven critical vulnerabilities in supported versions of on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server. These vulnerabilities were observed being used in limited targeted attacks; however, due to the critical nature and publication of these vulnerabilities, Microsoft released guidance that all customers ... READ MORE
How to have effective Enterprise Identity & Access Management (EIAM)
Your business operations can be complex and require multiple technologies such as applications, platforms, services and infrastructure. Effectively overseeing and controlling who has access to what across this landscape can be a daunting challenge. Unfortunately, there are numerous horror stories of failed IAM projects and many companies continue to struggle with effective IAM ... READ MORE
Building a Lab Network – Faux Corporate Networks
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
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