Tag: Defense in Depth

Posted in Current Events, Informational, Research

“Hack the Hackers…”

Posted on by Steph

Cybersecurity in the News

It’s been in the news that after two large cyberattacks against 2 Australian companies the government is:

  • Contemplating a law to prevent paying ransomware payments
  • Creating a team to ‘hack the hackers’
Computer screen filled with orange, red, white, and green ‘code’

The problem with the former solution is that it will hurts businesses more than hackers. The time to outlaw payments for ransomware has long passed in my opinion. It doesn’t appear to offer a solution really or it doesn’t answer the real problem which is that there a lack of push or support for shoring defenses that would lower the success of these attacks.

The second outcome I have less of an opinion on. Though I will say that active countermeasures (similar to this idea) has been a idea in cyber for years.

Dark Reading has more to say on the latter than I.

I just think this geopolitically is something to watch. I’m also curious to see how cybercriminals might respond to both proposed actions.

More Reading:

Posted in Goals, Informational, Labs, Research, Using, Walk-Throughs

Build a Lab with Me:

Posted on by Steph

PiHole

More Info:

The Pihole is a device built on a single board computer (sbc). The device acts as an ad-blocker for your network. There are also blacklists that can be applied or you can build your own.

I good deal for people build these with a raspberry pi, but I found 2 orange pi zeroes for cheap and decided to build on out of this.

Found a video that shows you how to put wireguard vpn and unbound dns on the orange pi along with pihole. Thos is the one I plan on following.

Posted in Informational, InfoSec History, Research, Vulnerabilities

There is no Safe Haven: Mac Attacks

Posted on by Steph

I was all set to write about an interesting job in infosec today and then I woke up and saw reports of a new attack: ‘Pacman’, being leveraged against Apple computers. This report got me thinking about a conversation I saw on Social media where a connection was asking about what laptop to buy. One of this person’s friends mentioned getting an Apple because they are ‘safer’ than Windows machines and ‘antivurs wasn’t needed’ (no one but us tech geeks recommend Linux it wasnt even in the running). I recall thinking that laypeople are just really unaware that Apple systems are getting targeted at higher rates in recent years . So here we are talking about Mac Attacks.

As a disclaimer I’ve got no real dog in whatever battle exists between OSes. As a tech-head I have systems that run Windows, MacOS, and several flavors of Linux. The job isn’t to safeguard a specific type of system it’s to safeguard them all.

We can say, oh MacOS and Linux OS distros have less know vulnerabilities or are attacked less often, but to say that one or the other doesn’t have any or doesn’t get attacked is untrue. All systems are opened to be attacked.

Some Recent Apple Malware:

  • Pacman
  • Silver Sparrow
  • XLoader
  • GoSearch22
  • Thiefquest

A more in depth look at some Apple vulnerabilities and malware can be found here or here.

I will always advocate for user to protect themselves. Defense in depth isn’t just for enterprises it also means that users shouldn’t assume that the systems are just inherently ‘safe’. When people say security is everyone’s business I can support that because your end security should be your business which includes setting precautions to overlap where initial software and hardware might fall short.