Why is user awareness training important for IT security? Phishing operations represent 41% of cyber breach incidents according to the IBM X-Force report. Deloitte estimates phishing to be the initial attack vector in 91% of cyber breaches. These estimates put phishing at the forefront of corporate attack surface because they identify phishing as the most successful method used by attackers to compromise a system and gain initial access to a victim’s network. In response, organizations need to increase their resilience against phishing and other types of social engineering attacks. By testing their staff’s ability to effectively identify phishing attempts and malspam and providing educational material, an organization can identify potential weaknesses and reduce the chance that an employee will fall prey to an attack. Of course, secondary cybersecurity measures should be in place to detect and respond to a successful phishing attack, user awareness training is a good practice…
Penetration Testing
@0x0SojalSec tweeted out a pure genius one-liner for automated SQL Injection pentesting and it while it was mind-blowing, it is also useful to dissect into the various elements. Along the way we can learn some great tools for command line penetration testing! Check out the original tweet or the image below: This is a great example of how automated toolkits can provide do a lot of work that doesn’t cost a lot of time. So, let’s disect the command and learn 5 great command line tools from @0x0SojalSec’s sorcery that will certainly prove useful on a pen-testing engagement. #1 – subfinder Subfinder is a command line tool from ProjectDiscovery.io that accepts a top-level domain and will return a set of subdomains from historical DNS records. Whenever relying on historical DNS records, the output is only as good as the service’s repository of historical data, but ProjectDiscovery’s service is top notch. …
Nessus is an enterprise vulnerability scanner that can perform external and internal credentialed scans and can support a continuous vulnerability management program. Nessus favors ease of use as compared to granular control over scanning which allows quick and efficient scanning configuration. Nessus comes with many pre-configured scans for PCI-DSS compliance, OVAL, and SCAP scanning, and many scans for novel threats such as Solarigate, CISA threat advisories, Log4Shell, Ransomware attacks, and more. Watch the video below to get the full scoop on how Nessus can support enterprise vulnerability management.
In this this series of articles and videos, I will explore some PHP malware code that has been publicly published. All the samples discussed are derived from a GitHub repository maintained by marcocesarato. The advice from Syspect CyberSecurity Consulting is to always maintain solid web-server security through hardened configuration and monitoring, and vulnerability scanning both internal and external surfaces with a tool such as CISOfy’s Lynis or Greenbone’s GVM. For an example of solid LAMP stack server security you can visit the Syspect’s VPS Deploy WordPress GitHub repository which is a tool for automatically deploying a WordPress website on a hardened Linux VPS Server. If you don’t want to secure your own WordPress installation, you can hire a trained security consultant such as Syspect CyberSecurity Consulting, or you can use another 3rd party managed hosting provider. PHP is a scripting language which means its source code is usually in human…
In October 2021, while writing an article about EDR/XDR solutions, I read an article from The Journal of CyberSecurity and Privacy entitled: “An Empirical Assessment of Endpoint Detection and Response Systems against Advanced Persistent Threats Attack Vectors”. I think now is a good time to revisit that research paper. The study tested state of the art EPP and EDR platforms against simulated APT attacks. They key contribution of this paper is that it reveals what type of TTPs are still able to circumvent top of the line EDR solutions. The products tested in the study are a who’s who of leading endpoint security vendors? Seeing a blog post from Recorded Future discussing the same paper reminded me about it, and wanted to contribute my take on it. The full FINAL paper is available and the published version is available by searching Google for the article title “An Empirical Assessment of…
The Details The Log4J vulnerability in the Java logging package maintained by Apache made headlines late last week. It was disclosed as a Zero Day bug which is easily exploitable, received a CVSS score of 10/10, and includes remote code execution (RCE) on the target host. Associated CVE-2021-44228 is available on the NIST NVD website which provides more information and references including the CISA advisory. The number of Log4J installations has been described as “hundreds of millions” and “countless”. Virtually all Log4J versions (<= 20.14.1 which was released in early March 2021) are vulnerable. The most recent version of Log4J is now version 20.16.0 since subsequent patched updates were released in quick succession on December 6th and December 13th of 2021. If you want to know whether a 3rd party application is vulnerable to re-assess your risk, review the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), if one has been provided, it…
Linux Dominates Performance-based Computing Market Share Linux may be less susceptible to cyber-attacks because Windows presents such an attactive target by holding the majority of the desktop marketshare. However, Linux servers dominate the global market in some powerful ways. According to industry reports, Linux OSs comprise 100% of all supercomputers, and over 95% of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. Linux runs on 90% of all cloud infrastructure and dominates the mobile phone market with > 80% of market share. Embedded operating systems, and RTOS for IoT devices? Again, Linux is by far the most popular OS of choice. If you want more interesting facts about Linux’s market presence, you can Read Nick Galov’s revealing 2021 comprehensive summary of Linux market penetration. Knowing how to conduct a Security Audit of a Linux system and services is very important indeed. This most often includes whitelisting required applications and…
What is GVM and OpenVAS? WikiPedia does a really nice introduction to GVM so let jump start our understanding with that: OpenVAS is the scanner component of Greenbone Vulnerability Manager, a software framework of several services and tools offering vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management. All Greenbone Vulnerability Manager products are free software, and most components are licensed under the GNU General Public License. To understand the relationship between OpenVAS and GVM we should refer to the OpenVAS website, which does a good job explaining the relationship between OpenVAS and GVM: In 2019 the branding separation was completed. OpenVAS now represents the actual vulnerability scanner as it did originally and the “S” in “OpenVAS” now stands for “Scanner” rather than “System”. These changes are accompanied by an updated OpenVAS logo. The framework where OpenVAS is embedded is the Greenbone Vulnerability Management (GVM).OpenVAS released with GVM-10 receives numerous performance optimization to address…
Trojan Source: Raw-Bin Hood Pick Pocketing Source Code with Unicode Bidirectional Control Characters
A new type of vulnerability has been disclosed by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK where Unicode Bidirectional Control Characters are used to change the way text appears in the IDE or text editor compared to how the compiler will interpret and compile the source code into an executable. Proof of concept code has been released for virtually every language including C, C#, C++, Go, Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Rust, and more. Here is a link to the original paper, a GitHub repository released by the authors that includes proof-of-concept code samples for virtually every popular language and the issued CVEs CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694, both having severity score of 9.8 “Critical”. Unicode Bidirectional Control Characters are needed in Unicode because Unicode is meant as a super encoding standard which allows all languages (and even emojis) to be contained in a single encoding standard as opposed to say, ASCII which…
These study notes are provided for students of CompTIA Pentest+ exam. If you notice any problems with the notes, please let me know via email (joseph@ripplesoftware.ca). General Pentesting Engagement Scoping Information Gathering Vulnerability Scanning Exploitation Process Pentest Tools Exploit Specifics Post Exploit Communication Processes
