Weekly Cybersecurity Wrap-up 11/26/23

Projects

LinkedIn Learning – CompTIA Security+ Module 10: Operations and Incident Response | In Progress

TryHackMe – Incident Response Framework – Identification and Scoping, Advent of Cyber (I’m posting these daily throughout December.)

UDemy – Python for Cybersecurity – Gitlab

EdX – EC-Council | Network Defense Essentials – In Progress

Videos

  • Generative AI: Top Use Cases for Security Practitioners – With generative AI now ever-present in most organizations, the next frontier for security practitioners is understanding where AI capabilities like machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing can best increase cybersecurity efficiency and effectiveness in their organizations. How can generative AI help your team respond to incidents, discover and patch vulnerabilities, or assist with programming? Or all the above? And what do teams need to consider in order to identify, review, assess risk and develop the use cases before putting them into production?

Articles

Podcasts

NameDrop Safe

Apple with iOS 17.1 and watchOS 10.1 introduced a new NameDrop feature that is designed to allow users to place Apple devices near one another to quickly exchange contact information. Sharing contact information is done with explicit user permission, but some news organizations and police departments have been spreading misinformation about how NameDrop functions.

MacRumors

MacRumors put together a well researched article that covers the mess that the news media made of this feature.

TryHackMe Walkthrough – Incident Response – Identification & Scoping

Preparation is the first room in the Incident Response learning path within the TryHackMe learning platform.

The learning path consist of the following rooms:

  • Preparation
  • Identification & Scoping
  • Threat Intel & Containment
  • Eradication & Remediation
  • Lessons Learned
  • Tardigrade

In this post I will be walking through Identification & Scoping.

Task 1: Introduction

Question 1: No answer needed.

Task 2: Identification: Unearthing the Existence of a Security Incident

Question 1: What is the Subject of Ticket#2023012398704232?

Follow the directions in the reading to dismiss all the Windows Office warnings. Once outlook opens on the VM scroll down the inbox to the first message from John Sterling that’s the one with the correct ticket number from the question. In the message thread scroll to the first message and you will see the ticket information including the subject.

Answer: weird error in outlook

Continue reading TryHackMe Walkthrough – Incident Response – Identification & Scoping

TryHackMe Walkthrough – Incident Response – Preparation

Preparation is the first room in the Incident Response learning path within the TryHackMe learning platform.

The learning path consist of the following rooms:

  • Preparation
  • Identification & Scoping
  • Threat Intel & Containment
  • Eradication & Remediation
  • Lessons Learned
  • Tardigrade

In this post I will walkthrough the Preparation room.

Task 1: Introduction

Question 1: No answer needed

Task 2: Incident Response Capability

Question 1: What is an observed occurrence within a system?

The answer is in the reading. Look at the first bullets in this task.

Answer: Event

Question 2: What is described as a violation of security policies and practices?

This answer is also in the reading, in the same place as question 1.

Answer: Incident

Continue reading TryHackMe Walkthrough – Incident Response – Preparation

TryHackMe – SOC Level 1 Path Complete!

In this post I’d like to talk a bit about TryHackMe and my experience working through the SOC Level 1 learning path.

TryHackMe is a learning platform that sends users to virtual machines (VM) they can access through their web browser. Extremely low barrier to entry! Absolutely no previous knowledge is required. I’m not sponsored and TryHackMe did not ask me to write this.

I’m a big fan of theirs. I think the learning paths and rooms (think learning modules) are fantastic hands-on learnings! I learned

  • Cyber Defense Frameworks
  • Cyber Threat Intelligence
  • Network Security and Traffic Analysis
  • Endpoint Security Monitoring
  • Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
  • Digital Forensics and Incident Response
  • Phishing

Each room walks the learner through hands-on learning.  I learned all these tools:

  • yara
  • opencti
  • misp
  • mitre
  • cyberkillchain
  • snort
  • zeek
  • brim
  • wireshark
  • sysmon
  • sysinternals
  • osquery
  • wazuh
  • splunk
  • autopsy
  • redline
  • linux (a lot!)
  • thehive
  • phishing

And even more! It’s a great platform. As of this writing it is $14 a month. If you’re not going to use it, don’t sign up, but if you really want to learn these tools and more it’s a great place to get started. You can spend as much time as you want learning these tools in real environments. You can’t break anything because it’s all VMs that start fresh each time the are launched. Getting the chance to work on these environments without setting up all these VMs is a huge time savings.

If you want to play around in there for free you can do that too. There is plenty of free content to get started with and see if you want to pay for the premium rooms and features. It’s worth checking out.

Weekly Cybersecurity Wrap-up 11/20/23

Projects

LinkedIn Learning – CompTIA Security+ Module 9: Operations and Incident Response | Complete!

TryHackMe – SOC Level 1(100 % Complete): Phishing Analysis Fundamentals, Phishing Emails in Action, Phishing Analysis Tools, Phishing Prevention, The Greenholt Phish

UDemy – Python for Cybersecurity – Gitlab

Videos

Articles

TryHackMe Walkthrough – The Greenholt Phish

Task 1: Just another day as a SOC analyst

Only one task for this room.

Question 1: What date was the email received? (answer format: M/DD/YY)

I opened the email in Thunderbird.

Answer: 6/10/20

Question 2: Who is the email from?

In the From…

Answer: Mr. James Jackson

Question 3: What is his email address?

Also in the From…

Answer: info@mutawamarine.com

Continue reading TryHackMe Walkthrough – The Greenholt Phish

TryHackMe Walkthrough – Phishing Prevention

Task 1: Introduction

Question 1: After visiting the link in the task, what is the MITRE ID for the “Software Configuration” mitigation technique?

Follow the link to https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1598/#mitigations. Look for Software Configuration and the ID is there.

Answer: M1054

Task 2: SPF (Sender Policy Framework

Question 1: Referencing the dmarcian SPF syntax table, what prefix character can be added to the “all” mechanism to ensure a “softfail” result?

Follow the link to the page and then click on the here in: “More in-depth information on the differences between “~” and “–” can be found here

This gives you the…

Anwser: ~

Question 2: What is the meaning of the -all tag?

This answer is on that second webpage as well. Scroll down a little and to see the difference between ~all and -all.

  • “softfail” in the case of “~”
  • fail” in the case of “-“

Answer: fail

Continue reading TryHackMe Walkthrough – Phishing Prevention