I had a conversation a few days ago that highlighted an interesting similarity between offensive security and, oddly enough, baby pictures. The conversation was with a photographer who worked extensively with families (family portraits, baby pictures, etc.). The photographer mentioned that they offer a package for parents to get pictures of their babies at newborn, […]
Some lessons learned from the ransomware attack on the City of Atlanta
On 22 March 2018, the public learned of a ransomware attack in the City of Atlanta information systems. The City of Atlanta held a press conference soon after the news broke and multiple news outlets covered the incident. In this article, I don’t want to re-hash the information already presented but rather highlight a few […]
Cyber Attack on the City of Atlanta – A stark reminder of the need for and importance of ethical hacking
Thursday morning (22 March, 2018), the City of Atlanta’s computer systems fell victim to what’s being called a ‘cyber attack’. According to the information that we’ve seen thus far, the attack is apparently a ransomware attack demanding payment in exchange for the decryption keys to unlock the affected data. According to news articles, local, state […]
Excellent article on the Georgia “Computer Crime” bill, SB315
S.B. 315 uses the term, “unauthorized access,” which is a very murky term. If you’re trying to go through all the proper channels in advance and get authorization for something, it’s not always clear who the person who has the authority to give that authorization is. If it’s a website and you’re testing some part […]
Partnerships to make the wise wiser; leveraging relationships to advance information security
At the end of the day, our goal is to help our clients see their organization from the perspective of an attacker; the unpatched vulnerabilities, the exposed services, the naive employee, the real-world risk that their security strategy has to address. It seems simple but, for someone that’s internal to the organization and actively engaged […]
Critical Infrastructure, Energy and More – The growing dangers of IoT
The Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the way that the world does business. I don’t mean things like Facebook, Twitter and all of those cat videos that everyone seems to be obsessed with, I mean the cool things that the Internet has enabled us to do (or do better). Connecting offices […]
Overview of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities
Both the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are basically design flaws in most modern CPUs (manufactured in the last decade or so). Some initial reports indicated that the vulnerabilities were specific to Intel CPUs but it’s now confirmed that other CPUs are impacted (AMD, ARM, etc.). The root issue is the way that memory is segmented […]
More than 591,000 systems in the US available via Remote Desktop with only a username and password
What is RDP? Remote Desktop Protocol, or RDP, is a tool that many organizations leverage to allow users to access systems remotely. It’s built into all modern versions of Windows, is easy to enable, typically uses the same username and password used to access other systems (laptop, desktop, email, etc.) and offers a full desktop […]
Knowing what you don’t know. Some lessons learned from Equifax and WannaCry.
It seems like we’re seeing report after report in the news about so-called ‘cyber attacks’ in organizations that, it seems, should have known better or done a better job at protecting themselves (and our data). What didn’t they know that led to the attack (and subsequent breach)? What could they have done to have prevented […]
How the Wannacry, Petya and ransomeware attacks underscore the need for offensive security
Organizations across the Internet are falling victim to cyber attacks costing not only time, productivity and revenue but also immeasurable damage to reputation and client / vendor / public trust. In some cases, the attacks constitute a failure to maintain regulatory compliance (HIPAA, GLBA, FIRPA, etc.) and in all cases, the attacks confirm that the […]