Brilliance in the Basics

Introduction


Tired of watching you and your friends get compromised, do exactly what's in this blog and start beating adversaries. Avoiding the memes adversaries win because of simple mistakes and neglect and we all already know what they are so I'm going to list them for you. Its all for free too.





Enumerate

To put it simply, there shouldn't be anything you don't know about your environment, you should know who all your users are, where all your electronic devices are and what they do, what applications you have and what versions they are. Enumeration is the jet fuel for making good defensive decisions. I wrote about how to enumerate your environment here Securing your estate: The First Step (goblinloot.net). Follow these steps and become the arbitrator of your own environment 

Your perimeter is a bridge, not a wall

Monitor your perimeter as best as you can but always assume it has already been defeated. Monitor endpoint system and process telemetry and southwest traffic for threats. Use your understanding of your environment to identify network activity that should not exist like domain controllers connecting to random domain names and build detections for them.

As much as possible segment your assets using ACLs on your switches so desktops cant communicate with MRI machines and other very much unrelated assets.

Take control of what is allowed on your assets

Most adversaries use binaries that need to execute regardless of their sophistication so take a whitelist approach and prevent items from running unless they are approved. This will defeat most malware. Controls like "Block at first site" and "Windows Defender Application control" are incredible at this. Projects like this will save your life https://github.com/HotCakeX/Harden-Windows-Security/wiki/WDACConfig

With that said build robust channels between your IT department  and users so that they are confident the IT department is there to support them and provide them with what they need otherwise you will be plagued with shadow IT. You can read more about Shadow IT here Shadow IT: Your Bible (goblinloot.net).

Beyond WDAC Microsoft offers the two following ASR rules that will save you from new files that reveal themself to be malware.

  • "Block executable files from running unless they meet a prevalence, age, or trusted list criterion"
  • "Block executable content from email client and webmail"
These rules will cover the vast majority of initial access vectors.


Disable anything your organization isn't using

This is generally the premise of CIS controls and id highly recommend implementing them and if their configurable items in your operating system not in use just simple eliminating the vector can go a longway. A really fascinating example is RPC firewall which you can read about here zeronetworks/rpcfirewall (github.com).

ASR from Defender Antivirus is also a fantastic example of just eliminating vectors with 16 options you can just prevent from being abused.


Take control of internet browsing

Most users get compromised because they click and navigate to the internet, there are a multitude of controls available to reduce this risk. On servers or assets, you wouldn't expect users to browse to the internet enable all available zones security to the highest level.



Where users are permitted to browse the Internet implement a control like Defender SmartScreen to prevent access to websites with malicious or suspicious attributes, implement content type filtering to cut down the number of ADs accidentally clicked and enforce an ad blocker like unblock origin 



Plug and play does not exist

If you purchase a security technology and are told its all ready to go you have been lied too. Any control needs regular review, tuning and validation regardless of how much lobster the salesperson buys you. You need to ensure your new control is covering new and emerging threats and behaves as expected when tested.


If it's not for a human don't give it to a human

Too often people rely on "service accounts" for humans to execute services, this exposes what could of been a relatively low-risk activity into one full of human-related errors and vectors. If you are making use of Active Directory ensure you are using MSA and GMSAs at every opportunity. This also extends to highly privileged accounts, with the use of technology like Privileged access management and privileged identity management solutions the integrity of a highly privileged account can be increased tenfold as opposed to Jeff writing the password on a post-it note.


Set expectations for authentication

Your data is why your business exists and you should not allow people to access it whenever and however they like. Utilize controls like conditional access policies to limit authentication attempts to:

  • Geo locations
  • Managed Devices
  • Strong authentication methods
  • Risk-based scoring
At a minimum, these criteria will stop an adversary from just getting lucky.

Summary

Think about the adversary and not what's convenient for you, you are responsible for data that belongs to humans that could jeopardize their lives. Try harder.







Popular

Endpoint on Adrenaline : One

Image
Introduction   This blog series will capture how to maximise the protection of an endpoint using the various technologies in the Defender suite. The controls outlined in the series will each need to have their own considerations taken into account for a given environment but hopefully at a minimum it will be clear just how powerful of an offering Microsoft has.  Unfortunately due to the highly modular and distinct diversity in controls Microsoft offers things are often overlooked and misconfigured when tests are conducted. With this in mind, the shortest possible route to a solution for this is utilizing the recommendations, CSPM and Secure Score technology contained within Defender 365 and Defender for Cloud as it will automatically conduct posture assessments and inform you of things you have missed and may want to turn on (IE dont take these recommendations lightly) Lastly, I would recommend reading the book “Defender for Endpoint in depth” from packt as it showcases the complexitie
Read more

Investigate

Image
  Introduction This document details how an analyst should conduct investigations and triage in the normal duties of their job. It will describe concepts and logic that enable analysts to look at data, ask investigative questions, evaluate those questions and arrive at assertions about what they have found. An Alert For the most part, analysts begin their investigative work when an alert is generated. Alerts are fantastic because they are a statement that something has happened and something needs to be done about it. Typically alerts are filled with information that an analyst can then use in their investigation. Alerts are generated by detections and these detections can come in many shapes and sizes. Some just look for a particular action like someone unlocking their car door, others might have access to more context like someone who isn’t the owner of the car unlocking the door. Going even further some detections might look at how the car door was opened or at what
Read more

Endpoint on Adrenaline 3

Image
Introduction Now that I have covered the advanced features obtained from Defender for Cloud and the complexities of Defender for Endpoint with the objective of delivering as much protection as possible to the endpoint, I will now explore how to expand on this greatly and open up even more use cases. Microsoft Sentinel This technology will allow us to unify and correlate data generated by other controls. I have decided to deploy Microsoft Sentinel into 4 primary categories : System Administrator - Asset Uptime, Application Inventory, Device configuration and Troubleshooting Network Engineers - Netflow and session traffic, violations and alerts for potential issues Threat Detection - Analytics and playbooks Threat hunting - Workbooks & Machine learning Using Microsoft Sentinel we can achieve a plethora of incredibly powerful use cases with Defender 365 endpoint data. Below is an illustration of how my SIEM works to enable analysts to prevent and detect threats Data Sources In order t
Read more

Writing detections when stuck with EDR

Image
Introduction Making the leap to purchasing and maintaining an EDR solution can be huge for organisations so huge in fact that they never really progress from there when it comes to visibility on assets. This is an important consideration because organisations should aim to achieve some level of detection engineering but will likely never get to explore the associated complexities. So how can organisations effectively and easily write detections that actually help to protect them when they are only able to leverage an EDR tool. Understanding your tools limitations To most people EDR tools are incredibly verbose in the telemetry they capture from any given asset but unfortunately relative to overall telemetry available they actually only capture what the vendors think is the most pertinent. This is for obvious reasons because ingesting telemetry at the scale vendors do comes at a significant cost so they implement "cost-saving measures" like limiting the amount of any one given
Read more

Endpoint on Adrenaline Two

Image
Introduction Continuing on from my last post that captured using Defender for Cloud to gain powerful additional features on top of defender for endpoint to protect your endpoints we are going to take a closer look at Defender for Endpoint itself and extend into some endpoint-specific use cases for Defender for Identity that tie directly back into Defender for Endpoint. Firstly a really important consideration when configuring Defender for Endpoint is that alot of the heavy lifting from a prevention standpoint actually happens in Defender Anti virus. This means that while im going to briefly cover some settings to make sure Defender Anti Virus isnt hindering Defender for Endpoint im going to reserve further Defender Anti Virus controls to the next part in this series. This also of course means that when your doing your own testing just installing the MSSense agent (What you get from the scripts, intune etc) is actually not Defender for Endpoint in its totality so you simply can not m
Read more

Standardized Note Taking Format For Analysts

Image
  Introduction This post outlines a format for note-taking designed to aid analysts and ensure the knowledge they acquire over time is kept so that it can easily be consumed later. This format is designed to be technology agnostic so it can be applied to a note-taking tool or platform of the analyst’s choice. I designed this format because analysts often received what you could call unplanned information whereby at any given moment during their day they could learn something highly impactful to their role via any medium. This really exasperates the need for good note-taking practices for analysts. Illustrated above is the wireframe that analysts can implement into their note-taking platforms. Each section contains sub-sections that allow for different knowledge to remain segregated and more searchable. Meeting Notes Within any given week analysts can have countless meetings and so it is important to note down items from meetings for future review. Not every meeting needs to be capt
Read more

Why you need to be purple!

Image
 It's Bad For those who have worked with me for longer periods, you would have heard me say at least once that I don't believe in the commonly prescribed structure of blue and red team operations as much as there are good intentions behind the separation of operations, human behaviour has prevailed and there exists a quite toxic environment between the two (wrongly opposing) sides. This is a direct contradiction to  our purpose in cybersecurity which is to harden environments and increase resiliency to cyber-attacks. We need to change While purple teaming was not created to replace blue and red operations I have adopted it to do exactly that. Too often I experience clashes between red team operators and defenders whether its online shouting contests or during client engagements behaviour that does not support the iterative improvement of cybersecurity is simply not welcome. Particularly SOC analysts will know this as they will have experienced their fair share of red team eng
Read more

Investigate Two

Image
Introductions How you as an analyst handle true positives is life and death in the eyes of potential victims. Traditionally the industry elected to prioritize overzealousness and sending more than not to cover their failings, This however is no different to guesses and it is possible to arrive at strong data-backed decisions on events that could be the compromise of an estate True Positive True positives exist at the heart of all our jobs, they are what we wake up for in the morning and why we endlessly pursue understanding how to protect our clients. The strictest possible definition of true positive is where an outcome of a prediction or model is returned true. This broad definition is important because the assumption carried with a predication or model can change. As an example many security technologies aim to identify when an application often unwanted by an organization is present within a system, these are commonly dubbed PUPs. (Potentially Unwanted Programs). The general cons
Read more

Securing your estate: The First Step

Introduction A commonly forgotten fact within the cybersecurity industry is that most organizations are not equipped nor have started to form any sort of security program. This is the case for many reasons because most organizations are SMBs so they don't and likely will never have funds to purchase people and technology and the fact that the cybersecurity industry is incredibly toxic for low expertise and or low capability teams as the well of knowledge we all rely on has been poisoned by vendors and 'thought leaders'. With this in mind, I have created a small resource that will guide you through what you need to do to make a start. This resource won't reference vendors and I will try to avoid specific jargon. Enumerate The term 'You can't secure what you don't know' stands strong even to this day and should be your primary focus before you do anything else. Understanding what assets, you have both physically (computer hardware) and logically (applicati
Read more