Successful mitigation of today’s security threats requires an approach that is both on the offensive and on the defensive. Here, we give our take on how to approach and handle specific security challenges, as well as our reaction to some of the latest industry topics.
Three areas to secure to ensure your critical infrastructure isn’t vulnerable to a Machine-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack. A multinational corporation in the energy industry enlisted our services to perform a comprehensive security assessment of their XRT Merging Unit. The merging unit sits on the power grid and is responsible for taking battery data from the company’s… Read more »
Students will learn the fundamentals of DevOps and how DevOps teams can build and deliver secure software. In a time when the drive for technology efficiencies has left security in the dust, organizations focused on developing code are now starting to realize the true importance of what secure DevOps means. DevOps security or DevSecOps is… Read more »
Could your endpoint security stand up to a ransomware attack? Endpoint security is one on a long list of protections your organization should have in place to protect against today’s malicious actors – but simply having endpoint security versus having effective endpoint security are two very different things. One of our clients, a large financial… Read more »
03.31.22Navigating the 5 Stages of Grief Following an Incident Response Event Are you a victim of a data breach and are you feeling signs of grief? You’re not alone. As an incident response professional, I have met many different types of corporate staff, from the IT staff to the C-suite. Unfortunately, it was probably on… Read more »
03.25.22Breaking Down Microsoft’s Response to the Lapsus$ Gang’s Social Engineering Compromise Microsoft has done an excellent job in explaining the social engineering breach that originated against them from the Lapsus$ group. In their recent blog post, they detail the Lapsus$ attack and how access was obtained, as well as provide some decent recommendations to enhance… Read more »
It’s time to rethink your password policy to prevent modern password attacks. If you think your company’s policy of requiring passwords to have a minimum length of eight characters, in addition to other complexity requirements, is sufficient to effectively prevent modern password attacks, think again. Our client, a global corporation with business units in more… Read more »
Avoid these three pitfalls that are inherent to most SCADA systems that manage critical infrastructure. A multinational corporation enlisted the services of DirectDefense to perform a security assessment of the organization’s newly-developed battery energy storage control (BESS) that would enable the company’s vendors and integrators to manage the voltage and power output for massive batteries.… Read more »
Security company Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit’s pkexec, CVE-2021-4034, dubbed “PwnKit”. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program. It’s installed by default in every major Linux distribution, which means that tens of millions of devices are vulnerable to this easily-exploitable bug. What makes this flaw even… Read more »
01.05.22What PCI Compliance for Cloud Data Looks Like: Challenges and Maintenance Moving to the Cloud is not as simple as “Just put it in the Cloud and we won’t have to do PCI.” The Cloud can reduce PCI Scope but it can also add to the complexity of maintaining PCI compliance. As we will discuss,… Read more »
12.09.21What to Know, How to Prepare, and How We Got Here When 2021 began, everything from the pandemic to the economy felt uncertain. Security threats increased both as a result of those uncertainties and the ever-growing sophistication of the threat landscape. In this post, we’ll review the events that created security threats in 2021 and… Read more »
