Articles

Securing our future 4: Governmental malware

As per Mikko Hyppönen’s contemplations, nation states have been coining the most advanced samples of malicious software, so read this follow-up to learn more. I suppose the biggest surprise, to me personally, over the last 25 years that I have been fighting online attacks is the fact that governments...

Securing our future 3: The Internet of Things

Mikko Hyppönen now shifts the vector of his discourse over to criminal challenges online as well as the dangers of the rapidly progressing Internet of Things. There are criminal things online as well. When we move from privacy problems to security problems, then we end up with practical things like this...

Securing our future 2: Legal infringement of privacy

Judging from targeted ad campaigns on social networks, Mikko Hyppönen argues, these companies know too much about their users, which is a big privacy concern. When you go and look at these services as a customer, you go and buy an ad, you end up in this user interface, for example with Twitter, where you...

Securing our future – Mikko Hyppönen

Mikko Hyppönen, F-Secure’s CRO and security celebrity who needs no introduction, highlights current and emerging concerns caused by ubiquity of the Internet. I am Mikko Hyppönen, and I have spent my life analyzing viruses, tracking hackers, catching online criminals and trying to protect the security...

How not to suck at pen testing 6: Penetration testers code of ethics

Black Hills Information Security’s John Strand lists the essential rules, which are intended to make pen testing more efficient as the industry is moving on. John Strand: The whole gist of this entire presentation is we need to keep moving forward as network pen testers. We need to continue to find new...

How not to suck at pen testing 5: Hunt teaming

This part is about a really interesting, highly effective take on network penetration testing advocated by John Strand and his colleague Joff Thyer. John Strand: So, let’s talk about trying to find new areas, and that’s kind of where we are going to start tying this up (see right-hand image). We need to...

How not to suck at pen testing 4: Bit9 issues and ISR Evilgrade attacks

John Strand dwells on a few nontrivial vectors applicable for compromising target organization’s IT infrastructure and bypassing technologies like Bit9. Also, there’s data loss prevention. As I said, we’re in the midst of a webcast called “Sacred Cash Cow Tipping”. In information security,...

How not to suck at pen testing 3: Mitigating structural weaknesses

The author of the presentation moves on to express his viewpoint on the correct way of handling structural vulnerabilities found during a security assessment. Another kind of offset one was antivirus. I know that this isn’t leet at all, but a couple of weeks ago we did a webcast called “Sacred Cash Cow...

How not to suck at pen testing 2: Thinking beyond the Reds

Some information security engagements described by John Strand demonstrate that the Criticals in pen test reports are not the only things to look at. A number of years ago Ethan Robish, who was with Black Hills Information Security, was doing a pen test for a customer of ours that had multiple pen tests from...

How not to suck at pen testing – John Strand

John Strand, the owner of Black Hills Information Security, shares his perspective upon what the present-day penetration testing should be like. The name of this presentation is “How not to suck at pen testing”. There’s a lot of presentations that you’ll see where people just rip on the pen...