7 Minute Security

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 sarcast...

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...

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 enc...

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 begi...

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 w...

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...

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 ai...

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 d...

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.u...

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 r...

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 f...

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)...

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 ....

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 wor...

I've had a fun week with a mixed bag of security related stuff happening, so I thought I'd throw it all in a big stew and cook it up for today's episode. Here are the highlights: Bash bunny preso I had a fun opportunity this week to speak to some property managers about the threats the Bash Bunny poses to an environment. Specifically I showed the one-two punch of: How BB can steal your wireless ne...

Intro CredDefense is a freakin' sweet tool from the fine folks at Black Hills Information Security that does some really nifty things: Password filter Lets say you use the out-of-the-box password policy that comes with Active Directory, and you want to change your password to Winter2017! - AD is gonna say "Yeah dude/dudette, go for it...it fits the bill!" But from an attacker's perspective we know...

In today's continuation of last week's episode I'm continuing a discussion on using free tools to triage Windows systems - be they infected or just acting suspicious. Specifically, those tools include: FTK Imager - does a dandy job of creating memory dumps and/or full disk backups of a live system. You can also make a portable version by installing FTK Imager on a machine, then copying the C:\Prog...

I had the privilege of creating a Windows System Forensics 101 course/presentation for a customer. The good/bad news is there is so much good information out there, it's hard to boil things down to just an hour. For the first part of the presentation, I focused on Mark Russinovich's technique of using Sysinternals as the primary surgical tool. This approach includes things like: Use Process Explor...

Last week I talked about how business has been going with the LLC. Today I answer some additional questions that I didn't have time to address: How I'm finding leads/projects to work on (TLDR: I'm NOT sending 1TB of PDFs to people, spamming them, calling them endlessly or LinkedIn'ing everybody and their mom) The interesting conversations I'm having with customers who seem a little tired of the tr...

Intro Here's some of the "juice" that has helped 7MS have a successful start: Support system Ok so I think if you're going to have a successful business, you need an awesome support system. Mine consists of some of these things: Faith - I'm a Christian and pray about this business constantly. In fact I learned really quickly how easy it is to brag about your rock-solid faith when everything is goi...

WEFFLES are delicious! WEFFLES stands for Windows Event Logging Forensic Logging Enhancement Services and is Microsoft's cool (and free!) console for responding to incidents and hunting threats. I had a chance to play with it in the lab this week and for the most part, the install of WEFFLES went well, but I had one minor issue that was cleared up easily. As I went through the MS TechNet article,...

Today I'm excited to be joined by my friend and advisor Kevin Keane ( Twitter / LinkedIn ) who is a lawyer, blogger, keynote speaker, business advisor, and just all around great guy. Kevin and I sit down to talk about: How SMBs can take some productive security baby steps How to get the most value out of your next security consultant engagement Can breaches ever be funny? What is the Trust Calculu...

GDPR in a nutshell GDPR, in a nutshell, is a set of legal regulations focused on the privacy of personal information for EU citizens - no matter where they are. Entities that store and/or process personal information about EU citizens must clearly explain to the citizens what data is being stored and processed, and any parties the data is being shared with. The citizens must opt-in and agree to ea...