What always gets me about these red team attacks is the same thing that gets me about internal phishing test emails.
My company sent an internal phishing test last week. Several people immediately reported it to a cybersecurity engineer, posted about it in Slack, saying they were surprised that such a sophisticated phishing attack was happening.
I too was surprised - Google is usually much better about catching these kinds of things in the GMail filter before they get through. Oh well, sometimes one slips though. Reported it and moved on
Come to learn that the only reason it made it through is because we let it through _on purpose_.
By analogy to these red team attacks: _theoretically_ someone could rent a car, pose as an employee, and set up a Raspberry Pi in the network.
But who would go to all that trouble?
Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble?
Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.
The only reason this attack vector was open is because the red team stood to gain a massive benefit from succeeding in the attack. What real-world actor would go to the trouble and stand to benefit as much?
”Finally, the company should have enforced a strong password policy that would have prevented our heroes from finding dozens of accounts with “winter2023!” as the password.”
Capitalize that “w”, and you’ve got a password that will pass most PWD policies. Why do they think it was “winter2023!” to begin with? In 90 days when the PWD expires, well, it will be spring of the next year, so…
The better idea is to require passwords with some real entropy, and get rid of expiring passwords. It’s not 1999 anymore.
I swear if the ghouls running things had abit more decency and allowed people to actually access and controll their passkeys then that would be the future, everyone would adopt it. The experience is so nice with key pair exchange for ssh. Its just that there i have thr security of knowing exactly where my secret is and how i can manage it, its just a file and i can move it like a file
Nobody wants the risk of getting locked out because of apple and googles walled garden bullshit
How about mixing up band names? Take the end of "Florence and the machine" and mix it with the start of "Rage against the machine" and you now have the totally unguessable "Rage sharing the machine". It's a different machine see?! Nobody would know that!
The company also should have restricted network access to the port in the conference room so that an unknown device like a Raspberry Pi could not make an Ethernet connection from that spot
Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.
What always gets me about these red team attacks is the same thing that gets me about internal phishing test emails.
My company sent an internal phishing test last week. Several people immediately reported it to a cybersecurity engineer, posted about it in Slack, saying they were surprised that such a sophisticated phishing attack was happening.
I too was surprised - Google is usually much better about catching these kinds of things in the GMail filter before they get through. Oh well, sometimes one slips though. Reported it and moved on
Come to learn that the only reason it made it through is because we let it through _on purpose_.
By analogy to these red team attacks: _theoretically_ someone could rent a car, pose as an employee, and set up a Raspberry Pi in the network.
But who would go to all that trouble?
Theoretically, someone could craft a perfect phishing attack, but who would go to all that trouble? Spray-and-pray, low precision, high surface area, attacks are the ones I end up reading about.
The only reason this attack vector was open is because the red team stood to gain a massive benefit from succeeding in the attack. What real-world actor would go to the trouble and stand to benefit as much?
”Finally, the company should have enforced a strong password policy that would have prevented our heroes from finding dozens of accounts with “winter2023!” as the password.”
Capitalize that “w”, and you’ve got a password that will pass most PWD policies. Why do they think it was “winter2023!” to begin with? In 90 days when the PWD expires, well, it will be spring of the next year, so…
The better idea is to require passwords with some real entropy, and get rid of expiring passwords. It’s not 1999 anymore.
I swear if the ghouls running things had abit more decency and allowed people to actually access and controll their passkeys then that would be the future, everyone would adopt it. The experience is so nice with key pair exchange for ssh. Its just that there i have thr security of knowing exactly where my secret is and how i can manage it, its just a file and i can move it like a file
Nobody wants the risk of getting locked out because of apple and googles walled garden bullshit
1. Open a web browser and do a search
2. Read until you find a sentence that you like.
3. Use it as your password
How about mixing up band names? Take the end of "Florence and the machine" and mix it with the start of "Rage against the machine" and you now have the totally unguessable "Rage sharing the machine". It's a different machine see?! Nobody would know that!
I like the last line of your comment
My password is now password
Hacked
Not enough numbers or special characters usually.
The company also should have restricted network access to the port in the conference room so that an unknown device like a Raspberry Pi could not make an Ethernet connection from that spot
Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.