Watering hole attack prevention

Watering hole attack prevention

A watering hole attack is an indirect attack on a victim. Rather than directly attacking the victim’s network, the attacker attacks a web site that the victim’s employees are likely to visit. Then the attacker attacks the victim’s network, via its own workstations, from that web site. A former colleague asked me how you protect against watering hole attacks, and I thought this was a good exercise. So here are some strategies for watering hole attack prevention.

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What to do about Petya ransomware if you already deployed MS17-010

Got MS17-010 deployed? Good, that means you’re immune to the Petya ransomware. I still want you to do something.

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Spot phishing e-mails with Outlook

Spot phishing e-mails with Outlook

I got e-mail the other day from Turbotax saying someone had filed my taxes for me. Obviously a cause for concern, right? Here’s how I determined the message was fake in about three minutes. You can spot phishing e-mails with Outlook the same way.

Some people will tell you not to even open a message like this, but if you’re a computer professional, at some point someone is going to want you to prove the message was fake. I think this is something every e-mail administrator, desktop support professional, security professional, and frankly, every helpdesk professional ought to be able to do.

So here’s how you can get the proof. And generally speaking, Outlook’s default configuration plays it safe enough that this procedure won’t get you into any trouble, at least on modern versions of Windows.

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Password management advice from CSO Online

Over at CSO Online, there’s a nice war story about tracking down and resetting 300 passwords.

I could pick nits at a few of his details, but that’s annoying and counterproductive. His overall advice is very good–manage your passwords, set them to something random, keep in mind that some sites just won’t allow for a very strong password so do the best you can, and protect your main e-mail password and your password management system password with all the diligence you can muster.

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What to do after you get breached and sign up for the free credit monitoring

After a large company that has your data gets breached, the standard next step is to give you credit monitoring.

It’s not enough to protect yourself, but you can make it enough. Read more

New password advice from GCHQ

New password advice from GCHQ

The GCHQ is the British equivalent of the NSA. They recently published a new document containing the GCHQ’s new password advice in light of the things we’ve learned in the last few years. It’s worthwhile reading, whether you’re a sysadmin or a web developer or just an end user who wants to stay secure online.

Some of the advice may be surprising.

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The workstation events you want to be logging in Splunk

Every once in a while the NSA or another government agency releases a whitepaper with a lot of really good security advice. This paper on spotting adversaries with Windows event logs is a fantastic example. It’s vendor-neutral, just talking about Windows logs and how to set up event forwarding, so you can use the advice with any log aggregation system or SEIM. I just happen to use and recommend Splunk. But whatever you use, these are the workstation events you want to be logging.

I want to call your attention to a couple of items in the paper. Most breaches begin on workstations, and this paper has the cure.

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Hacktivism is real, and getting more dangerous

Lost in the stories of last week was a story I really don’t want to talk about, but I have to: Planned Parenthood got hacked, and a database of its employees was stolen.

I don’t want to talk about it because the risk is this story becoming about abortion rather than about security. But it brings up a real problem: Now we know that political activists have the desire and the ability to hack into organizations they disagree with.

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Five things security experts do vs. five things non-experts do

There was a fair bit of talk last week about a study that compared security advice from security experts versus security advice from people who are at least somewhat interested but don’t live and breathe this stuff.

There were significant differences in the answers, and a lot of security professionals panned the non-expert advice. I don’t think the non-expert advice was necessarily bad. Mostly it was out of date.

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Expect a rough road ahead for Flash

Adobe has patched Flash twice in two weeks now. The reason for this was due to Hacking Team, an Italian company that sells hacking tools to government agencies, getting hacked. Hacking Team, it turns out, knew of at least three unpatched vulnerabilities (also known as “zero-days” or “0days”) in Flash, and exploits for these vulnerabilities were among the things that got breached.

That’s why Adobe is having a bad month.

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