Ethical Hacking

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 32 today we are discussing about Group Policies.A Group Policy is a set of rules or policies that can be applied to a set of users or computer accounts within an operating system.Now, to Access the Group Policy Editor simply go to the run prompt and enter gpedit.The Local Group Policy editor will then launch and this is used to create and manage policies within a Windows environment.Each policy acts as a security template that can apply a set of rules to different users.These rules can contain things like Password complexity requirements, Account lockout policies,Software restrictions, and Application restrictions.If you're using an Active Directory domain controller in a Windows environment, you actually have access to a more advanced version of the Group Policy Editor as well.In corporate environments, it's common to create a Security Template with predefined rules based  upon your Organization'sAdministrative Policies.This Security Template is a group of policies that can be loaded through a single procedure within the group policy editor. A large part of hardening the operating system occurs through loading different Group Policy objectives or GPOs against the workstation or against the server.These Group Policies are also used to create a secure baseline as part of your larger Configuration Management Program.Using them, new accounts and computers can quickly be configured with all of your organizational requirements. After creating your secure baseline,it's important to conduct Baselining.Baselining is a process of measuring changes in the network,hardware or software environment. Effectively baseline helps establish what normal is for your organization.By knowing what normal is,  you can then identify what abnormal or a deviation looks like. For example, if you're looking at your network utilization over a period of time, you can identify high periods and low periods.If you normally have low periods of activity during a Saturday afternoon, for example, but this Saturday afternoon, you saw an excessively high amount of activity.You should look into that and investigate it.For example, in this image, we can see one very high spike of activity. We would compare this to a known baseline and then determine this spike is expected or if it should be investigated further.Every deviation should be looked at and categorized as either acceptable and expected or an issue to investigate further.Many data breaches have been discovered by investigating higher than expected network utilization during periods of time that should have been relatively low.By looking at this they have found things like data exfiltration and other problems that have happened through the network.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 31 today we are discussing about What is patch management?Patch management is the planning, testing,implementing, and auditing of software patches.Why is patch management so important?Well, there are a lot of patches out there.Each manufacturer is going to create their own patches for their own applications.Part of patch management is keeping track of all of the various updates, and ensuring that they get installed properly throughout your environment.But it's also important to have a patch management system in place to ensure that a patch that is designed to fix one problem doesn't create multiple,new problems for you as well.After all, patches can have bugs in them too.There are fours steps to patch management.Planning, testing,implementing, and auditing.Planning consist of creating policies, procedures,and systems to track available patches and updates,and a method to verify that they are compatible with your systems.Planning is also used to determine how you're going to test and deploy each patch.Microsoft actually provides a useful tool that can help us in determining the status of our system,and whether or not a patch needs to be applied.This is known as the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer or MBSA.This tool can help identify security misconfigurations within your network's workstations.After planning, the next thing is testing.It's important to test any patch you receive prior to automating its deployment throughout the network. As I said before, while a patch is designed to solve one problem, it can often create new ones for you.Within your organization, you should have a small test network or lab or, at the very least,a single machine that you use for testing,where you deploy the patch first and ensure it's working properly.After all, many of our organizations have unique configurations within our networks.And while manufacturers attempt to ensure patches will not cause harm to our systems, this can't be guaranteed.It's better to find out in your lab that a patch is causing issues than to push it out across 10,000 workstations,and then have all your end users yelling and screaming when their systems crashed.After testing the patch,it's time to deploy it to all of the workstations that might require it.You can do this manually or automatically by deploying that patch to your clients' workstations to implement it.If you have a small network, you may choose to manually install the patch across the network.If you have a large network, though,you're going to want to use some sort of a tool.Microsoft provides us with the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager,but you can use third-party patch management tools as well.Some organizations rely on automatic updates from the Windows Update system,while others decide they want to have complete control over the installation of patches. For large organizations, it is highly recommended to centrally manage updates through an update server instead of using the Windows Update tool.This will allow you to test the patch prior to deploying it in your environment.To disable Windows Update,you simply need to disable the Windows Update service from running automatically on the workstation.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 30 today we are discussing about In order to maintain the security of our software, it's important for us to implement updates and patches.But, what exactly is a Patch? A patch is a single problem-fixing piece of software designed for an operating system or an application.Essentially, when we find a bug in the code,this is going to create a problem for us.And a patch is used to correct it.You may have also heard the term Hotfix.What's a hotfix? Well, it's a single problem-fixing piece of software designed for an operating system or application.Now, wait a minute.That's the exact same definition as a patch.Jason, are you trying to confuse us? Well, no.Originally a hotfix was different than a patch.A hotfix could be installed without requiring a reboot of your system.But a patch, required a system reboot.Over time, patches and hotfixes began to be used interchangeably by most manufacturers.Today, whether you call it a patch or a hotfix,it really refers to the same thing.Patches and hotfixes are both considered a general term.But there are more specific types of updates as well.Let's look at five categories of updates.First, we have a Security Update.Security updates are a type of software code that's specifically issued from a product-specific security-related vulnerability.So, if a hacker finds a bug in the code for Microsoft Word,that may allow them to breach your security.Microsoft would release a security update that contains a patch to correct the bug in the code.The second type of update, is a Critical Update.A critical update is a piece of software that's designed for a specific problem that addresses a critical,non-security bug in a piece of software.For example, if Google Chrome kept crashing every time you tried to load Facebook, Google would release a critical update that patches this non-security focused bug.A third type of update we have, is a Service Pack.A service pack is actually a grouping of other patches.It contains hotfixes, security updates, critical updates,and possibly even some feature or design changes.Service packs are commonly seen with an operating system update.As you can imagine, Windows has a lot of security and critical updates that have been released since the initial version comes out. If I installed a brand new copy of Windows 7 today, there would be several hundred patches and updates that I would have to install, to bring it up to the most current and up-to-date version.Service packs provide a single installation file that contains hundreds of these individual updates that can be installed.Generally, a service pack is only released once every other year.Any updates that have been released since the last service pack,would still have to be installed individually. The next type, is called a Windows Update. This is a recommended update to fix a non-critical problem that certain users have found, and it may also provide some additional features or capabilities.For example, if Microsoft wanted to add a new way to display animated background images on your desktop,they could do this as part of a windows update.The final type of update, is a Driver Update.Driver updates provide either a security fix,or additional features for a supported piece of hardware. For example, you might receive a driver update for your network card. And this can help you increase the efficiency in how it sends and receives data.In Windows 10, the windows update program is used to manage all of the different types of updates directly from Microsoft.And it can be configured to allow automated updates to occur as well.This is what most home users will do to increase their security. And ThankYou ...

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 29 today we are discussing about Large organizations like the Federal Government process a lot of sensitive information,and they want to ensure that their operating systems are truly trusted.To provide organizations with a level of assurance, the classification of a Trusted Operating System was created.A Trusted Operating System is any operating system that meets the requirements set forth by the government and it contains multilevel security.For the Security+ exam,you don't need to learn the specific requirements, but you should know that the government has a long list of them.What operating systems meet the criteria to be called a Trusted Operating System? Well, every version of Windows since Windows 7 is considered a Trusted Operating System.This includes Windows 8, Windows 10,Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016.Also, every version of Mac OS X since version 10.6 is classified as a Trusted Operating System.If you're using FreeBSD,if you load the TrustedBSD extensions,this is also considered trusted,as well as Red Hat Enterprise Server.There are other Trusted Operating Systems out there as well,but those are much less popular than the ones listed here.To remain a Trusted Operating System, the software manufacturer must routinely provide patches and updates to the software in order to maintain its security. This is one of the reasons that both Mac and Windows provide frequent security updates,to patch any vulnerabilities that have been discovered. Prior to installing any patches or updates though,you should first verify the current version and build of your operating system.This is done by going to the system information program within your computer.For a Windows machine,you simply run the msinfo32.exe program from the Command Prompt and it'll display the exact version and build of the software.In this example, the computer is running Windows 10,version 10.0.10240.This contains all the patches and updates to the software code through Build 10240.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 28 today we are discussing about Let me ask you a question.How many applications do you have installed on your computer right now?Now I don't mean how many are currently running.But how many exist on your computer in total?Do you have five? 50? 500? Or maybe more?Each application that's installed on your device takes up valuable disk space,but more importantly, it introduces additional code and therefore additional vulnerabilities.To combat this system administers attempt to practice known as least functionality.Least functionality is the process of configuring a work station or a server to only provide essential applications and services that are required by the user.To create an environment of least functionality administrators should restrict unneeded applications, services, ports and protocols.Another method of doing this is to uninstall any unneeded applications.After all, every application that's installed on a computer must be managed, updated and it provides yet another chance for a vulnerability to be introduced into our system.Now, our computers at work are often under a process known as configuration management.Most of our personal computers though have become mess with unnecessary programs being installed and accumulated over time.For example, if you open up your programs and features section of the control panel,take a look at all of the various programs you have installed.You might surprised at just how many are on your computer.For this example this computer had 132 different programs installed that took over 400 gigabytes of disk space looking through that list, there is a lot of unnecessary programs that user could have uninstalled.As we previously mentioned, it's important to keep your programs and you software up to date.Sometimes though, new programs are installed the old version is simply not removed.Recently we updated our video editing software from Adobe Premiere 2018 to Adobe Premiere 2019 after the installation was complete we saw that both versions remained installed on the computer.To eliminate the vulnerabilities from the 2018 version we had to go back and manually uninstall it from our systems now this may be easy to do when you have a small network of just few machines.But how do you do this when you're managing a huge enterprise network? For example one network I used to manage had over 10,000 computers spread across four countries.It would have been impossible for me to send a system administrator to check the installed programs on each and every computer throughout the network.In large networks like this, preventing excessive installations is the best solution.In our corporate networks, it's common for us to create a secure baseline image that we use for all of the work stations across the company.This image will hae the operating system,the minimum applications required and strict configuration policies that are set up for all of those machines.These polices though do have to be updated and changed over time, based on changing business requirements.We can use the Microsoft's system center configuration management or the SCCM tool that allows us as admins to manage large amounts of software across the network as well as push out new configurations and policy updates to all of our PCs.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 27 today we are discussing about In this episode we're going to discuss the 10 best ways to increase the security of your mobile devices.This is known as mobile device hardening.Number one, update your device to use the latest version of the software, whether this is your operating system,your apps or your firmware,you should always be updating it.By updating it, you're making sure that you have all known vulnerabilities patched and secured.Just like your desktop,most devices are hacked because they're not patched from a known vulnerability,so when an update comes out, make sure you apply it.Number two, install antivirus.A lot of people figure that it's a mobile device and it's not a computer so it doesn't need antivirus.But, just like a computer,your mobile devices do need to have antivirus and antimalware installed.Number three, train your users on proper security and use of the device.This includes showing them how to use social media appropriately,what sites are safe to browse and what apps are allowed to be installed.Remember, these are all vulnerabilities that your employee,who's holding the device,can install and use on your device.You have a right to train them the correct way.Next, number four, only install applications from the official mobile stores.At least if you've done that,they have malware checks and security checks and you're much less likely to have issues.Again, this is the App Store for Apple and the Google Play store for Android.Number five, don't root or jailbreak your device.That's going to bypass the security and the built-in protections that Apple and Android have already put in there for you.If you do this, you're asking for trouble.Number six, only use version two SIM cards with your devices.As we talked about in the SIM cloning lecture,version two is very hard to clone but version one is actually quite easy.So you should always use version two SIM cards to help counter SIM cloning.Next, we have number seven,turn off all unnecessary features.Whether this is Wi-Fi, Bluetooth,near-field communication,mobile hotspots, tethering,location tracking, and more.Turn it off if you're not going to use it.If you do have to use Bluetooth,make it undiscoverable.Number eight, turn on encryption for your voice and data.This'll ensure things like Bluetooth,near-field communications, Wi-Fi,and others have encryption enabled whenever you're using them.Number nine, use strong passwords or biometrics for log on.That means you shouldn't be using a four digit PIN.You want to use things like a thumbprint,a face scan, or long, strong passwords,whichever of those three your device supports.Also, you should turn on Find My Phone,enable remote lockout, and remote wipe capabilities before you need them.Number ten, don't allow BYOD.I know I talked about in the BYOD lecture,that you can allow your organization to make the choice, but let's just be honest:bring your own device means bring your own disaster.It introduces a ton of risk; if you use it you need to ensure that you have storage segmentation,and good mobile device management and having your employees allow you to install it.And Thankyou 

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 26 today we are discussing about Bring Your Own Device is a policy that a lot of organizations have been adopting.This means when you come to work,you can bring your own device, and use it on their network.This may be your laptop, your tablet, your cellphone,keyboards, mice, or any other type of device.Some organizations have fully adopted Bring Your Own Device,and others are fully against it.We're going to talk about both,and why you should consider it,or decide not to use it in your organization.Now, when you use Bring Your Own Device,it brings a lot of security issues for you to consider.If I have somebody's laptop that now gets plugged into my network,I'm also introducing all of the vulnerabilities that device had.So, if you took your laptop home,plugged it into your network, downloaded a game,installed the game, and got malware and now you plug it into work the next day,you can bring that malware into work with you.This is a major concern with Bring Your Own Device because as an organization, I don't control your device,and so I don't know the security of it.And, that's one of the major risks with Bring Your Own Device.Now, on the flip side, a lot of companies really like Bring Your Own Device because it means they don't have to buy laptops, and cellphones,and all those type of  devices for their employees because the employee is bringing their own.And, while that might save them money,and it's good for the bottom line, there are concerns.When the data goes on your device, who's data is it?Is it the company's data, or do you have rights to it?Where do you draw the line between what's personal data,and what's business data? A lot of organizations that have adopted Bring Your Own Device, will use storage segmentation.This will create a clear separation between personal,and company data on a single device.Now, there's lots of different ways to create this segmentation.There are highly technical solutions,and then there's highly procedural solutions.For example, you might have an application on your phone that says work, and when you click on that,it opens up a virtual environment, and all of your work is done from within there.And, when you exit that, you're now back into your personal device.That would be a clear technological limitation between the two.Now, you don't always have to use a highly technical solution.In my company, we're very small,we use personal devices as work devices,and so on my phone in particular, I have two email clients.I have one that's on Apple Mail that I use for my personal email, and then I have another one,which is Gmail, using the Gmail app that I use for my company email.That gives me a clear separation between my personal stuff,and my business stuff, and keeps them in separate buckets.Now, again, there's nothing really that would prevent me from loading up my business email inside Apple Mail if I wanted to.Except that we have a policy that says we won't do that.So, we've chosen an administrative control,as opposed to a technical control.Another concern you have with mobile devices under the Bring Your Own Device policy,is how do you ensure that device is always up to date?We talked about how important it is for patches,and updates to be installed on your mobile devices.I can push out software policies to you,prevent you from installing applications,and install updates remotely without your use.But, when I do Bring Your Own Device,are you going to let me install Mobile Device Management on your system?You might not.And, so this is why a lot of companies are now switching from a Bring Your Own Device,because of all those security issues,into a Choose Your Own Device, or CYOD model.CYOD gives the employee a choice of a couple of phones.We might have four, or five models that we support,and we say you can pick any one of these,and we'll pay for it for you. And Thankyou byebye

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 25 today we are discussing about Security of Apps.How do you know the app you want to install is secure?How do you know it's not going to be spying on you?How do you know there's no malware embedded in it?Well, you don't.But the best way to ensure that you don't get those type of things is by installing applications from the official mobile stores only.If you're using an Android device,that's the Google Play store.If you're using an Iphone,that's going to be the App Store.Now, some people have taken their phones and done what's called jail breaking it or rooting it.On an Apple device,jail breaking it means you're going to remove the security protections that Apple has put in place so that you can take it from your wireless carrier to a different wireless carrier or install third party apps outside of the App Store.As you can probably guess,these are both bad security practices and should not be done.Now, we you have an Android device we don't call jail breaking it,we call it rooting it.The reason is because Android is at heart a Linux operating system.So if you root the device,you now have administrative permissions over it.And you can install whatever applications you want and make the phone do things that it wasn't necessarily designed to do.Again, making sure that you don't jail break or root your device is a good first step to ensuring you have a secure device.Next, you want to think about what browser and what applications you're actually running.For example, if you're using the Chrome browser,that's a fairly secure web browser.But if you decide to get a third party web browser,you don't know who it is that put that out there and if you can trust them.Maybe they're giving you this web browser but they're also taking a copy of all your data going through it.To avoid those type of issues,always get official applications when possible.And speaking of web browsers,one of the things you want to ensure is whenever browsing the web on your mobile device,you're always going to the secure version of a website.That's denoted by the https at the front of the web address.This ensures that you have a TLS tunnel created between your phone and the server.What's TLS?Well, it's Transport Layer Security.It's going to put a encryption layer and a tunnel between your device and the server to ensure you have confidentiality and nobody is conducting a man in the middle attack from you.Now as businesses, we are increasingly going mobile all of the time.An Enterprise Mobility has a couple of things that we need to think about when we talk about securing our apps as well.One of those, is making sure we have control over those devices and what apps are installed.If your organization is going to be providing the cellphone to its employees,you have the right to install mobile device management software. MDM or Mobile Device Management is a centralized software solution that allows your system administrators to create and enforce policies across all of the mobile devices.This can ensure that people don't install games like Angry Birds or they don't put a third party apps or that they could only go to certain websites.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 24 today we are discussing about Mobile devices are an increasingly large part of our life.They are doing everything with us these days.When we're on travel, we have 'em with us.And sometimes if we're not careful, someone can steal 'em. For example, this guy's about to get his iPad stolen out of his backpack.It's not going to be a very good day for him.Now, we have to think about all of the data that's on that device.Let's say you were on a family trip and you just took a whole bunch of pictures from your vacation.And now you're returning to the United States,you're going through the airport,and somebody steals your phone.You're not just losing the value of your phone,but you're losing the value of all of those memories that may be irreplaceable.So when you think about what's on your device,one of the most important things is to always ensure that you have a good device backup. And the reason is, the memories, the photos,your files, that's irreplaceable.The device itself, you may have cell phone insurance for or you'll just go buy a new one.But the information on it is what's really critical.Now, let's take it to a darker side.What else is on your device? Well, if you're like most people,you also do mobile banking on your device.And so if you don't have your device encrypted and locked and protected, somebody can take that device and access your account.That's another big issue.So what do we do about this?Well, the first thing is we want to encrypt our device.We want to use full disk encryption on our cell phones and our tablets.By doing this, even if someone is able to steal the device, they won't be able to access the information on the device without the proper PIN and encryption key.Additionally, we want to make sure that we're thinking about setting up tracking on our device.If the device is lost or stolen, you should be able to be pulling the information from that phone and where its GPS location is to determine where it is.Now, just because you know where it is,doesn't mean you should go get it yourself.In fact, police recommend that you don't try to recover your device alone if it's stolen.Instead, you should go to the police and have them go with you to the location of your device that you've been able to find based on its location tracking.And how exactly can you find out where your phone is?Well, if you're using an Apple device,you can use Find my iPhone.If you're using Android, you can use Find my Phone.These are websites that connect to your phone based on its data location and its GPS signal and it will tell you where that phone is located.Now, these sites also have some additional features.One of them is the remote lock option. This will allow you to remotely lock you phone from the website.This will make it so it requires a PIN or a password before the person who has your device can actually log in to it and get access to your data. Another great feature of these sites is the ability to conduct a remote wipe.A remote wipe is going to allow you to remotely erase the contents of the device to ensure that no information is recovered by the thief.Now, why would you want to remotely wipe your device?Because maybe you have some personal things on that,maybe you have personal text messages or photographs or banking information that you don't want anybody seeing.By using remote wipe, even if the criminal has your device, they're not going to be able to see anything on it because you've already formatted the device, even from a remote location.

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 23 today we are discussing about Bluetooth attacks.In this lesson, I want to talk about wireless connectivity and some of the attacks that go against it,specifically we're not going to focus on the 3G, 4G or LTE cell phone part of it,we're going to focus on Bluetooth.Now, when we talk about Bluetooth,there are two terms that you have to know for the exam.Bluejacking and bluesnarfing.Bluejacking is sending unsolicited messages to Bluetooth-enabled devices.This often happens by having somebody who will pair to your device and then send the data to you,so if your car isn't paired up with your cell phone,somebody who's sitting next to you in the parking lot,can pair to your car and send messages to you or if your phone is in discoverable mode,they can go and connect to your phone and send you messages that way.Now when we talk about bluesnarfing, on the other hand,this is unauthorized access of information from a wireless device over a Bluetooth connection.Did you notice the key distinction here?When we talked about bluejacking,we're talking about sending information to a device but when we talk about bluesnarfing,we're taking information from a device.That's the main difference here.Now, one of the ways that you have to worry about this is you have to consider what the Bluetooth-pairing key is.Most devices come with a default of 0000 or 1234.If your devices are set up to use a default key,you are asking for an attack.You're going to become a victim of either bluesnarfing or bluejacking, so make sure you're not using the default pairing key.The other thing is if you're not using Bluetooth,you can go ahead and turn it off on your phone.A lot of us don't use Bluetooth.Instead we use wired headphones,we use a USB cable that connects our phone to our car stereo and if you're no using Bluetooth,it's better to turn it off.If you are using Bluetooth,at least turn it so it's not in discoverable mode.By turning off the discovery feature,it's not there sitting and waiting to accept connections from any devices that come in the area.Instead it will only remain connected to the ones you've already paired.Taking these actions will help secure your mobile device and prevent bluejacking and bluesnarfing. And Thankyou bye bye.....