7 Minute Security

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. Today's episode is a follow-up interview with Joe Klein, who is my good pal, a former coworker, and a SOC analyst extraordinaire. You might remember Joe from things such as...this podcast - episode #290 to be exact. When we last left Joe, he had just started an exciting new journey as a SOC analyst, and also picked up a new sweet gig teaching college-level security courses. So Joe and I sat down last week in the 7 Minute Security studios to talk with Joe about: How to be an absolute beast at networking Seizing new opportunities (even if it seems scary) Good certs for security newbs (and not-so-newbs) to pursue Life as a SOC analyst How to learn security by teaching it! This interview was an absolute blast to work on with Joe, and after it was over, neither of us could believe that the run time was nearly 2 hours! So in order to help you navigate the episode and have the best listening experience possible, we created the following "Choose Your Own Adventure" timeline with the high (and low?) discussion points of the interview. Enjoy! (Interview timeline available on 7MS under episode #321)

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. This week I sat down with Lane Roush of Arctic Wolf to discuss the big hairy beast that is...(insert dramatic music here) logging and alerting! I work with a lot of clients (and you probably do too) who want answers to these questions: What in the world is going on in my network? How will I know if bad stuff is happening? If I do identify the bad stuff and attempt to eradicate it, how will I know if I've exorcised all the demons? So Lane and I sat down to discuss this conundrum, and explore answers to other burning questions like: Why is it so hard to separate the signal from noise when trying to figure out what's happening in the bowels of your network? Should logging/alerting be a full-time job for one or more people? When does it make sense to outsource these responsibilities? Check out today's interview to learn more, and also reach out to Arctic Wolf on their Twitter or LinkedIn for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. In today's episode, I talk about my fun experience using the Sn1per automated pentesting tool. It's really cool! It can scan your network, find vulnerabilities and exploit them - all in one swoop! It also does a nice one-two punch of OSINT+recon if you feed it a domain name. And, I tell a painful story about how a single checkbox setting in a firewall cost me a lot of hours and tears. You can LOL at me, learn from my pain, and we'll all be better for it.

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. This week's show is another interview episode - this time with my pal Bjorn Kimminich of the OWASP Juice Shop. If you've never heard of the Juice Shop before, it's the world's most secure (and I mean that sarcastically) online shopping experience. Actually, it's chock full of security issues, which makes it a fantastic learning tool for Web app pentesters, be they seasoned or total newbs. Bjorn and I sat down (over Skype) to discuss: How the Juice Shop came to be The current status of application security (is it getting any better?!) Common vulnerabilities still found in today's Web apps Juice Shop being featured in Google's Summer of Code How dev teams can better bake security into their products What's next for the Juice Shop (hint: stay tuned after the episode is over for a hint on one new "feature") Bjorn has gone to great lengths to provide documentation about how to get up and running with a copy of the Juice Shop to begin your hacking. Personally I find it dead simple to follow Bjorn's instructions for spinning up a Docker container: docker pull bkimminich/juice-shop docker run --rm -p 3000:3000 bkimminich/juice-shop Should you find the Juice Shop to be a valuable tool, please be sure to ping Bjorn on Twitter to let him know. Be sure to follow the Juice Shop on Twitter as well. Psst...this account sometimes tweets coupon codes which can help you unlock certain challenges!

Today's interview features Justin McCarthy, CTO and cofounder of StrongDM, which offers both commercial and open source tools (like Comply) to help customers with SOC compliance. Justin schooled me (in a nice way) about a lot of things, including: What SOC and the various SOC types are all about What SOC compliance costs What to look for in selecting a good auditor Tools that can help companies make SOC compliance efforts go more smoothly

In this episode I wanted to give you some cool/fun updates as it relates to 7MS the business! Specifically: A new member of the 7MS team (kinda!) The weird and varied projects I'm working on Upcoming podcast sponsors (probably in July) 7MS has a "real" office coming soon to the southern metro of MN (hopefully!)

As a continuation of last week's episode I'm now making a bit of progress in finding a good backup solution that protects USB backups both at rest and when pumped up to the cloud. I mentioned I've been using BackBlaze for backups (not a sponsor), and they allow you to backup USB drives as long as they're connected at least once every 30 days. That's cool. However, many of my USB drives are not encrypted, and I want to protect myself in the off chance that someone breaks in and steals all my stuff while those unencrypted drives are connected. My BackBlaze backup PC is just a little dinky box running Windows 10 Home, so I don't have access to BitLocker. I was gonna drop the ~$100 for the Windows 10 Pro upgrade, but I coincidentally was doing an endpoint security product evaluation at the same time, and so I grabbed a copy of ESET's DESLock (also not a sponsor) because it was on sale. Where I'm stuck now is that the USB drives are unlocked, and yet for some reason BB can't properly back them up. I've got a ticket into their support folks, and will update you once we get to part 3 of this miniseries.

You probably create DR plans for your business (or help other companies build them), but have you thought about creating one for yourself? Yeah, I know it's grim to think about "What will my loved ones do to get into my accounts, backups, photos, social media accounts..." but it's probably not a bad idea to prepare for that (spoiler alert: we all die at some point). Today I talk about how I'm beginning to build such a plan so my wife can take over for my/our online accounts. This plan includes: A "here's how I run all our technology" Google doc with domains I have registered, their expiration date, what their function is, etc. A how-to guide on restoring data from our online backup solution Implementation of a password manager

As I was preparing for my Secure 360 talk a month or so ago, I stumbled upon this awesome article which details a method for getting Domain Admin access in just a few minutes - without cracking passwords or doing anything else "loud." The tools you'll need are: PowerShell Empire DeathStar Responder Ntlmrelayx I've written up all the steps in a gist that you can grab here. Enjoy!

It has been a heck of a week (in a good way), and I'm taking a break from security so you can help me untangle a mystery that's been wrapped around my brain for years. I need you to help me figure out what this dude meant when he said that something was as frustrating "as boxing a cat." P.S. if you hate off-topic episodes no worries! We'll be back to our regularly scheduled security program next week!

This week I dove into building a Cuckoo Sandbox for malware analysis. There are certainly a ton of posts and videos out there about it, but this entry called Painless Cuckoo Sandbox Installation caught my eye as a good starting point. This article got me about 80% of the way there, and the last 20% proved to be problematic. I got some additional answers from the Cuckoo documentation but still left some answers to be desired. Through a lot of Googling, banging my head against the wall and looking at the GitHub issues list, I finally got everything working. I've taken my entire build process and included it as a gist here. Enjoy!

Last week I was in the recording studio to record three 7MS commercials aimed at churches. The goal was to educate them on some security topics and close with a "hook" to contact 7MS for help securing your church. The commercials themselves are embedded in this episode so please have a listen and let me know what you think! I'll also let you know (via the podcast) when these commercials hit the air. It's likely the station won't air in your area, but you can catch it on the interwebs if you so desire (thanks again for your support, mom).

Cracking passwords in the cloud is super fun (listen to last week's episode to learn how to build your own cracking box on the cheap at Paperspace)! In the last couple weeks, customers have asked me about doing a password strength assessment on their Active Directory environment. I asked around and read a bunch of blogs and found a method that I think: Extracts the hashes safely Parses down the dump to contain only the hashes (so that if somebody popped my Paperspace cloud-crackin' box, they'd have just a list of half-cracked hashes and that's it) Does the work pretty automagically I talk about this in more detail in today's podcast, and here's the gist you can follow with all the necessary commands to get AD crackin'!

I had an absolute ball this week trying to figure out how to crack passwords effectively, and on the cheap, and in the cloud. Today's episode goes into much more detail, and embedded below is the Gist of my approach thus far. If you've got things to add/suggest to this document, let me know! P.S. if you don't see the gist because you're reading this in a podcast-catching app, head to https://7ms.us and look up today's episode and you'll see the gist in all its gisty glory!

Hey, so this week I am without my main machine - thus no jingle or "jungle boogie" intro music. Feels weird. Feels real weird. Anyway, ya know how I teased last week that 7MS could possibly be coming to a radio station near you? Well I think it's more of a probability than a possibility at this point! I met with a radio exec a few weeks ago and we talked about: Lots of people still listen to the radio (who knew?) Creating a "security minute" spot that would lead to a commercial about 7MS How to write a good commercial "hook" It's difficult to write a 60-second commercial! Targeted advertising at churches, which is an under-served market when it comes to infosec Writing a new (shortened) 7MS jingle More on this today on 7MS!

We've dug into some pretty technical topics the last few weeks so we're gonna take it easy today. Below are some FAQs and updates I'll cover on today's show: FAQs What security certs should a sales person get? What lav mic should I get for podcasting? How do I know if I'm ready to take the OSCP? When are you gonna do some more YouTube videos? When will the PacktPub project be done? Updates Don't forget to check out these new and/or updated pages on BPATTY: Caldera LAPS PwnedPasswords Speaking engagements I learned that the Cryptolocker song was played as muzak for a security conference. That makes me LOL ;-) Those of you in Minneapolis/St. Paul are invited to join me for Blue Team on a Budget lunch and learn at Manny's - it's on May 3 and hosted by OneIdentity. I'll be at Secure360 on May 16 to give my Blue Team on a Budget talk at 9:30 a.m., and I'll also be hosting our pal Bjorn for his Twin Cities vs. OWASP Juice Shop workshop on May 17. Gonna be awesome - hope you can come to either event (or both!).

Today is part two of evaluating endpoint solutions, where I primarily focus on Caldera which is an adversary simulation system that's really awesome! You can essentially setup a virtual attacker and cut it loose on some test machines, which is what I did as part of an endpoint protection evaluation project. The attacks simulated are from Adversarial Tactics, Techniques & Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) project. So the big question is...did any of these endpoint solutions catch some of the simulated ATT&CKs? Check out today's podcast to find out! Oh, and I wrote up my quick install guide for Caldera here.

I've been super pumped about Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords project ever since it came out - especially when I saw a tweet about using it in Active Directory so that enterprises could essentially stop people from picking previously pwned passwords! That led me to explore the following two solutions: Pwned Passwords DLL This blog entry has everything you need to get started with this GitHub project. If you've got some coding skillz you can probably give everything a quick read and have the DLL installed and running in no time. If you're like me and have little to zero Visual Studio experience, head to my BPATTY site page about Pwned Passwords where I've laid everything out step-by-step! Bottom line is this is a FREE way to check AD passwords against Troy's list of 500M+ previously pwned passwords. Awesome dude! SafePass.me I gave this commercial solution a demo and it worked fine as well. It's about $700 USD and comes packaged in an .MSI file that you simply double-click to install, then reboot the domain controller(s). It looks to do the exact same thing as Pwned Passwords DLL but without having to build a DLL or install it manually.

I'm working on a fun project right now where I'm evaluating endpoint protection solutions for a client. They're faced with a choice of either refreshing endpoints to the latest gen of their current product, or doing a rip and replace with something else. I've spun up a standalone AD environment with ~5 Win 10 VMs and nothing on 'em except a current set of patches. The idea is I can assign each workstation VM an install of INSERT_NAME_OF_POPULAR_AV_VENDOR_HERE and have somewhat of a "bake off." Now what I'm finding is there are great sites like [AV Test](AV Test) or AV-Comparatives do a nice job of breaking down what kind of performance, features, and management offerings a given vendor has. But what I haven't found is some structured testing for "act like a bad guy" actions. I'm thinking things like: Mimikatz tomfoolery Lateral attacks with Metasploit shells Egress port scanning (to find an acceptable outbound port for C2 or data exfil) Jacking around with various PowerShell scripts and commands However, thanks to some awesome friends on Slack they pointed me to what looks to be a nice set of scripts/tests - many of which could be used to see what kind of behaviors the endpoint protection will catch. So coming up in part #2 of this series, I'll do a deeper dive into: RTA Atomic Red Team

I've had a fun week with a mixed bag of security related stuff happening, so I thought I'd throw it all in a big stew and cook it up for today's episode. Here are the highlights: Bash bunny preso I had a fun opportunity this week to speak to some property managers about the threats the Bash Bunny poses to an environment. Specifically I showed the one-two punch of: How BB can steal your wireless network pre-shared keys that are saved to your PC How BB can go into "Responder mode" to capture credentials From the comfort of my mom's basement I can steal all this stuff, have it emailed to me, then drive up to your parking lot and join your wifi network with valid network creds! Sneaky bunnies FTW! Bloodhound I got to run this on a big AD environment this week and the results were super interesting. I'm working on a down and dirty Bloodhound quick start guide for BPATTY (coming soon). Brian's botched wireless Lesson learned this week: doing large Nessus scans from your home network can crush your ERX so scan with care (specifically, go into your Nessus policy and don't scan as many hosts simultaneously - I cranked mine down from like 100 hosts at a time to 5).

Intro CredDefense is a freakin' sweet tool from the fine folks at Black Hills Information Security that does some really nifty things: Password filter Lets say you use the out-of-the-box password policy that comes with Active Directory, and you want to change your password to Winter2017! - AD is gonna say "Yeah dude/dudette, go for it...it fits the bill!" But from an attacker's perspective we know this is bad - people love to pick bad seasonal passwords like Winter2017, Summer2019, etc. With CredDefense's password filter in the mix, any new password gets checked against an additional word list, and if there's a match found within, BAM!! - password rejected. Password audit Ok, so now are you curious who in your AD environment is already using crappy passwords like Winter2017? Load up the password audit feature, feed it a big wordlist like rockyou, and you'll be good to go in no time. ResponderGuard This is a nifty PowerShell tool that can jack with pentesters/attackers in your environment who are running the popular cred-stealing Responder tool. And what I especially appreciate from a blue team perspective is that if ResponderGuard catches Responder in use in the environment, it can stamp a log in the event log, which can then in turn generate an email if you're using something like WEFFLES (which we talked about recently) and the nifty WEFFLES email script my pal hackern0v1c3 put together here.

In today's continuation of last week's episode I'm continuing a discussion on using free tools to triage Windows systems - be they infected or just acting suspicious. Specifically, those tools include: FTK Imager - does a dandy job of creating memory dumps and/or full disk backups of a live system. You can also make a portable version by installing FTK Imager on a machine, then copying the C:\Program Files\wherever\FTK Imager\lives to a USB drive. FTK on the go! Redline grabs a full forensics pack of data from a machine and helps you pick apart memory strings, network connections, event logs, URL history, etc. The tool helps you dig deep into the timeline of a machine and figure out "What the heck has this machine been doing from time X to Y?" DumpIt does quick n' dirty memory dumps of machines. Volatility allow you to, in a relatively low number of commands, determine if a machine has been up to no good. One of my favorite features is extracting malware right out of the memory image and analyzing it on a separate Linux VM with something like ClamAV.

I had the privilege of creating a Windows System Forensics 101 course/presentation for a customer. The good/bad news is there is so much good information out there, it's hard to boil things down to just an hour. For the first part of the presentation, I focused on Mark Russinovich's technique of using Sysinternals as the primary surgical tool. This approach includes things like: Use Process Explorer to find processes with no signature and/or description. Put any suspicious processes to sleep before killing them (it's more humane! :-) Use autoruns to find registry entries, scheduled tasks, etc. that might be hooked to malicious executables that run on startup. Rinse and repeat. In part 2 (coming up soon!), I'll continue the forensics fight and talk about tools like Redline, Volatility and FTK Imager! Stay tuned.

Last week I talked about how business has been going with the LLC. Today I answer some additional questions that I didn't have time to address: How I'm finding leads/projects to work on (TLDR: I'm NOT sending 1TB of PDFs to people, spamming them, calling them endlessly or LinkedIn'ing everybody and their mom) The interesting conversations I'm having with customers who seem a little tired of the traditional pentest/assessment song and dance (spoiler alert: they're looking for people with solutions and who will actually help remediate the stuff in the report!) The training services I'm offering are getting a lot more interest than I expected - and I think that's due to some of the sessions being more technical, yet not as intense as, say, a SANS course or the OSCP. More on today's show!

Intro Here's some of the "juice" that has helped 7MS have a successful start: Support system Ok so I think if you're going to have a successful business, you need an awesome support system. Mine consists of some of these things: Faith - I'm a Christian and pray about this business constantly. In fact I learned really quickly how easy it is to brag about your rock-solid faith when everything is going fine. And then when suddenly the rug is pulled out from under you, you find what your faith is really made of! My wife - she's my biggest supporter and cheerleader. Financial advisor - we have a great "money guy" who helped us plan for moments like these, where income might be slower as I drum up business. Trusted advisors - I'm blessed to have a partner called InteProIQ that has been a sounding board for a zillion and one questions. Everything from helping me quote projects and set hourly rates to marketing plans and connecting me with other business owners and contacts. General "get your business started" stuff Form your LLC - I just Googled how to do it, and found a bunch of articles with good info. Basically I found my state's Web site hierarchy and within that was a place to register the LLC and grab an EIN for tax purposes. Bank accounts - I visited my local banker and setup work checking/savings/etc. Tech tools to help you get the job done Quickbooks - I use this to keep track of expenses, send out quotes, reconcile invoices, etc. Expensify - I use it to track receipts and mileage. They even give you an email address where you can forward receipts to and it'll work it's awesome OCR magic to automatically extract the vendor, charge and date. Awesome! Toggl - a free Web interface (and app) to track time for projects (if the client doesn't already have something they want me to use) ....more on 7MS.us!

WEFFLES are delicious! WEFFLES stands for Windows Event Logging Forensic Logging Enhancement Services and is Microsoft's cool (and free!) console for responding to incidents and hunting threats. I had a chance to play with it in the lab this week and for the most part, the install of WEFFLES went well, but I had one minor issue that was cleared up easily. As I went through the MS TechNet article, I wrote a full install write-up on my BPATTY site. So go gobble up some WEFFLES and let me know how it goes!

Today I'm excited to be joined by my friend and advisor Kevin Keane (Twitter / LinkedIn) who is a lawyer, blogger, keynote speaker, business advisor, and just all around great guy. Kevin and I sit down to talk about: How SMBs can take some productive security baby steps How to get the most value out of your next security consultant engagement Can breaches ever be funny? What is the Trust Calculus? Do I need to care about GDPR? That and much more is coming up today on this special interview edition of the 7 Minute Security podcast!

GDPR in a nutshell GDPR, in a nutshell, is a set of legal regulations focused on the privacy of personal information for EU citizens - no matter where they are. Entities that store and/or process personal information about EU citizens must clearly explain to the citizens what data is being stored and processed, and any parties the data is being shared with. The citizens must opt-in and agree to each instance or reason that their data is being stored and processed. The citizens also must be able to, at any time, request a copy of the data or request that it be deleted. How does GDPR define "personal data" As "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person." When do GDPR regulations start being enforced? May 25, 2018. What are the key roles organizations need to be aware of as it relates to handling data under GDPR regulations? Two primary roles: Controller An entity that determines the purposes, conditions and means of the processing of personal data Processor An entity which processes personal data on behalf of the controller What are the GDPR lawful basis for processing data? Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose. Contract Legal obligation Vital interests Public task Legitimate interests Are there any good step-by-step guides to GDPR compliance? This site lays things out at a high level with a 12-step program, if you will. How can I learn more about GDPR? This http://gdprandyou.ie/ site is a great GDPR primer, and this PDF from Imperva is good as well. I also googled GDPR for dummies and found some good results too :-)

Back in episode 280 I talked about how I started working with PacktPub to start authoring a video course on vulnerability scanning using Kali. Since that episode I've found that recording and editing high quality video clips is taking waaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy longer than I'd like, but it's worth it to create good stuff! PacktPub authored a tool called Panopto to make videos, but I found it a little frustrating to work with, so I'm going with the following janky - but functional - recording setup: Record raw video using iShowU Pull that video into iMovie and cleanup all the mistakes Record audio in Quicktime Pull audio clips into iMovie and edit those to match up with what's happening in the video Export video as 1080p Additionally, here are a few little tweaks that help the content creation match up with PacktPub's requirements: Resolution should be 1920x1080 (full HD) - I just bought a secondary monitor for this. Specifically, an HP 22cwa. I set my .bashrc file to use all white for the terminal prompt. See this article which helped me out. In Terminal I created a PacktPub profile that has font as Monospace Regular 20pt.

Hey folks, I had originally planned to cover the CredDefense toolkit but I couldn't get it working. I'm basically having the same issue that someone reported here. Sooooo....will have to save that for next week. In the meantime, this episode features a story about how I nearly knocked a retina out of my sister's face with an ice ball when I was about 8 years old. Yep, she's still mad about it, but I think 2018 is the year for forgiveness! Enjoy, and we'll talk to you in 2018. Blessings to you and yours!

Did I mention I love the Critical Security Controls? I do. And here's an absolute diamond I found this week: This site (http://www.auditscripts.com/free-resources/critical-security-controls/) offers awesome CSC-mapping tools (and they're free!), specifically: A spreadsheet with how the CSCs map to other popular frameworks like ISO and NIST A manual assessment tool for measuring your org - or someone else's org - against the CSCs. Flippin' sweet right? RIGHT! Also, be sure to come and Slack chat with us, as my pal hackernovice is building a tool called MacMon to help you satisfy CSC #1! Lastly, I built an LOL-worthy pentesting recon tool called SSOTT (Scan Some of the Things) that might help you automate some NMAPing, DIRBing, NIKTOing, and the like. Cheggitout!

My pal and former coworker Joe Klein joins me in the virtual studio to discuss: His career as a diesel mechanic and insurance guru How to leave a stable job, take a huge pay cut and start a risky infosec internship (sounds like the name of a broadway musical!) The start of his new career as a SOC analyst The importance of having a career cheerleader/mentor Being hungry for knowledge and certifications without being ashamed or afraid to look like a newb CompTIA Security+ and Cisco CCNA Cyber Ops certs The proper pronunciation of the word "dude" How to do a proper Arnold Schwarzenegger impression Other references made in the episode: Arnold Schwarzenegger the love poet Joe welcomes your comments, concerns, insults and questions via email (listen to today's episode for the address!) or Twitter.

Two weird things happening in this episode: I'm not in the car, and thus not endangering myself and others while podcasting and driving! My once beloved lav mic made a trip through the Johnson family's washer and dryer. I don't know that she'll ever record anything again. We'll see once it fully dries out (fingers crossed). I spent some time this last week getting back into Windows systems forensics, which has been really fun. If you want a play-by-play guide with some fantastic, practical, hands-on advice, grab yourself a copy of the Blue Team Handbook: Incident Response Edition. I also started a forensics page on BPATTY. Also, I picked up a Google Home Mini for $30 and can honestly say it quickly has found a special place in my tech/geek heart...even if it is recording everything I say and sending it to the NSA. But a small device that will play Michael Buble's Christmas album as soon as I command it with my voice? Worth the privacy sacrifice. Finally, if you're in the St. Paul, MN area tomorrow and wanna hear me come talk about "Blue Team on a Budget," come to the Government IT Symposium - more info here.

Sorry the podcast is late this week - but it's all for good reasons! I'm busy as a bee doing a ton of pentesting so I have a smattering of random security stuff to share with you: Mac High Sierra root bug Did you hear about this? Basically anybody could log in as user root on your system without a password because...there isn't a password! Read the Twitter thread where I originally read the news here, read about the root account madness here, and then read how the fix broke file sharing here. BPATTY ROCKS! I tried to wiki-fy my BPATTY project to make it a bit easier to read, so head to bpatty.rocks and let me know what you think! I'm BURPing a lot I can't tell you how fun it has been to get back in the pentesting saddle and hack some Web sites these past few weeks. Here are a few tips/tricks others taught me that have helped me get back in the swing of things: In Burp, state files are being depreciated in favor of project files. Read more here For BApp extensions, here are a few that help you get the job done: retire.js looks for old/outdated/vulnerable Javascript libraries Software vulnerability scanner helps you find vulnerable software, such as old versions of IIS CO2 has a bunch of tricks up its sleeve - my favorite of which is helping you craft sqlmap commands with the right flags More on today's show!

Well, after over-teasing this last week, I'm excited to announce that I've started my own company! 7 Minute Security, LLC gives me an outlet to do all my favorite infosec stuff, such as: Network assessments Vulnerability scanning Penetration testing Training Public speaking I welcome you to check out 7MinSec.com for more information. Or 7MinuteSecurity.com or SevenMinuteSecurity.com. Collect 'em all! What does this mean for the podcast? Nada - I'll keep cranking it out. Maybe we'll cover a few more business related topics (people have asked about how to get an LLC off the ground, so I might do an episode or two on that), but otherwise everything's the same! What about the Patreon project? Because I've been blessed with this opportunity - which will in turn help me keep the 7MS lights on - the Patreon campaign will close down soon. For you lovely Patreons, I've sent you a message (via Patreon site and via email) with more details.

We're continuing to hammer on the CSCs again this week. Here's some rad resources that can get your CSC efforts in the right direction: CIS Implementation Guide for SMEs CIS Cybersecurity quarterly newsletters Netdisco lets you locate machines by MAC or IP, show the corresponding switch port, and disable it if necessary. Defensive Security Handbook isn't specifically mapped to CSCs but offers great advice to tie into them. Open-Audit tells you what's on your network, how it's configured, and when it changes.

Nothing to do with security, but I've heard this song way too much this week. I love the CIS Controls but it seems like there isn't a real good hands-on implementation guide out there. Hrmm...maybe it's time to create one? Speaking of that, check out the MacMon project and chat with us about it via Slack. After hearing rave reviews about Fingbox (not a sponsor), I picked one up (~$120) and wow, I'm impressed! It's got a lot of neat features that home users and SMBs would like as it related to mapping to CSC #1: Ability to map network devices to users to create an inventory Email alerts for new devices that pop up on the network Block unwanted users from the app, even when not directly connected to the LAN Nice set of troubleshooting tools, such as wifi throughput test, Internet speed test, and port scanning of LAN/WAN devices More on today's show...

For a long time I've been electronically in love with the Critical Security Controls. Not familiar with 'em? The CIS site describes them as: The CIS Controls are a prioritized set of actions that protect your critical systems and data from the most pervasive cyber attacks. They embody the critical first steps in securing the integrity, mission, and reputation of your organization. Cool, right? Yeah. And here are the top (first) 5 that many organizations start to tackle: Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Devices Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Software Secure Configurations for Hardware and Software Continuous Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation Controlled Use of Administrative Privileges Google searches will show you that you can definitely buy expensive hardware/software to help you map to the CSCs, but I'm passionate about helping small businesses (and even home networks!) be more secure, so I'm on a quest to find implementable (if that's a word?) ways to put these controls in place. I'm focusing on control #1 to start, and I've heard great things about using Fingbox (not a sponsor) to get the job done, but I'm also exploring other free options, such as nmap + some scripting magic. More on today's episode...

My plans for this week's podcast went hush-hush, kablooie, bye-bye, see ya, adios. So, I'm pinch-hitting and going off-topic and talking about...of all things...cops. Now wait! Wait wait! Don't run away. I'm not going all political on you or anything like that. Just wanna share some anecdotes and perspectives on the following: What it was like growing up with a dad who was a cop Losing a cousin in the line of duty Getting a call from my local police department this week claiming I was a danger to a school bus full of kids. Whaaaaa? Oh, and I sing a little bit on this episode too.

I'm gonna level with you: it's been a heck of a week. So I thought I'd try something a little different (and desperate?) and use this episode to answer some FAQs that come in via email and Twitter DM. Today's burning questions include: Q: Do I think it's dangerous to podcast and drive? A: Not really, especially now that I got one of these babies. Q: What is the eJPT cert all about? A: It looks like a pentest training/cert path that sits somewhere (difficulty wise) between CEH and OSCP. It's favorably reviewed and will set you back a few hundred dollars. Have you taken this cert? I'd love your feedback and, if possible, to do a mini Skype interview with you for the show. Drop me a note and lets chat. Q: What's a good place to practice Web hacking skills online? A: I've been a long time fan of Juice Shop, and up next in my queue is HackTheBox. Q: Any more Vulnhub.com VMs in the works? A: Kinda. Listen to today's episode :-)

I went to my first ever banking-focused infosec conference a few weeks ago (WBA's Secure-IT) and learned a ton. I met some really great people and had many productive conversations around security. The main takeaways from the conference that I talk about in today's episode: Standing all day and talking about security is exhausting! You can thwart "swag whores" (sorry mom, but I learned that that's what they're called!) by pushing your merch table deep into the booth so it's touching the rear curtain. That way people have to go through your "people perimeter" and engage in conversation with you in order to be granted access to the swag! From the conversations I had with the staff at these small banks, they're definitely wanting to slurp up as much helpful info from the sessions as possible. Specifically, finding ways to better improve security posture using free/cheap tools is ideal! I attended a few sessions that got my blood boiling. The outline of these talks went something like this (slight exaggeration added, but not much): Hackers are way smarter and more physically attractive than you, and they can get by all your defenses with ease You're helpless, hopeless, and not physically attractive Luckily we (Vendor X) are here and we offer our patented Super Solution Y that will thwart the APTs 100% of the time, no question, guaranteed People don't appreciate being talked down to, nor do they want to be shamed, blamed or scared into making security better. More on today's episode...

I'm excited to announce I'm going to be a PacktPub author! I'm going to work with them to create a course on network/vulnerability scanning. I'm pumped, but kinda nervous, so when I had the initial conversations with PacktPub staff, I made sure I hit them with my burning questions: Q: Are you going to ask me to create a sweet course and then pay me pennies for every digital copy sold? A: No. Authors get paid a lump sum up front and then share in profits for digital copies sold. Q: Who's gonna dictate the project outline - as well as timeline for recording it? A: It's a joint effort. The author dreams up the timeline, fine-tunes it with PacktPub, and then hammers out a mutually agreeable project timeline. Q: Do I have to buy some expensive software/hardware to make these videos? A: Not really. PacktPub did recommend I buy a better microphone (so I got a Snowball), and then they license authors a copy of Panopto to record the videos. More Qs and As covered on today's episode!

Intro The patching solutions review concludes this week with Ivanti's patch solution, as well as PDQ Deploy/Inventory. As a quick reminder, here's where our bake-off currently sits: Ninite (covered in 7MS #275) ManageEngine (covered in 7MS #277) Quick reminder: none of these solutions are bribing me with fat wads of cash to plug their products. Some day I hope to have such problems, but today is not that day. Ivanti You might know Ivanti as Shavlik - that's the product name I'm more familiar with anyways. Back in February, Shavlik became Ivanti. Pros Pretty easy to install and manage - even without a deep background in IT (in today's episode I tell a story that can back this claim based on my experience) Does a solid job of applying patching Windows OS and third party Cons Pricing is a little steep - last figures I saw were ~$80 per server, per year and ~$40 per workstation, per year. ITScripts library (that allows for GPO-style policy enforcement) is a little slim when compared to similar functionality offered from other solutions PDQ Deploy/Inventory Pros Lets you crazy with building custom packages you can deploy to granular groups Awesome online help resources, including a YouTube video library that's got a video for just about everything Quick response to support tickets Cons A bit more complicated to get comfortable with than the other solutions A little confusing on the Windows patching side - not quite as "point and patch" as some of the other solutions Agentless system - machines have to be able to "see" the PDQ

Intro We're breaking ground with this episode, folks! For the first time in 7MS history, we've got a guest on the show (finally, right?!). Rob Sell is an IT manager who has been working in IT for many years, with a focus on information security specifically for the last 4 years. He recently came home from Defcon 25 with a third place in the SE CTF. Rob sat down with me to discuss the CTF, how to make an outstanding CTF audition video, OSINT tools/tips/techniques, the value of tech/security certifications, career advice, and more! Interview notes and links Here's Rob's Defcon CTF audition video EchoSec helps you see a geographical area at a certain point in time. According to the Web site, EchoSec is "the most comprehensive social sentiment tool on the market" - hmmmm, seems like a great SE tool! X-Ray is "a tool for recon, mapping and OSINT gathering from public networks." Michael Bazzell's Web site has online training, free tools and other goodies. Michael also has some books. Christopher Hadnagy has a podcast that's strictly focused on SE. He's also got some books. ArcGIS isn't necessarily labeled as an SE tool, but can certainly be used for SE efforts.

ManageEngine Desktop Central Overall, I have to bluntly say that I really enjoyed playing with ManageEngine's solution. It's got a crap-ton of features built into it - above and beyond patching - that I think IT/security folks will really appreciate. Pros Agent or agentless management of systems MDM (didn't play with it but it certainly looks feature-rich) Application white/blacklisting Ability to push out configurations for things you'd normally use GPOs for - i.e. setting a login banner, enforcing screen locks, setting IE homepage and search engine, etc. Patch management is full-featured - it's easy to setup a simple "scan systems, download and deploy missing patches." Or just a "scan to identify missing patches" kind of thing. It's easy to run a variety of reports to find out which systems are most vulnerable, which patches are missing across the enterprise, etc. Software deployment engine - there's a big package library where you can easily search and deploy things like Dropbox, Adobe Reader, etc. It also includes a self-service portal where users can simply select certain packages and have them installed automagically! Inventory - ability to have detailed hardware/software level details on each machine. Ability to block software by path and/or hash. You can also give people a warning saying "We're gonna nuke dropbox in 2 days if you keep it on here!" Agent-based install gives you ability to chat with users, remote control systems, send announcements, drop to a command line at a target machine, etc. Reports - you can create a report for just about anything under the sun like AD group changes, user logon reports, users that are disabled/expired, and on and on... Email alerts - I think you can trigger an email alert for just about ANYTHING that happens in the environment. ...more on today's episode!

This is it! The worldwide Internet debut of an original infosec-themed song called CryptoLocker'd, and as the name implies, it's about a CryptoLocker incident. Here's the quick back story: A few years ago a worked on an incident response where a user got phished with a promise of a free burrito from Chipotle but instead got a free order of CryptoLocker! And rather than tell IT or sound the alarms, the user just left for the day! The next day they came back and the company was digitally on fire, and they played ignorant to what was going on. I found the user's handling of the situation humorous (read: not the CryptoLocker infection itself!), so I was inspired to write a song about it. Today's episode has the audio, and I welcome you to follow along with the lyrics below (head to 7ms.us to see the full lyrics as they are included in a GitHub gist)

This episode continues our series on comparing popular patching solutions, such as: Ninite ManageEngine Ivanti PDQ Ninite This week I focused on Ninite, and here's the TLDR version: Pros Does one thing (third party patching) and does it really well Extremely affordable User interface is clean, simple and really easy to use/learn Cons No "agentless" option - it's an agent or nothin' I'm not sure if Ninite has the brand name recognition and reputation to be accepted/respected by large companies I need to do more homework on how they pull down their packages...are they ripping apart packages and repackaging them at all? That could be a big avenue for side-loading icky stuff.

I'm back from Vegas! My talk went really well and I'm excited to tell you about it in today's episode. First, some conference/trip highlights: During the ILTACON conference I attended a great talk by Don McMillan about how to infuse humor into your work environment. Really enlightening, and you know those things you hear about how humor lowers blood pressure, increases satisfaction and just overall makes you a more pleasant person to be around? Turns out it's true! On the day before my presentation I got my first experience touring around the Vegas strip, and the people watching did not disappoint. I also saw the Muhammad Ali and Van Gogh exhibits, which were awesome. When it came to the actual talk, everything went really well. The audio/visual stuff all worked perfect, and I felt the content delivery went over well too. People asked a lot of questions and even hung out afterwards to discuss security topics further. There were two big surprises I wasn't expecting, though: A podcast listener was at the conference, and shared with me that after listening to lots of 7MS episodes, he always figured I looked like Jared from Subway. :-( There were super talented artists from a company called Filament did a comic-book style retelling of my talk live as I was doing it. I love crazy-talented people like this, so I was totally geeking out. I reposted the renderings (with their permission) at my personal portfolio site if you wanna check 'em out.

I ran out of time in episode #272 to tell you about why preparing to be a speaker for ILTACON was way more stressful that preparing for Secure360 a few months ago. The main points of difference/stress were: ILTA wanted to see PowerPoint deck progress weekly, whereas with Secure360 it was pretty much "Your talk is accepted - see you at the conference!" ILTA is going to show a "speaker slide" with bio a few minutes before the sessions starts. That way the session is focused on content (and probably avoids people who like to talk about themselves too much :-) ILTA requested my PowerPoint and handouts a few weeks before the session so they could put on their Web site for attendees to see. Although that put some pressure on me to get content done early, I think it's great because presumably some people at the talk will have screened the content and therefore be more tuned in.

This is part 2 of a series focusing on public speaking - specifically for the ILTACON conference happening in Vegas this week. In this episode I share a high-level walkthrough of my talk and the 10 "Blue Team on a Budget" tips that the talk will focus on. These tips include: Turning up Windows auditing and PowerShell logging Installing Sysmon Installing Security Onion Don't put too much faith in endpoint protection Keep an eye on Active Directory Install RITA Deploy a Canary Use strong passwords Install LAPS Scan and patch all your things