7 Minute Security

Today's interview features Justin McCarthy, CTO and cofounder of StrongDM, which offers both commercial and open source tools (like Comply) to help customers with SOC compliance. Justin schooled me (in a nice way) about a lot of things, including: What SOC and the various SOC types are all about What SOC compliance costs What to look for in selecting a good auditor Tools that can help companies make SOC compliance efforts go more smoothly

In this episode I wanted to give you some cool/fun updates as it relates to 7MS the business! Specifically: A new member of the 7MS team (kinda!) The weird and varied projects I'm working on Upcoming podcast sponsors (probably in July) 7MS has a "real" office coming soon to the southern metro of MN (hopefully!)

As a continuation of last week's episode I'm now making a bit of progress in finding a good backup solution that protects USB backups both at rest and when pumped up to the cloud. I mentioned I've been using BackBlaze for backups (not a sponsor), and they allow you to backup USB drives as long as they're connected at least once every 30 days. That's cool. However, many of my USB drives are not encrypted, and I want to protect myself in the off chance that someone breaks in and steals all my stuff while those unencrypted drives are connected. My BackBlaze backup PC is just a little dinky box running Windows 10 Home, so I don't have access to BitLocker. I was gonna drop the ~$100 for the Windows 10 Pro upgrade, but I coincidentally was doing an endpoint security product evaluation at the same time, and so I grabbed a copy of ESET's DESLock (also not a sponsor) because it was on sale. Where I'm stuck now is that the USB drives are unlocked, and yet for some reason BB can't properly back them up. I've got a ticket into their support folks, and will update you once we get to part 3 of this miniseries.

You probably create DR plans for your business (or help other companies build them), but have you thought about creating one for yourself? Yeah, I know it's grim to think about "What will my loved ones do to get into my accounts, backups, photos, social media accounts..." but it's probably not a bad idea to prepare for that (spoiler alert: we all die at some point). Today I talk about how I'm beginning to build such a plan so my wife can take over for my/our online accounts. This plan includes: A "here's how I run all our technology" Google doc with domains I have registered, their expiration date, what their function is, etc. A how-to guide on restoring data from our online backup solution Implementation of a password manager

As I was preparing for my Secure 360 talk a month or so ago, I stumbled upon this awesome article which details a method for getting Domain Admin access in just a few minutes - without cracking passwords or doing anything else "loud." The tools you'll need are: PowerShell Empire DeathStar Responder Ntlmrelayx I've written up all the steps in a gist that you can grab here. Enjoy!

It has been a heck of a week (in a good way), and I'm taking a break from security so you can help me untangle a mystery that's been wrapped around my brain for years. I need you to help me figure out what this dude meant when he said that something was as frustrating "as boxing a cat." P.S. if you hate off-topic episodes no worries! We'll be back to our regularly scheduled security program next week!

This week I dove into building a Cuckoo Sandbox for malware analysis. There are certainly a ton of posts and videos out there about it, but this entry called Painless Cuckoo Sandbox Installation caught my eye as a good starting point. This article got me about 80% of the way there, and the last 20% proved to be problematic. I got some additional answers from the Cuckoo documentation but still left some answers to be desired. Through a lot of Googling, banging my head against the wall and looking at the GitHub issues list, I finally got everything working. I've taken my entire build process and included it as a gist here. Enjoy!

Last week I was in the recording studio to record three 7MS commercials aimed at churches. The goal was to educate them on some security topics and close with a "hook" to contact 7MS for help securing your church. The commercials themselves are embedded in this episode so please have a listen and let me know what you think! I'll also let you know (via the podcast) when these commercials hit the air. It's likely the station won't air in your area, but you can catch it on the interwebs if you so desire (thanks again for your support, mom).

Cracking passwords in the cloud is super fun (listen to last week's episode to learn how to build your own cracking box on the cheap at Paperspace)! In the last couple weeks, customers have asked me about doing a password strength assessment on their Active Directory environment. I asked around and read a bunch of blogs and found a method that I think: Extracts the hashes safely Parses down the dump to contain only the hashes (so that if somebody popped my Paperspace cloud-crackin' box, they'd have just a list of half-cracked hashes and that's it) Does the work pretty automagically I talk about this in more detail in today's podcast, and here's the gist you can follow with all the necessary commands to get AD crackin'!

I had an absolute ball this week trying to figure out how to crack passwords effectively, and on the cheap, and in the cloud. Today's episode goes into much more detail, and embedded below is the Gist of my approach thus far. If you've got things to add/suggest to this document, let me know! P.S. if you don't see the gist because you're reading this in a podcast-catching app, head to https://7ms.us and look up today's episode and you'll see the gist in all its gisty glory!

Hey, so this week I am without my main machine - thus no jingle or "jungle boogie" intro music. Feels weird. Feels real weird. Anyway, ya know how I teased last week that 7MS could possibly be coming to a radio station near you? Well I think it's more of a probability than a possibility at this point! I met with a radio exec a few weeks ago and we talked about: Lots of people still listen to the radio (who knew?) Creating a "security minute" spot that would lead to a commercial about 7MS How to write a good commercial "hook" It's difficult to write a 60-second commercial! Targeted advertising at churches, which is an under-served market when it comes to infosec Writing a new (shortened) 7MS jingle More on this today on 7MS!

We've dug into some pretty technical topics the last few weeks so we're gonna take it easy today. Below are some FAQs and updates I'll cover on today's show: FAQs What security certs should a sales person get? What lav mic should I get for podcasting? How do I know if I'm ready to take the OSCP? When are you gonna do some more YouTube videos? When will the PacktPub project be done? Updates Don't forget to check out these new and/or updated pages on BPATTY: Caldera LAPS PwnedPasswords Speaking engagements I learned that the Cryptolocker song was played as muzak for a security conference. That makes me LOL ;-) Those of you in Minneapolis/St. Paul are invited to join me for Blue Team on a Budget lunch and learn at Manny's - it's on May 3 and hosted by OneIdentity. I'll be at Secure360 on May 16 to give my Blue Team on a Budget talk at 9:30 a.m., and I'll also be hosting our pal Bjorn for his Twin Cities vs. OWASP Juice Shop workshop on May 17. Gonna be awesome - hope you can come to either event (or both!).

Today is part two of evaluating endpoint solutions, where I primarily focus on Caldera which is an adversary simulation system that's really awesome! You can essentially setup a virtual attacker and cut it loose on some test machines, which is what I did as part of an endpoint protection evaluation project. The attacks simulated are from Adversarial Tactics, Techniques & Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) project. So the big question is...did any of these endpoint solutions catch some of the simulated ATT&CKs? Check out today's podcast to find out! Oh, and I wrote up my quick install guide for Caldera here.

I've been super pumped about Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords project ever since it came out - especially when I saw a tweet about using it in Active Directory so that enterprises could essentially stop people from picking previously pwned passwords! That led me to explore the following two solutions: Pwned Passwords DLL This blog entry has everything you need to get started with this GitHub project. If you've got some coding skillz you can probably give everything a quick read and have the DLL installed and running in no time. If you're like me and have little to zero Visual Studio experience, head to my BPATTY site page about Pwned Passwords where I've laid everything out step-by-step! Bottom line is this is a FREE way to check AD passwords against Troy's list of 500M+ previously pwned passwords. Awesome dude! SafePass.me I gave this commercial solution a demo and it worked fine as well. It's about $700 USD and comes packaged in an .MSI file that you simply double-click to install, then reboot the domain controller(s). It looks to do the exact same thing as Pwned Passwords DLL but without having to build a DLL or install it manually.

I'm working on a fun project right now where I'm evaluating endpoint protection solutions for a client. They're faced with a choice of either refreshing endpoints to the latest gen of their current product, or doing a rip and replace with something else. I've spun up a standalone AD environment with ~5 Win 10 VMs and nothing on 'em except a current set of patches. The idea is I can assign each workstation VM an install of INSERT_NAME_OF_POPULAR_AV_VENDOR_HERE and have somewhat of a "bake off." Now what I'm finding is there are great sites like [AV Test](AV Test) or AV-Comparatives do a nice job of breaking down what kind of performance, features, and management offerings a given vendor has. But what I haven't found is some structured testing for "act like a bad guy" actions. I'm thinking things like: Mimikatz tomfoolery Lateral attacks with Metasploit shells Egress port scanning (to find an acceptable outbound port for C2 or data exfil) Jacking around with various PowerShell scripts and commands However, thanks to some awesome friends on Slack they pointed me to what looks to be a nice set of scripts/tests - many of which could be used to see what kind of behaviors the endpoint protection will catch. So coming up in part #2 of this series, I'll do a deeper dive into: RTA Atomic Red Team