7 Minute Security

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at Netwrix. Their amazing Netwrix Auditor tool gives you visibility into what’s happening both on your local network and cloud-based IT systems and tells you about critical changes, and when and where people have been accessing data. Give it a spin right in your browser here, and then try it in your environment free for 20 days! www.netwrix.com Well I'm geeking out big time because today I chatted with John Strand of Black Hills Information Security, SANS instructing, Security Weekly, Active Countermeasures, RITA and more. Some people think he looks like Wash from Serenity or Steve the Pirate from Dodgeball, and others get upset when they learn he's not John Strand the male model. I've followed John and his team's work since I got started in security, and they've been a huge inspiration for what I do at 7MS. If you're not watching the BHIS Webcasts stop what you're doing and subscribe now! They're all full of practical, hands-on security advice - often complemen

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at Dashlane, a fantastic password manager for you, your family and your business! Head to www.dashlane.com/7ms and use the code 7MS for 10% off a year of Dashlane Premium! Today I'm super pumped to be joined by Ryan Manship of RedTeam Security and Dave Dobrotka of United HealthGroup. Both these guys lead red teams for a living and had a lot of great insight to share as it relates to: The definition of "red teaming" and where it overlaps, if at all, with pentesting Successfully running red team campaigns Defending against a red team campaign How to climb unclimbable walls Is antivirus any good at stopping attackers? The importance of 2FA and training your end-users How to fool the "This email originated outside your organization" email banners How to break into red teaming as a career How to successfully break into a casino (or not) Other links and things mentioned in today's show: RedTeam Security's awesome YouTube video on breaking into the US power grid

Today's episode is a follow-up to #304 where we talked about how you can integrate over 500 million weak/breached/leaked passwords form Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords into your Active Directory. To get started with this in your environment, grab Troy's updated passwords list here, and then you can check out my BPATTY site for step-by-step implementation instructions. The big "gotchas" I discuss in today's episode are: If users update their password to something on the Pwned Passwords list, they'll see the generic "Your password didn't meet policy requirements" message. In other words, the message they'll see is no different than when they pick a password that doesn't meet the default domain policy. So be careful! I'd recommend training the users ahead of pulling the trigger on Pwned Passwords. If you want to take, for example, just the top 100 words off of Troy's list and start your implementation off with a small list with: Get-Content ".\pwnedpasswords.txt" | select -First 100 As it relates to "hard c

It's been a while so I thought I'd update you on how things are going on the business front. Here are the big updates I want to share with you in today's episode: A new 7MS hire that's going to hunt sales opportunities! My approach to finding podcast sponsors (it seems to be working) Some kick-butt interviews that are on the horizon (including the one and only JOHN STRAND!) Lots of goodies to share today!

I'm putting together a general security awareness session aimed at helping individuals and businesses not get hacked. To play off the lucky number 7, I'm trying to broil this list down to 7 key things to focus on. Here's my list thus far: Passwords 2FA/MFA Wifi (put a good password on it, don't use WEP, don't use WPS Sign up for HaveIBeenPwned Update all the things Block malware/mining with browser plugins Security awareness training What do you think? Anything I missed or should consider swapping with another topic? Contact me!

I had an exhilarating and terrifying experience this week doing my first ever live radio interview! As a quick bit of background, this interview was part of the 7MS radio marketing campaign that I've talked about my "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying" series (here's part 1, 2 and 3). The interview was conducted by Lee Michaels, and though my heart was pounding for the first few minutes, it quickly became fun as Lee and I talked about picking good passwords, securing wifi, talking to your kids about safe online behaviors, and more.

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. Today's episode is a follow-up interview with Joe Klein, who is my good pal, a former coworker, and a SOC analyst extraordinaire. You might remember Joe from things such as...this podcast - episode #290 to be exact. When we last left Joe, he had just started an exciting new journey as a SOC analyst, and also picked up a new sweet gig teaching college-level security courses. So Joe and I sat down last week in the 7 Minute Security studios to talk with Joe about: How to be an absolute beast at networking Seizing new opportunities (even if it seems scary) Good certs for security newbs (and not-so-newbs) to pursue Life as a SOC analyst How to learn security by teaching it! This interview was an absolute blast to work on with Joe, and after it was over, neither of us could believe that the run time was nearly 2 hours! So in ord

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. This week I sat down with Lane Roush of Arctic Wolf to discuss the big hairy beast that is...(insert dramatic music here) logging and alerting! I work with a lot of clients (and you probably do too) who want answers to these questions: What in the world is going on in my network? How will I know if bad stuff is happening? If I do identify the bad stuff and attempt to eradicate it, how will I know if I've exorcised all the demons? So Lane and I sat down to discuss this conundrum, and explore answers to other burning questions like: Why is it so hard to separate the signal from noise when trying to figure out what's happening in the bowels of your network? Should logging/alerting be a full-time job for one or more people? When does it make sense to outsource these responsibilities? Check out today's interview to learn more

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. In today's episode, I talk about my fun experience using the Sn1per automated pentesting tool. It's really cool! It can scan your network, find vulnerabilities and exploit them - all in one swoop! It also does a nice one-two punch of OSINT+recon if you feed it a domain name. And, I tell a painful story about how a single checkbox setting in a firewall cost me a lot of hours and tears. You can LOL at me, learn from my pain, and we'll all be better for it.

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. This week's show is another interview episode - this time with my pal Bjorn Kimminich of the OWASP Juice Shop. If you've never heard of the Juice Shop before, it's the world's most secure (and I mean that sarcastically) online shopping experience. Actually, it's chock full of security issues, which makes it a fantastic learning tool for Web app pentesters, be they seasoned or total newbs. Bjorn and I sat down (over Skype) to discuss: How the Juice Shop came to be The current status of application security (is it getting any better?!) Common vulnerabilities still found in today's Web apps Juice Shop being featured in Google's Summer of Code How dev teams can better bake security into their products What's next for the Juice Shop (hint: stay tuned after the episode is over for a hint on one new "feature") Bjorn has gone to g

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 ticke

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!