Hacked Off

Many security guides out there presume that you're implementing security on an existing system or an existing product; look at what has been missed and improving things incrementally - but what if you're building something completely new? If it's a new product or a new company, things can be a different.

When you're struggling with security many experts will tell you that you should have started sooner - but where exactly do you start? You can't PenTest a product before you've written your first line of code, so what should you do first?

It's difficult to fit it all in without making an episode that goes on for days - but in today's episode Holly Grace looks at some of the common aspects to security starting with design and building up to implementation, and response.

Key Points:

2'35 Testing too late makes it harder

4'15 Design, Implementation, and Protection

5'30 Security Policy: Updates, Passwords, and Authentication

6'45 Awareness Training: Why the policy is that way

10'42 Policies and Implementation not matching

15'10 How frequently should you Pen Test?

19'05 Response: Logs, Alert, and Hunting

Links

Secarma's Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment - https://www.secarma.com/services/cybersecurity-assessment/maturity-assessment.html

NIST Cybersecurity Framework - https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework

NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework - https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/caf/cyber-assessment-framework

Listening Time: 24 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

In this episode we follow up on recent news events including the Travelex Ransom payment, fraud linked to Covid-19, and US-Cert Guidance on the cyber risks from North Korea - plus Secarma announce a Charity Support Fund.

Key Points:

2'45 Travelex: Paying the Ransom

4'28 Business Continuity and Getting Through Lockdown

5'25 FTC report on Covid-19 Fraud

8'35 Blurring nation states and organised crime

11'10 Cryptojacking Attacks and the ICO

13'33 Extortion Campaigns

16'43 Charity Support Fund

Links

Charity Support Fund: https://blog.secarma.com/charity-support-fund.html

US-Cert Guidance: https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/DPRK_Cyber_Threat_Advisory_04152020_S508C.pdf

FTC Report: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/attachments/coronavirus-covid-19-consumer-complaint-data/covid-19-daily-public-complaints.pdf

Listening time: 19 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

We look into the importance of protecting user privacy and the difficulty of anonymising data - both in regards to COVID19 as well as broadly for businesses.

Key Points:

0'45 The benefits of location-tracking

3'15 The risks of location tracking

6'36 Reducing risk through pseudonymisation

10'07 The risk of sharing data

12'00 Balancing benefit and protection

14'10 The 5 Data protection questions

Listening time: 20 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

In Lockdown Episode 2 we're talking about video conferencing vulnerabilities, staff complacency, and security awareness risks brought on by job role changes.

Key Points:

2'00 Zoom under security researcher scrutiny

6'03 Stealing passwords from video-conferences

9'30 Network architecture and working from home

13'05 Staff complacency and risk

14'35 Job role changes and risk

16'12 Attack surface reduction

Listening time: 18 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

For this episode we're starting a new mini-series, investigating how recent news events are impacting companies; in part 1 we're looking at performing effective internal infrastructure tests, remotely.

Key points:

5'08 Assessing VPN security

6'41 Differences with remote testing

8'30 Our (VOT) Virtual Onsite Testing Solution

9'30 Hackers hacking home WiFi

11'00 Making remote-internal testing effective

Download on iTunes: apple.co/2Ji61Ek

Listening time: 13 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

What do you do when a pandemic hits and you are forced to send your entire workforce to work from home? Is your business ready for the technical and security risks that comes with that? What have you missed?

COVID-19 is presenting organisations with new challenges and testing their business continuity plans. Holly Grace Williams talks about these challenges and a few things you may not have already considered.

1'58 The challenges of working from home

8'43 The perfect time to be hacked

10,27 Phishing

13'38 Events

16'18 Web traffic

Download on iTunes: apple.co/2Ji61Ek

Listening time: 18 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

Secarma's Technical Director, Holly Grace Williams, discusses how threat actors could bypass your wireless security through guest WIFI, pre shared keys, or even enterprise wireless security. She talks about the benefits of network segmentation and how your networks may not be as separate as you think!

Key Points:

1'20 Network segmentation

3'38 Technologies to protect wireless networks

5'56 Open wireless networks

11'12 Pre shared keys(PSK)

13'12 Cracking hashes

19'57 Enterprise security

Download on iTunes: apple.co/2Ji61Ek

Listening time: 25 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

There seems to be a colour for all the different types of cybersecurity teams these days, but is there any value behind these marketing buzzwords and what do they really mean? Holly Grace Williams takes us through the different 'team' definitions and how to look beyond their colourful names!

Key Points:

1'41 The difference between penetration testing and red teaming

3'25 Red Teaming and Blue Teaming

4'13 Purple Teaming

9'04 White Teaming

9'56 Gold Teaming

11'19 Looking past the marketing buzzwords!

14'33 TIBER - Threat intelligence based ethical Red Teaming

16'30 Atomic Red Teaming

Download on iTunes: apple.co/2Ji61Ek

Listening time: 20 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

On Saturday 8th February 2020, Redcar & Cleveland Council was hit with, what is thought to be, ransomware. Holly Grace Williams discusses the wider impact of hacking a council, and the brand damage that can come from this kind of attack.

Key points:

1'27 What happened to Redcar & Cleveland Council?

1'50 Do people really understand what ransomware is?

4'll The timing of ransomware attacks

6'44 Why restoring from backup is not always as simple as it sounds

8'17 The wider impact of councils being hacked

13'04 Dealing with brand damage from a breach

21'39 How can you have confidence in an organisation's security?

Download on iTunes: apple.co/2Ji61Ek

Listening time: 26 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams, Technical Director at Secarma

Is your antivirus working for you? It wasn't for James Mckinlay, the Group Information Security Officer at Barbican Insurance, so he made the controversial decision to switch it off! James discusses why he made this decision and infrastructure he built to replace it.

Key points:

1'18 The decision to turn off antivirus

2'35 Alternatives to antivirus

4'10 Application whitelisting

13'28 Cyber Essentials

16'53 To patch or not to patch

23'00 Other things we turned off

34'50 Not everyone should switch their antivirus off!

Download on iTunes: apple.co/2Ji61Ek

Listening time: 40 minutes

Hosted by: Holly Grace Williams | Technical Director at Secarma

Guest: James Mckinlay | Group Information Security Officer at Barbican Insurance