Tag Archives: network security

How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords

People use weak password practices to secure critical information. Weak password practices include using the same password for multiple systems regardless of the value of the asset, dictionary words, short phases and keeping the same passwords for extended periods of time. For example, it’s common to find a password on a non-critical asset such as a PlayStation 3 be the same as a person’s bank account login.

The more information an attack knows about your password profile, the more likely they will crack your password. For example, a policy of “6-10 characters with one upper case letter and special character” actually helps an attacker reduce the target space meaning passwords are weaker with the policy. If an hacker captures a password for another system and notices a formula such as ‘<dictionary word>’ followed by ‘<3 numbers>’, it helps the attacker prepare a dictionary attack (utilities such as Crunch makes this easy). Any password shorter than 10 characters is an easy target to brute force attack based on today’s system process power.

Here are some tools that hackers can use to crack your passwords.

 How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords

John the Ripper is an old school yet powerful password cracking utility. It has several types of engines that can crack different types of passwords including encryption and hashes. John can detect most hash types (about 90% accurate) and generate matching hash outputs to map back to auto generated passphrases  Attackers like John the Ripper because it’s very customizable

johnrip1 How Hackers Crack Weak PasswordsJohn the Ripper cracked 3 passwords from a Linux shadow file.

hashcat1 How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords

Hashcat is a password cracking utility. Hashcat is multi-thread tool meaning it can handle multiple hashes and password lists during a single attack session. Hashcat offers many attack options such as brute-force, combinator, dictionary, hybrid, mask and rule-based attacks

hashcat2 How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords

Hashcat GUI

Ophcrack

Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on rainbow tables (Rainbow tables are pre-computed hash tables). Ophcrack can import hashes from a variety of formats including dumping directly from the SAM files of Microsoft Windows.

ophcrack How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords

Ophcrack Cracking Hashes

Findmyhash

Findmyhash is a python script which uses a free online service to crack hashes. Findmyhash will analyze against multiple website Rainbow tables.

FindMyHashKali How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords Findmyhash running a MD5 hash against multiple websites

Crunch

Crunch is a tool used to generate password lists. This can be extremely helpful if you are able to gather intelligence on how your target creates passwords. For example, if you capture two passwords and notice the target uses a phase followed by random digits, Crunch can be used to quickly generate a list of that phrase followed by all possible random digits. Perfect tool for defeating company password policies!

crunch1 How Hackers Crack Weak PasswordsCreating a password list for the word “pass” followed by any two numbers

cruch2 How Hackers Crack Weak Passwords

Crunch output. List of all combinations of “pass” and two numbers

Chntpw

An alternative to breaking a Windows password is completely bypassing it. Chntpw is a software utility that can reset or remove a Windows passwords. This gives a hacker with access to your Microsoft Windows SAMs file the ability to obtain Administration privileges.

chntpw1 How Hackers Crack Weak PasswordsChntpw options. Option 1 clears the password.

There are many tools available to break weak passwords. Best practices is using a password longer than 10 characters (having a repeated character at the end even helps!),  don’t use dictionary words, change your password periodically, don’t use the same passwords for secure and non secure sources and don’t use a computer that accesses sensitive data for personal use (IE same system for Facebook and configuring routers). I suggest using the first letter of each word of a long sentence so you can remember the password yet the output is random. Hope this helps. All tools shown are free and available on BackTrack / Kali.

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Verizon’s 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report

VerizonCover1 Verizon’s 2013 Data Breach Investigations ReportVerizon recently released their annual Data Breach Report (download HERE). This report is based on statics from 19 organizations and showcases 621 security breaches and 47,000 security incidents with the goal of educating the public of the current risks from cyber threats. All results are built from first-hand evidence collected during paid external forensic investigations and related intelligence operations conducted by Verizon from 2004 through 2012.

There are a lot of interesting findings that range from most common attacks to popular targets. According to the report, everybody is a target. The report states, “from pubs to public agencies, mom-and-ops to multi-nations, nobody was immune”. Some attacks had as high as 95% success rates such as phishing meaning “most attackers would be able to slap a “guaranteed” sticker on getting a click”. They even call out that most agencies should mentally be thinking they are already compromised.

To break things down, here are some highlights:

  • Who are the targets? – Everybody
  • Who is perpetrating breaches? The majority of attacks are outsiders (92%) however insider is on the rise (14%).
  • How do breaches occur? 76% was based on weak or stolen credentials followed by hacking (52%) and Malware (40%).
  • How sophisticated are the attacks? From a range of High to Very Low, the majority of first breaches were done leveraging Low level attacks. I like how they put it by saying “Would you fire a guided missile at an unlocked screen door”.
  • Who are the Criminals? Organized Crime made up the majority of external attacks (over 50%) while others fell around 20% or less.
  • The leader for espionage was China while Romania followed by the USA lead for financial crimes. Spyware (including keyloggers) is the common method for financial crimes while multiple forms of malware are typical for espionage.
  • Social Engineering took a dip the last two years but is now up according to 2012 (29%)
  • Installing Malware to compromised systems is still the most common vector to be breached.
  • ATM hacking was top of the list for physical crimes. I wonder if this was triggered by Barnaby Jack’s Blackhat.
  • 2/3 of data compromised was data at rest meaning on an asset like a database or file server. 1/3 of the data was compromised when the data was being processed such as Ramp scrapers, skimmers and key loggers. No data was compromised while in transit (IE compromising a backbone router).

Screen Shot 2013 05 06 at 3.40.18 PM Verizon’s 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report

The Verizon report is another confirmation that cyber threats are very real and probably active insider your network. The reports calls out that the most common attacks are easy to execute and have very high success rates (such as phishing campaigns). Standard security products that leverage signatures will not catch many threats called out in this report. The best way to identify these threats is monitoring behavior inside the network and utilize a layered approach to building your security strategy.

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5 Steps to Take Right After Suffering a Cyber Security Breach

Thanks to my guest writer Kyle Olson for this post. Kyle’s bio is below.

ohno 5 Steps to Take Right After Suffering a Cyber Security Breach

Security breaches on your website hosting servers and any other server based online assets are no laughing matter. Suffering one of these breaches can mean anything from the theft of data for fraud related purposes to the total destructive erasure of all your information just for the fun of it (Hackers aren’t exactly known for always being motivated by money)

Whatever the case may be, you as the hard working owner of a site you spent months or years building, can enjoy the fun position of watching everything you built come crashing into zero in less time than it takes you to have lunch. This is not something you want, and especially since it can be avoided through some fairly straightforward security procedures that would have saved you nicely.

Anyhow, what’s done is done, you’ve been hacked, and the only thing left to do is save what you can. Let’s cover how you can do that with 5 essential and effective steps.

1. Don’t Panic, Be Methodical

This is the first and most basic thing you need to do; calm down and proceed methodically. Yes, a hack is a severe thing that needs to be dealt with quickly, but running around like a headless chicken won’t solve anything. If you calmly assess the situation, go through the possibilities and the steps we’re about to cover, you’ll have a much better chance of successfully countering any damaging effects than if you work randomly or just freeze up, waiting for the situation to improve on its own.

2. Check in With Your Hosting Provider

Contact your Hosting provider as soon as you’ve noticed that your site is down, redirecting to suspicious third party sites, or showing unmistakable signs of serious malfunction. Do the same if you can’t access key parts of your back end admin such as servers, cpanel or CMS login. For one thing, your hosting provider has the tools and expertise to help you with resolving your hack or saving your data, and secondly, they can help you uncover vital information about the hack, such as how many people it’s affecting and how it might have occurred.

3. Make a Record of Everything and Save All Suspicious data

As soon as you start to notice something wrong with your servers or site, also start noting things down. Make a record of everything you saw, experienced and the times at which you saw it. Additionally, save copies of any malicious or suspicious code, files and processes. Even if you need to destroy them as part of your damage control, first save all such data on a remote medium such as USB. This saving also includes (when possible) making a mirror copy ISO of your entire drive or server.

Just as if you’re dealing with a police crime scene, creating a record of events and a chain of evidence will help you more clearly understand and possibly resolve your hack source.

4. Shut Your Site and FTP off then Start Backing Up Your Data

Back up everything in your servers and all associated files to a remote storage medium. Don’t worry if some of it is still contaminated with malicious code –you can later scan and clean it of everything abnormal—for now the key thing is to save as much of your site data as quickly as possible.

Before you start your backup process up, disconnect your site from all remote access. This may mean taking it offline and cutting off access to all FTP accounts. You can also later change all of your server/site access passwords in these FTP profiles and elsewhere.

5. Download Everything Again

Once you’ve performed a thorough backup of all your data, cut your site off from outside access, changed all your access passwords and stopped as much malicious activity as possible, you can now download fresh programs for any third party applications that were supporting your site on the server. These may include LAMP software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), plugins like Java, Flash and Adobe or a CMS bundle like WordPress.

Having downloaded the newest, cleanest copies of all these applications to your newly secured server, you can start re installing all your salvageable backed up data from the site before it was hacked.

When all else fails, you can always contact a company that will perform digital forensics tests to determine the cause of the incident.

About the author: Kyle Olson has written for the tech industry for over 10 years and has operated his own small business in the industry. When he’s not writing poignant articles, you can find him covering civil engineers in Boston or working on his forthcoming novel.

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Defining The Difference Between A Penetration Test, Vulnerability Assessment and Security Audit

 Defining The Difference Between A Penetration Test, Vulnerability Assessment and Security AuditThe terms Penetration Test, Vulnerability Assessment and Security Audit are often blended together when requested by clients or offered by security service providers. All three terms have security aspects however are very different regarding what purpose they serve as well as the expected deliverable.

 Defining The Difference Between A Penetration Test, Vulnerability Assessment and Security Audit

A Security Audit typically means evaluating a system or application’s risk level against a set of standards or baselines. Standards are mandatory rules while baselines are the minimal acceptable level of security. Standards and baselines achieve consistency in security implementations and can be specific to industries, technologies and processes.

Most requests for Security Audits are focused on passing an official audit (IE preparing for a corporate or government audit) or proving the baseline requirements are met for a mandatory set of regulations (HIPAA, PCI, etc.). In many cases, Security Audit services do not include any level of insurance or protection if an audit isn’t successful post services meaning services will only provide information that a client can use to become compliant.

IMPORTANT: In many cases, security audits give customers a false sense of security. Most standards and baselines have a long update process that is unable to keep up with the rapid changes in threats found in today’s cyber world. It is highly recommended to go beyond standards and baselines to raise the level of security to an acceptable level of protection for real world threats.

 Defining The Difference Between A Penetration Test, Vulnerability Assessment and Security AuditA Vulnerability Assessment is the process in which network devices, operating systems and application software are scanned in order to identify the presence of known and unknown vulnerabilities. A vulnerability is a gap, error or weakness in how a system is designed, used and protected. When a vulnerability is exploited, it can result in giving unauthorized access, escalation of privileges or denial-of-service to the asset.

Vulnerability Assessments typically stop once a vulnerability is found meaning services doesn’t include executing an attack against the vulnerability to verify if it’s legitimate. A Vulnerability Assessment deliverable provides potential risk associated with all vulnerabilities found with possible remediation steps. There are many tools that can be used to scan for vulnerabilities based on system type, operating system, ports open for communication and other means. Vulnerability Assessments are a valuable way to assess a network for potential security weakness to identify where to invest for future security.

 Defining The Difference Between A Penetration Test, Vulnerability Assessment and Security AuditA Penetration Test is attempting to attack vulnerabilities in a similar method of a real malicious attacker. Typically, penetration services are requested when a system or network has exhausted investments in security and seeking to verify if all avenues of security have been covered. The key difference between a Penetration Test and Vulnerability Assessment is a penetration test will act upon vulnerabilities found and verify if they are legit reducing the list of confirmed risk associated with a target.

IMPORTANT: One popular misconception is a Penetration Testing service enhances IT security since services have a higher cost associated than other security services. Penetration Testing does not make IT networks more secure since services evaluates existing security! A customer should not consider a penetration test if there is a belief the target is not completely secure.

Hopefully these definitions help define future security service requests.

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Situational Awareness For Cyber Threat Defense

Aamir Lakhani did a great post on Situational Awareness. The original post ca be found HERE

Illustration Kekai Kotaki Red Dragon 992x712 Situational Awareness For Cyber Threat Defense

Illustration by Kekai Kotaki

Problem

Cisco Systems in their Cyber Security Threat Defense white papers outlines how the network security threat landscape is evolving. They describe how modern attacks are stealthy and evade traditional security perimeter defenses.

Traditional monitoring and reporting tools are no longer sufficient in detecting true threats on the network. Modern security tools and hardware devices such as firewalls, anti-virus, patch management solutions, IPS, and other solutions can only provide a small amount of relief against attacks. Most of these tools seem to be really implemented to fulfill some sort of checkmark for an auditor on a compliance form. Security professional know these tools, although very important, alone don’t provide a full security defense architecture.

Furthermore, as security threats and malware invade systems, security administrators are having trouble understanding the nature of attacks, how they occur, and how to defend against them. Remember you can’t fight what you don’t understand.

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War (source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu)

Cisco ISE 1024x617 Situational Awareness For Cyber Threat Defense

Image Source: Cisco Identity Services Engine

Cisco Identity Services Engine provides true network identification, profiling, and access controls.

Combined as a center piece for Cisco’s TruseSec Solution, Cisco ISE creates a secure ecosystem treating security as a holistic solution.

Federal Cyber Initiatives

New mandates are making cyber security front and center of the news. President Obama recently challenged the nation and the Federal government in the United States to increase its cyber defense capabilities. As Federal IT budgets are getting slashed back in 2013; however, spending for cyber security appears to be increasing in the eyes of the casual on-looker.

Cisco Systems, in their Cyber Threat Defense White Paper discusses how “with increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks like WikiLeaks on the rise, federal agencies require more innovative solutions for maintaining a strong security posture. Additionally, with the evolution of the CNCI (Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative), federal agencies are being required to take a more holistic and collaborative approach to analyzing threat information across the totality of government networks for improved incident response and forensic investigation.”

Being constantly bombarded with continuous threats, how can security professionals even guadge they are being attacked or a threat is posing a clear and present danger (yes that was a Harrison Ford shout out).

NetWitness Situational Awareness For Cyber Threat Defense

RSA NetWitness Logo

Image Source: RSA

How To Solve The Problem

I recommend creating a conceptional framework for Threat Defense Visibility and Awareness program. The goal of program should be to (1) provide a framework that can be built by using products, technologies, and methodologies that are available today, (2) provide network visibility on network health and status in real-time, (3) provide real-time network posture and attack risk baselines, (4) provide a training facility for attack analysis and defense.

What Is Network Visibility?

According to Lancope (source: http://www.lancope.com/), “network visibility focuses on the most complex and dangerous information security threats – threats that lurk in networks for months or years at a time stealing vital information and disrupting operations. This type of solution provides visibility into these threats and context to decipher their targets and potential damage”. Lancope further states on their website, security analysts gain visibility into advanced cyber threats such as:

  • Network reconnaissance
  • Network interior malware proliferation
  • Command and control traffic
  • Data ex-filtration

Lancope Situational Awareness For Cyber Threat Defense

Lancope Stealwatch provides network visibility

Understanding trends, anomalies, and threats of the network

Image Source: Lancope

Network visibility gives security administrators the ability to detect problems because they highlight changes in baseline behavior. Did traffic spike a 100%, did outbound traffic suddenly increase, are more requests being transmitted to new domain on the Internet? All these occurrences can indicate an attack. Network visibility shows network security professionals exactly what is different about today’s traffic patterns than what is normally looks like. Continue reading

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Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your Network

Watching Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkToday’s threat landscape is loaded with malicious websites, malware and other risks that attack users every nanosecond of the day.  There isn’t a single product available that can guarantee protection from cyber threats. Older solutions leveraging static technologies such as signatures are not good enough. The best approach for dealing with advanced threats is continuously monitoring the entire network through layering security technologies.

Cisco is known for network and collaboration products however Cisco also has a very strong security catalog that extends beyond traditional firewalls and IPS appliances. If I had to summarize Cisco’s core visibility technologies for cyber threats, I would highlight Cisco’s capabilities around Access Control, Web Security and partnership with Lancope for Insider Threats.

Access Control is critical for knowing who and what is accessing your network regardless if it’s the LAN, Wireless or remotely using VPN technology. Cisco Identity Services Engine ISE accomplishes visibility of users accessing the network by leveraging how people authenticate along with profiling what types of devices are being used. The screenshot below shows two users with mobile devices obtaining different levels of wireless access. Cisco ISE can also verify if devices meet specified polies by enforcing posture prior to providing network access meaning ensure Joey’s windows 7 laptop has the latest updates and security applications installed.

ISE Auth Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkCisco ISE showing Android with Contractor access and iPhone with Employee mobile access

Screen Shot 2013 03 01 at 8.36.52 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkProfiled devices in my home lab. “Apple-Device” is a MACMINI hosting ISE via “VMWare-Device”

Screen Shot 2013 03 01 at 8.36.01 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your Network

Some default profiles for Cisco ISE. 

Web Security is crucial for protecting internal users from threats while surfing the public Internet. Cisco Web Security Appliance WSA (previously Ironport) provides visibility of Internet usage as well as security through layered technologies. Network use policies such as denying gambling web content during work hours can easily be enforced through Cisco WSA’s categorized content classes.

Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.08.05 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your Network

Cisco WSA Content Dashboard

The real value of Cisco WSA is going beyond average web content filtering by offering layers of security options that protect users accessing approved content. The first layer is verifying if the web source is a known evil location based on reputation. Reputation can be factors such as where it’s located, how long it’s been up or if it has been marked as a source for malicious activity. If the web source has a safe reputation, WSA scans traffic with a combination of Sophos, McAfee and Webroot engines along with other intelligence looking for malicious behavior. There is also a botnet scanner that sits on a spam port designed to capture users that happen to get compromised and have malware phone home activity from their devices. The botnet scanner is a first step towards identifying insider threats but not good enough.

Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 5.03.01 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkCisco WSA Main Dashboard

Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.07.42 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkCisco WSA Threat Dashboard

True insider threat visibility can only be accomplished by monitoring all internal traffic for threats that can compromise your network through email, web, infected devices or other means. Cisco has partnered with Lancope to give network wide forensic visibility leveraging capabilities that exist within networking products such as routers, switches and firewalls as well as in the datacenter. Administrators can use Lancope’s Steathwatch to see the top 10 threats that range from Data Loss to Botnet infections.

Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.11.20 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkMain Lancope Cyber Security Dashboard

(Top 4 machines infected with botnets)
Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.12.19 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkEthel’s Windows 7 Workstation With Botnet

Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.12.42 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkEthel’s Workstation communicating with malicious source

Lancope identifies threats using a combination of reputation and behavior regardless if the threat attempts to hide by throttling, encryption or interact through multiple compromised systems. Some examples are flagging a user dumping large amounts of data to dropbox, communication with known malware web sources, host-to-host reconnaissance and use of obscure ports. Lancope can zero in on a threat by stitching together the entire communication chain meaning an administrator will see a map of all infected devices, how the infection started, who the users are (including Cisco ISE integration), where its spreading and how its sending traffic off the network. Lancope also gives visibility into abusing network resources, unauthorized tunneling and problems in network performance.

Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.13.00 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkLancope Dataloss Diagram
Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.13.18 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkMalware Propagation Diagram

Purple IP has infected green IP which is probing other systems
Screen Shot 2013 02 22 at 12.14.47 PM Cisco’s Cyber Solutions – What Is Happening In Your NetworkKnown Botnet Sources via Reputation

Combing Access Control, Web Security and Insider Threat technology gives administrators complete visibility of what is happening on the network. There is a lot of power having reports showing every user and device on the network, how those devices access the public Internet and near real-time analytics on if any of those devices have been compromised. This information can dramatically improve identification and reaction to cyber threats saving time, money and other problems caused by network breaches.

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The Importance of a BYOD Policy for Companies

Here is a guest post from Pierluigi Paganini. He is a security researcher for InfoSec Institute. InfoSec Institute is an information security training company now offering a mobile computer forensics course.

The IT landscape is dominated by the rise of paradigms such as cloud computing, mobile networking, and social networking, three concepts that have totally revolutionized the daily user’s experience on the web.

Users, in a more or less conscious way, have now become slaves of the concepts of mobility and connectivity, technological change has been rapid and has involved masses of people as never before. There are a billion people, acting as nodes in a global network and exchanging an unimaginable quantity of data, while ignoring the basic concepts of information security.

-        Which means are used for the data transfer?
-        Are the communications channels secure?
-        Where is the user’s information hosted?
-        What is the impact on user’s private and what is the impact of technological innovation for business?

All of these questions need careful reflection to avoid serious consequences for our data, for our digital identities, for our business.

Every day we read the world “BYOD” in many articles, but how much we know about it?

BYOD is an acronym for “bring your own device” and it refers to the fact that employees, business partners, and other users bring their own mobile computing devices, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, to the workplace for use and connectivity on the corporate network and for access to business data. The repercussions, from the security perspective, are extremely serious, because the absence of proper policies regulating the use of these devices exposes user and company to risk of data leak and cyber attacks.

These policies have to address the ways in which employees could use the devices once out of workplace, the mechanisms of access protection to be adopted, data encryption, data accessible by the mobile platform, and limiting the execution of applications that can be run outside the company (e.g., email client or data mining applications).one The Importance of a BYOD Policy for Companies

Suggestions for a secure BYOD policy

The proper management of mobile devices and their use by employees when outside is a critical aspect for the security of enterprises. Companies today may choose to be compliant to different standards and regulation; the majority of them, such as ISO 27001, already cover many aspects that could improve a BYOD policy.

Because the presence of mobile devices inside companies and government agencies has increased at an impressive rate, ordinary business relationships with other enterprises, such as clients and providers, require the definition and the adoption of a proper BYOD policy. Sophos proposed a document titled “BYOD Risks and Rewards” that reports that one in four devices used today for work are either smartphones or tablets.two The Importance of a BYOD Policy for Companies

Figure 1 – Sophos BYOD Survey

The SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Networking, and Security) Institute in March 2012 published the whitepaper “SANS Mobility/BYOD – Security Survey.” The survey found that “only 9 percent of respondents felt completely aware of all mobile devices accessing their enterprise infrastructure and applications. At the same time, nearly 40 % felt they were fully aware of their devices, while nearly half did not have the level of awareness that they should.”three The Importance of a BYOD Policy for Companies

Figure 2 – SANS Institute -State of Mobile Devices Awareness

Continue reading

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My Awesome Portable Lab – Apple Mac mini Running ESXI 5.0 5.1 hosting Cisco ISE, NCS, Backtrack, Lancope and More

applemacmini My Awesome Portable Lab – Apple Mac mini Running ESXI 5.0 5.1 hosting Cisco ISE, NCS, Backtrack, Lancope and MorePart of my job is being an expert on various technologies. This means having hands on experience with the latest products as well as the ability to demonstrate how specific solutions work. Many vendors are virtualizing their solutions making it easier to build a home lab that is portable and light on power usage. My team has researched the best method for a mobile home lab based on price, size, power consumption and noise. After comparing various servers and laptops, we found the Apple Mac mini to be the best choice. It’s small enough to fit in a backpack, low on power consumption, silent and around $1,400 fully loaded.

The Mac mini is 7.7 by 7.7 and comes with standard apple OS and a hdmi display adaptor.  Some monitors may need a VGA adapter, which a adapter can be purchased for $10-25 dollars. You will need a Apple super drive to load the ESXI ISO and possibly some drivers that are lost during the install depending on your Mac mini model and method of install. I’ve heard people doing it with other media methods such as USB storage however I’ve personally only used the super drive for two different Mac minis. Make sure to have a USB mouse and keyboard as well.

This website covers how to install ESXI 5.X on an older Mac mini (2011 or older) HERE. The steps are very straight forward however one lesson learned is you HAVE TO burn the driver disk that will be mounted from a windows computer. I wasted a dozen CDs burning the drivers with my MAC using various tools yet the CD never mounted. You can use any type of device to burn the ESXI software.

 My Awesome Portable Lab – Apple Mac mini Running ESXI 5.0 5.1 hosting Cisco ISE, NCS, Backtrack, Lancope and More Continue reading

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Invention Market Scam – Don’t Waste Your Money With Davison.

Screen Shot 2013 01 18 at 4.02.28 PM Invention Market Scam – Don’t Waste Your Money With Davison.I discovered a scam while researching methods to develop new ideas. Like many people, I have ideas but unsure how to make them real products. I found firms offering research, prototype development and marketing services for inventions. I decided to run a few ideas through the top advertised firm on Google known as Davison Design & Development.

Experience with Davison

Davison presents itself as a successful invention firm. Their website has customer quotes, products they brought to market (see HERE) and videos from popular TV shows like Lifetime’s The Balancing Act (see HERE). If you search Google for Davison customer feedback, you will find endless complaints and lawsuits. I question Davison about the negative feedback and was provided rebuttal videos targeting the Better Business Bureau as a means to defuse the bad press (see HERE). 

I submitted two ideas under different aliases to put Davison to the test. The first idea is something I believe is great while the other is ridiculous and should be discarded. I filled out an online form for both ideas and eventually spoke with a sales rep. One interesting part of the process is Davison requires users to accept that they have reviewed Davison’s success rate.  As you can see, they are open about how unlikely they can bring your idea to market. My gut tells me this protects Davison from future lawsuits.

Screen Shot 2013 01 11 at 4.33.01 PM Invention Market Scam – Don’t Waste Your Money With Davison.

Users Must Agree Before Submitting Ideas (click to enlarge)

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How To Educate Your Employees About Social Engineering

 How To Educate Your Employees About Social EngineeringA common saying is ” Amateurs Hack Systems, Professionals Hack People”.  Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. People fall for social engineering tricks based on their instinct to be helpful and trusting. The typical attacker never comes face-to-face with a victim using deception through email, social networks or over the phone.

Consultants list end-user training as a top prevention to defend against social engineering. How should you provide training for your user community? Here are some tips for educating your staff about common social engineering attacks.

Explain Why Policies Exist

 How To Educate Your Employees About Social Engineering

It is common to see organizations send out policy reminders without explaining why they exist. The average user will delete a policy email once they realize its standard legal language.

Try explaining why users should care. For example, start off with a scenario about an email account being violated and or company data compromised. Include details about what social engineer tactic was used, investment by IT to clean up the issue and ways to avoid the threat. Close with the policy being enforced.

Provide Examples Beyond The Intranet

 How To Educate Your Employees About Social Engineering

Organizations typically send warning emails to employees when they discover threats to internal sources. It is rare to see companies extend warnings about phishing or other external attacks. Try periodically sending out examples of different social engineering attacks highlighting what to look for and where they are common. Examples should include social networks, fake URLs, craiglist scams and threats using shareware. Your end-users can be targeted anywhere so educate on all forms of social engineering attacks. Continue reading

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