We, cybersecurity professionals, need to understand what happened in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. Though internal details are not public, based upon what little we know from the media, let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of the cybersecurity professionals who had to respond to this attack.

The term threat hunting spawns different ideas and has different meanings for seemingly everyone you talk to. Understanding what threat hunting is will help you better equip your security teams to respond to alerts and mitigate risk. But is it basic triage of known indicators of compromise (IOC) in a proactive manner or some magical Jedi skill that only masters can summon and execute?

It’s the URL, stupid (me)!

Consider a scenario. You are in a miserable situation where you accidentally clicked on some phishing link or scam URL. A long time ago, when the web was safe, and viruses, trojans, and worms were transmitted only by EXE or BIN files, we could rest assured that the virus scanner protected us.

Now, the web is the purveyor of all things good and evil. Smartphones have become the norm rather than the exception. The individual security measures (windows, IOS, etc.) are only as useful as there latest update, and maintaining the amount of tech we each possess up to date is difficult. But the most common denominator is the URL centric web. All devices have Internet access and thus are vulnerable to the latest threats.

Think of the email before spam abuse. There used to be open relays everywhere, and anyone could send emails using a 10 line shell script using SMTP command verbs. Today that is impossible since email abuse has turned people away from everyday email. Even when you need to use email for work, most of one's inbox is someone trying to sell you something or market something. Every piece of traffic that humans originated on the Internet has a URL, so let's look at new-age security measures to help protect you.

In the last article, Understanding the Elastic Stack, I broke down the various Elastic components (check it out for a quick refresher). Now we will use the REST API provided by Elasticsearch as the back-end for a simple project. But before, let us discuss why we want to use Elasticsearch REST API as back-end.

The functionality of the back-end:

Introduction

We have all have heard of network analyzers or packet sniffers, Wireshark with its command-line counterpart Tshark, or tcpdump.

This article explores how Linux's command-line power, combined with the tcpdump lexical parser's filter expressions, can be used for some complex networking debugging. If you are bored at home in these COVID times, how about extracting the video of a video conference capture? (On a serious note, only do this for your video with the participants' permission.)

We talked about introductory OpenSSL in a previous blog Dipping Our Toes into OpenSSL, that covered how it supports rich cryptographic-centric operations, which are needed for all sorts of things in the security domain and even outside of it. Today, let's take the next step and understand some of the crypto arithmetic behind it, without making the topic too complicated.

Photo by Vanna Phon on Unsplash

DNS - Do Not think it's Simple

In our recent series of articles, we talked about network security-related tools and techniques one needs to be aware of to build a cybersecurity career. Next, we will cover DNS and its related security implications!

DNS, or Domain Name System, translates domain names to IP addresses, so your browser/s can find what you searched. DNS resolvers are usually stub resolvers, which means that the full DNS records lie elsewhere.

Zeek the new Bro

Zeek is the new name for Bro that has been in existence since 1994. In this article, we will review the useful features of Zeek that make it a powerful tool for network analysis and security monitoring. Need a little more familiarity with Zeek? Check out our previous blog:  Bro: Security's Swiss Army Knife.

To start a career as a security analyst, one must have a good understanding of the network and knowledge of networking tools. Let's begin with netcat.

Looking for some top hacking techniques? Read about the most common ones below! 

Credit to Finjan.com, for more detail on this content see the original post: https://blog.finjan.com/9-common-hacking-techniques-and-how-to-deal-with-them/