Autosploit is a new tool that has only recently been released to the public by “cyber security enthusiast”, “VectorSEC“. It’s obvious that the release of such a tool be a controversy, after all – even legitimate non-automated tools used by noble pentesters and security researchers get enough slack as is, just due to the nature that these tools can be abused and packaged into other “kits” marketed to those with malicious intent. And on the tweet about its release, it is also obvious that people are... 

Things are about to get interesting in Security Operation Centers around the world, GDPR is going to hit like a bunch of bricks. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) also known as EU Regulation 2016/679 is about to become “enforceable” on May 25th 2018. It requires that EU member states standardise on data protection rules, with the founding principle that data is inherently owned by the resident/citizen that the data references, meaning that organisations are essentially custodians of their end users data. Just like when you... 

A group from the hacker collective of Anonymous have today announced one of their leaders and author of the book DARK OPS: AN ANONYMOUS STORY, CommanderX has asked for asylum in Mexico after making a land crossing from Canada through the US, under the Anonymous named Operation Golden Eagle. Operation Golden Eagle had been an ongoing campaign launched in September 2017, but according to members the original plan was first talked about as far back as August 2015. The operation was announced on October 23rd via their Twitter account OpGoldenEagle... 

I work for a US bank in their security operations team, a couple of years ago we got hacked. This is my story I how we got hacked, how we tracked down the breach, what we did wrong, what we did right and the lessons learnt. I got the call on an early summer morning I was still asleep when all hell broke loose, we had been hacked, we had lost millions of our users personal identification details, including emails, addresses and phone numbers. As we would find out later our users would be targeted in penny stock pump and dump scams, targeted emails... 

As a cyber security guy I always start the year looking at what security conference are coming up in the next 12 months, just so I can plan my itinerary. You always get the SANS events which are always good quality, especially their training sessions, although they can be a tad expensive. You also get the specialist events, those focused on encryption, those focused on regional forums and more recently those focused on Crypto-currencies like BitCoin or DodgeCoin, which, if you are interested in those fields that’s great, but not of an interest... 

Having taught a number of Cyber Security classes in the past year I often get asked what equipment cyber security students need to be successful. Fortunately there is a simple answer, you need Internet access, and a decent laptop. You are not going to get very far as a student with out the Internet, especially when learning about cutting edge technology or techniques in cyber security. Laptop’s however are slightly more complicated, there are many different types of laptops, with different configurations, different RAM, CPU hard disks etc... 

Bob Lord, CISO over at Yahoo has confirmed the company was hacked and the perpetrators got away with account information for half a billion users. From what is likely to be one of the largest hacks of all time Bob’s statement casually drops in the following “investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network” That’s right according to Bob, they were attacked by a NATION STATE! No if’s no but’s, the state-sponsored actor is no longer in their network. It is unusual... 

We are entering the third phase of Cyber Security. Phase one was all about perimeter security, read Firewall, and Anti-Virus, if you had those two security controls you were “secure”. In this phase your security team was the firewall guy/gal. Then we started to hear about big organisations getting hacked, Sony, Target and JP Morgan Chase were just a few of the big ones to hit the front pages of newspapers across the globe. The target CEO was a casualty of their hack, and board rooms started to take security seriously. Late phase one... 

I am a big fan of Security Information Event Management (SIEM), I mean if you don’t know what is actually happening in your environment you certainly can’t claim to be secure. Your SIEM solution will see new users created in Active Directory, it will see new software installed, it will see a login in to your network from a foreign IP address, but here is the problem. As the attacks from external sources become more sophisticated it become harder to understand what to look for within the audit logs. What does a breach look like? What... 

Interestingly I found myself in Dubai this past week, attending the GISEC security conference, one of the big tech conferences in the region. Now I am a fan of Dubai, the weather is warm, well bloody hot if I am honest, the hotels are the best on the planet for the money, and I always feel safe wandering around Dubai, even if I am wandering around at 3:00am because my body clock is still on UK time. But here’s the thing, I went to check in to my hotel on Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan Road, walking distance of Dubai World Trade Centre, where all...