Amateur Security Archaeologists, trying not to break things.

Category: Security Concepts (Page 5 of 8)

How visibility makes you the most frustrating victim

Who hasn’t hear this one: “the attacker only need to be right once, and they are a success”. Indeed, the corollary is said just as often: “you only need to be wrong once and you’re screwed!” All of that makes you feel a little helpless, right? Helpless folks give up – and good luck getting them to deal with the myriad of issues that are inherent to securing their environments! We’re going to see how we can turn the tables here, and the first step is to see how visibility makes you a most frustrating victim for adversaries!

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CAPEC Explained: Your Ultimate Guide to Web & App Attack Patterns

If you take a look at the long list of breaches that make front-page news, you may think that a single framework can do a decent job of explaining the mechanisms. But that is not the case – some of the largest most famous breaches or vulnerabilities were web application related like the Equifax breach, Yahoo, First American, Facebook, and more. We can thank these breaches for endless credit monitoring – thanks folks! When we talked about MITRE ATT&CK, we discussed a very popular methodology that focused greatly on network and endpoint attacks. Web and application attack patters are missing, though, so how do we discuss a web or application threat? CAPEC helps us understand those web attack patterns and defend against them!

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Best Friends: What makes the Diamond Model a useful threat modeling tool for analysts?

We’ve covered a lot of different angles to threat modeling. The main takeway for me is that there is no “best approach” – pick what makes sense to you! How you justify that is up to you, and hopefully less controversial than John Lennon’s denial that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD. Here we’re talking about the Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis. This model describes an active event under investigation, but it is mentioned here because it is helpful to understand how this information so directly links to the other models we’ve discussed before. So what makes the Diamond Model a useful threat modeling tool for analysts on the front line?

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A Retro Feast for the Family: The Cyber Kill Chain

Americans reading this may be like me and headed towards a food coma. My gift to you? I give you a crowd-pleasing topic for family banter. Rather than argue over controversial topics, avoiding Aunt Mildred’s hugs, or snoozing through a futile Cowboys game, cook up a retro feast for the family with the Cyber Kill Chain! If you’ve seen the “Fishes” episode of The Bear, you know how bad things can get. So consider this your safe topic, one everybody can enjoy. Your kids will thank you. Your family will be prepared to defend against nation state threats while bickering over the wishbone. Relative peace AND security? You’re welcome.

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Gap Analysis With ATT&CK: Fix Your Posture, Young Man!

Early adopters certainly focused on using ATT&CK for glamorous use cases like Threat Intelligence and Adversary Emulation. Conducting gap analysis with ATT&CK to prioritize engineering efforts is a high-return effort for you and your organization. It’s my favorite of the use cases because it can help any organization! Before the availability of CTI for everyone, many gap assessments conducted by organizations without dedicated threat intelligence teams. The only means available were often based on notional system architectures driven by market trends or vendor pressures. You may have experienced this yourselves – and you may have mountains of shelf-ware purchased in response to the latest fad. By leveraging CTI from frameworks like ATT&CK, you can now ensure that every defensive measure you take provides actual value in countering the threat actors and techniques that are likely to target you.

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