Author: ByteMe
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Weekly Cybersecurity Wrap-up 11/26/23
Projects
LinkedIn Learning – CompTIA Security+ Module 10: Operations and Incident Response | In Progress
TryHackMe – Incident Response Framework – Identification and Scoping, Advent of Cyber (I’m posting these daily throughout December.)
UDemy – Python for Cybersecurity – Gitlab
EdX – EC-Council | Network Defense Essentials – In Progress
Videos
- Generative AI: Top Use Cases for Security Practitioners – With generative AI now ever-present in most organizations, the next frontier for security practitioners is understanding where AI capabilities like machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing can best increase cybersecurity efficiency and effectiveness in their organizations. How can generative AI help your team respond to incidents, discover and patch vulnerabilities, or assist with programming? Or all the above? And what do teams need to consider in order to identify, review, assess risk and develop the use cases before putting them into production?
Articles
- Hackers Hijack Industrial Control System at US Water Utility – Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in Pennsylvania confirms that hackers took control of a booster station, but says no risk to drinking water or water supply.
- Slovenia’s largest power provider HSE hit by ransomware attack – Slovenian power company Holding Slovenske Elektrarne (HSE) has suffered a ransomware attack that compromised its systems and encrypted files, yet the company says the incident did not disrupt electric power production.
- Fidelity National Financial Takes Down Systems Following Cyberattack – Fidelity National Financial is experiencing service disruptions after systems were taken down to contain a cyberattack.
- General Electric investigates claims of cyber attack, data theft – General Electric is investigating claims that a threat actor breached the company’s development environment in a cyberattack and leaked allegedly stolen data.
- A Hacker Faked His Own Death–Then Claimed To Have Sold Marriott Customer Data To Russians, FBI Says – A hacker told the FBI earlier this year that he sold access to the personal data of Marriott hotel customers on a Russian forum, according to a search warrant obtained by Forbes.
- Yamaha Motor Confirms Data Breach Following Ransomware Attack – Yamaha Motor discloses ransomware attack impacting the personal information of its Philippines subsidiary’s employees.
- ownCloud vulnerability with maximum 10 severity score comes under “mass” exploitation – Easy-to-exploit flaw gives hackers passwords and cryptographic keys to vulnerable servers.
- Former Uber CISO Speaks Out, After 6 Years, on Data Breach, SolarWinds – Joe Sullivan, spared prison time, weighs in on the lessons learned from the 2016 Uber breach and the import of the SolarWinds CISO case.
- Five Cybersecurity Predictions for 2024 – Cybersecurity predictions for 2024 to help security professionals in prioritizing efforts to navigate the ever-changing threat landscape.
- Dollar Tree hit by third-party data breach impacting 2 million people – Discount store chain Dollar Tree was impacted by a third-party data breach affecting 1,977,486 people after the hack of service provider Zeroed-In Technologies.
- Okta admits hackers accessed data on all customers during recent breach – Okta chief security officer David Bradbury said the company has since determined that all of its customers are affected by the breach.
- Staples confirms cyberattack behind service outages, delivery issues – American office supply retailer Staples took down some of its systems earlier this week after a cyberattack to contain the breach’s impact and protect customer data.
- LogoFAIL bugs in UEFI code allow planting bootkits via images – Multiple security vulnerabilities collectively named LogoFAIL affect image-parsing components in the UEFI code from various vendors. Researchers warn that they could be exploited to hijack the execution flow of the booting process and to deliver bootkits.
Podcasts
- Smashing Security 349: Ransomware gang reports its own crime, and what happened at OpenAI?
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TryHackMe | Advent of Cyber 2023 | Day 1
I’m a rule follower, so I can’t write up the walkthrough for this TryHackMe room. This one will be a video. Click play above to follow along.
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NameDrop Safe
Apple with iOS 17.1 and watchOS 10.1 introduced a new NameDrop feature that is designed to allow users to place Apple devices near one another to quickly exchange contact information. Sharing contact information is done with explicit user permission, but some news organizations and police departments have been spreading misinformation about how NameDrop functions.
MacRumorsMacRumors put together a well researched article that covers the mess that the news media made of this feature.
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TryHackMe Walkthrough – Incident Response – Identification & Scoping
Preparation is the first room in the Incident Response learning path within the TryHackMe learning platform.
The learning path consist of the following rooms:
- Preparation
- Identification & Scoping
- Threat Intel & Containment
- Eradication & Remediation
- Lessons Learned
- Tardigrade
In this post I will be walking through Identification & Scoping.
Task 1: Introduction
Question 1: No answer needed.
Task 2: Identification: Unearthing the Existence of a Security Incident
Question 1: What is the Subject of Ticket#2023012398704232?
Follow the directions in the reading to dismiss all the Windows Office warnings. Once outlook opens on the VM scroll down the inbox to the first message from John Sterling that’s the one with the correct ticket number from the question. In the message thread scroll to the first message and you will see the ticket information including the subject.
Answer: weird error in outlook
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TryHackMe Walkthrough – Incident Response – Preparation
Preparation is the first room in the Incident Response learning path within the TryHackMe learning platform.
The learning path consist of the following rooms:
- Preparation
- Identification & Scoping
- Threat Intel & Containment
- Eradication & Remediation
- Lessons Learned
- Tardigrade
In this post I will walkthrough the Preparation room.
Task 1: Introduction
Question 1: No answer needed
Task 2: Incident Response Capability
Question 1: What is an observed occurrence within a system?
The answer is in the reading. Look at the first bullets in this task.
Answer: Event
Question 2: What is described as a violation of security policies and practices?
This answer is also in the reading, in the same place as question 1.
Answer: Incident
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TryHackMe – SOC Level 1 Path Complete!
In this post I’d like to talk a bit about TryHackMe and my experience working through the SOC Level 1 learning path.
TryHackMe is a learning platform that sends users to virtual machines (VM) they can access through their web browser. Extremely low barrier to entry! Absolutely no previous knowledge is required. I’m not sponsored and TryHackMe did not ask me to write this.
I’m a big fan of theirs. I think the learning paths and rooms (think learning modules) are fantastic hands-on learnings! I learned
- Cyber Defense Frameworks
- Cyber Threat Intelligence
- Network Security and Traffic Analysis
- Endpoint Security Monitoring
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
- Digital Forensics and Incident Response
- Phishing
Each room walks the learner through hands-on learning. I learned all these tools:
- yara
- opencti
- misp
- mitre
- cyberkillchain
- snort
- zeek
- brim
- wireshark
- sysmon
- sysinternals
- osquery
- wazuh
- splunk
- autopsy
- redline
- linux (a lot!)
- thehive
- phishing
And even more! It’s a great platform. As of this writing it is $14 a month. If you’re not going to use it, don’t sign up, but if you really want to learn these tools and more it’s a great place to get started. You can spend as much time as you want learning these tools in real environments. You can’t break anything because it’s all VMs that start fresh each time the are launched. Getting the chance to work on these environments without setting up all these VMs is a huge time savings.
If you want to play around in there for free you can do that too. There is plenty of free content to get started with and see if you want to pay for the premium rooms and features. It’s worth checking out.
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Weekly Cybersecurity Wrap-up 11/20/23
Projects
LinkedIn Learning – CompTIA Security+ Module 9: Operations and Incident Response | Complete!
TryHackMe – SOC Level 1(100 % Complete): Phishing Analysis Fundamentals, Phishing Emails in Action, Phishing Analysis Tools, Phishing Prevention, The Greenholt Phish
UDemy – Python for Cybersecurity – Gitlab
Videos
Articles
- AutoZone Files MOVEit Data Breach Notice With State of Maine – The company temporarily disabled the application and patched the vulnerability, though affected individuals should still remain vigilant.
- Hacktivists breach U.S. nuclear research lab, steal employee data – The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirms they suffered a cyberattack after ‘SiegedSec’ hacktivists leaked stolen human resources data online.
- Inside Job: Cyber Exec Admits to Hospital Hacks – Healthcare cyber services executive Vikas Singla admits to hobbling hospital operations, then using the incidents to try and gin up extra business.
- AI Helps Uncover Russian State-Sponsored Disinformation in Hungary – Researchers used machine learning to analyze Hungarian media reports and found Russian narratives soured the nation’s perspective on EU sanctions and arms deliveries months before the Ukraine invasion.
- Canadian Military, Police Impacted by Data Breach at Moving Companies – Data breach at moving companies impacts Canadian government employees, and military and police personnel.
- Tor Network Removes Risky Relays Associated With Cryptocurrency Scheme – The Tor network has removed many relays associated with a cryptocurrency scheme, citing risk to integrity and users.
- Windows Hello auth bypassed on Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo laptops – Security researchers bypassed Windows Hello fingerprint authentication on Dell Inspiron, Lenovo ThinkPad, and Microsoft Surface Pro X laptops in attacks exploiting security flaws found in the embedded fingerprint sensors.