Very interesting read. I had a phone call from a customer of ours that was targetted personally. I spent the past several hours unfolding this scam, and one of the most targetted ones that I've seen in a very long time.
Worth the read, and wow - the organization on this.
I'm glad they reached out to me, normally I get "the subject line has my password, am I hacked?" phone calls from people.
I listened and immediately got my friends at the FBI involved in this one.
Local police/Sherriff even thought this was real and not a scam.
They used a number of techniques social engineering wise to ensure success, and honestly - if it hadn't been for MoneyPak - I probably would have fallen for this also.
The level of organization, multiple individuals perfect English speaking, and personal info is legit.
I wrote this blog with assistance from @rpargman at #BinaryDefense - this really caught our eye as the level of effort here individually has yielded a very large net return of $4,000+ with a high level of success to someone that was already skeptical.
Even when "Mary" walked into the sheriff's office, they believed this was a legitimate campaign and that "Mary" in fact missed jury duty. They even called the fake number and validated that "Yep this is the sheriff's office".
Think if her husband had not called me to validate.
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Seeing a massive problem in the security industry today. We have brand new candidates lacking "hands on" experience coming into the workforce and finding it extremely difficult to find a job. 1/10
We talk about skills shortages everywhere in cyber security - but almost 99% of the job postings I see are for already experienced individuals.
We have a skills shortage because we are not hiring new security folks into this industry. 2/10
As an example, we recently opened up two internship spots and had over 900 applicants. This is insane and impossible odds for these folks.
Salaries are out of control for minimal experience where companies are paying outrageous wages for just a few years of experience. 3/10
A friend sent me a pic of mandatory/required in-person training they are required to do and one of the topics was cybersecurity.
Of course, it was a black hoodie-looking hacker, and the course was about as dry as it could possibly be.
It was good to get his perspective (1/4)
He learned absolutely nothing.
It was more on scare tactics of what hackers could do to spy on you and the company.
It wasn't exciting and wasn't about what's happening and what you can do to protect the company and your own personal assets.
(2/4)
If we are looking to curb user behavior, we need to explain WHY humans are a risk factor in the organization's overall threat model in very basic terms.
Assigning responsibility and ownership here is key in that it's everyone's mission in an org. Again, keep it basic.
If you control your calories, you control your body.
It starts with eating.
Losing weight == less calories.
Some tools can help, mostly short term such as intermittent fasting, keto, etc. These are great things for fast or short term..some can do it long term but is rare.
Once coming out of these "diets", you need a program to keep the weight off.
Count those calories.
Don't start with cardio and buying a treadmill.
It won't work unless your mind is right on food.
Control your food first, and add cardio or weightlifting once your calories are right.
More cardio == you wanting to eat more == eating too much.
I wanted to clarify some complex topics regarding the Exchange / ProxyLogon discussions that happened since the dust has settled.
1. I'm concerned generally about the negativity against security researchers releasing code as I view this as taking steps back not forward.
1/10
2. I think researchers should be mindful of when a PoC drops. In the ProxyLogon event, I was against dropping early to give companies time to patch. In stating that, there should be no hindrance as to when a researcher publishes code, especially after a patch is released.
2/10
3. My biggest fear is we are moving back to where red is secretive in TTPs which does not help the industry progress forward. This occurred several years ago in this industry, and there were several years of organizations not understanding how to defend themselves.
Last week, made a comment about how I wasn't a huge fan of Sentinel overall. Got to dive a bit deeper into it with my team over at Binary and has definitely changed my perspective a bit.
Sentinel is not easy by any stretch but there is a lot to it.
If you have the right data going into it (which isn't easy), and you have a team behind you to build up the detections, Sentinel is extremely powerful.
With jupyter and KQL foundation is super powerful to build what you need to off of it.
From my comments earlier, it is a solid product.. It just requires a substantial lift to get it to a point that will help you mature monitoring and detection capabilities.
Requires a knowledgeable team is the biggest thing there.