7MS #303: Evaluating Endpoint Protection Solutions

Today's featured interview is with Lewie Wilkinson, senior integration engineer at Pondurance. Pondurance helps customers improve their security posture by providing a managed threat hunting and response solution, including a 24/7 SOC. Lewie joined me via Skype to talk a lot about a topic I'm fascinated with: incident response! I had a slew of questions and topics I wanted to discuss, including: Fundamentals of threat hunting What is threat hunting? What are the fundamentals to start mastering? How can someone start developing the core skills to get good at it? How can sysadmins/network admin, who have a busy enough time already just keeping the digital lights on, handle the mounting pressure to also shoulder security responsibilities as part of their job duties? What training/cert options are good to build skills in threat hunting? Lets say you know one of your users has clicked something icky and you suspect compromised machine/creds. You pull the machine off the network and rebuild it. How do you know that you've found/limited the extent of the damage? Are attackers on networks typically wiping logs on systems as the bounce around laterally? Anything to add to the low-hanging hacker fruit list? Why is it so critical to not just have logs, but have verbose logs with rich data you need in an investigation? When does it make sense to outsource some security responsibilities to a third party? Learn more about Pondurance at their Web site and Twitter.

20 Feb 20191h

Today's featured interview is with Ameesh Divatia, cofounder and CEO at Baffle. Baffle offers an interesting approach to data protection that they call data-centric protection, and the idea is you need to protect information at the record level, not just the sort of traditional approach of "encrypt at rest" and call it good. Ameesh sat down with me to talk about a lot of high level data and security privacy concerns, specifically: Data privacy - it seems like every 15 minutes there's yet another massive data breach. Why is this continuing to happen? What are the basic security/privacy fundamentals that companies should be doing but, for whatever reason, are not? GDPR What does GDPR mean to the average person? Why it was a data privacy wake-up call for so many? Have there been any sizable fines issued thus far? How can data that companies collect on us be processed in a way that doesn't compromise security? Learn more about Baffle at their Web site and Twitter.

14 Feb 201929min

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at safepass.me. Safepass.me is the most efficient and cost-effective solution to prevent Active Directory users from setting a weak or compromised password. It's in compliance with the latest NIST password guidelines, and is the only enterprise solution to protect organizations against credential stuffing and password spraying attacks. Visit safepass.me for more details, and tell them 7 Minute Security sent you to get a 10% discount! This episode focuses on security for families/kids - specifically cell phone security for tweenagers. We hit a milestone in the 7MS household this year because my tweenage son got an iPhone, much to my...uhh...not excitement. So we decided to wrap the following technical and administrative controls around the phone to hopefully make it a pleasant experience for everybody: Technical I really dig the Apple family sharing controls, which let you do things like: Have the phone "sleep" at certain hours Limit the total amount of screen time per day Require you to authorize any apps that are downloaded We turned on OpenDNS to help filter inappropriate content. I also use UniFi access points, which allow you to create a separate wireless SSID with a voucher system enabled on it. That way, you can hand out vouchers to kids with a defined amount of access attached to it (like 1 hour or whatever you like). We use it as a reward once the kids' chores and homework is complete. Administrative For our tweenager with the phone, we wrote up an agreement about acceptable use of the phone - including guidelines around the device's physical security, passwords and PINs, appropriate content, etc. You can grab a copy here

6 Feb 201936min

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at safepass.me. Safepass.me is the most efficient and cost-effective solution to prevent Active Directory users from setting a weak or compromised password. It's in compliance with the latest NIST password guidelines, and is the only enterprise solution to protect organizations against credential stuffing and password spraying attacks. Visit safepass.me for more details, and tell them 7 Minute Security sent you to get a 10% discount! Psst...my pals Paul and Dan are hosting a Webinar all about building your own pentest lab for ~$500. This is happening next Tuesday, Feb. 5 at 12 p.m. CST. Sign up here. Today I thought I'd kind of hit the reset/refresh button and give you a little background on: My self-diagnosed job ADHD (check out my series on career guidance for the even longer version :-/) The history of 7MS the podcast (inspired by 10 minute podcast) How the podcast helped launch 7MS the business The various resources 7MS has worked on to help you in your IT/security career, such as: BPATTY - Brian's Pentesting and Technical Tips for You A Slack channel full of cool security people who want to help you learn, and learn from others as well Vulnerable VMs to help you practice hacking, such as Billy Madison and Tommy Boy Thinking about starting your own company? Come see me at Secure360 this summer for my talk called So You Want to Start a Security Company.

31 Jan 201949min

WARNING: Today's episode is a bit of an experiment, and I hope you'll hang in there with me for it. I had the opportunity to do a week-long red team engagement, and so I recorded a little summary of the experience at the end of each day, and then pasted them all together to make today's episode. Listening back to the episode now, it sounds like I might belong on a funny farm. But I thought it would be fun to give you a first-hand account of the experience so you can share the stomach-twisting journey with me.

24 Jan 201950min

Coming up on Tuesday, January 22 I'll be doing a Webinar with Netwrix called 4 Ways Your Organization Can Be Hacked. It features a Billy Madison theme and pits evil Eric Gordon against sysadmin Billy Madison. Hope you'll join us - it'll be fun! Today I'm pleased to welcome Amber Boone to the program! She is an awareness builder for a cybersecurity vendor (insert dramatic music!), and Amber was gracious enough to help me pilot a new style of interview called 7 Minute Interviews with 7MS. I basically asked Amber a "serious" question about security, then a goofy one, then another serious, then another goofy...and so on and so forth until the 7 minutes was up. Amber answered important questions such as: Would she rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or 1 horse-sized ducks? What basic security effort could orgs address without investing a huge amount of dollars and effort? Would she rather be a giant hamster or a tiny rhinoceros? If you'd like to check out what Amber's doing online, check out her LinkedIn, her side project YourLegacies.com or follow Amber on Twitter. Interested in doing a 7 minute interview with 7MS? Head here.

16 Jan 201922min

I'd like to coordially invite you to the first-ever 7MS User Group meeting, coming up Monday, January 14th at 6 p.m.! You can attend physically, virtually or both! All the info you need is in today's podcast, as well as here. See you there!

9 Jan 201911min

Psssst! Wanna come to the first ever 7MS User Group meeting? It's coming up on January 14th. You can join in person or virtually! Head here for more information! Dan DeCloss (a.k.a. wh33lhouse on Slack and @PlexTracFTW aon Twitter) joined me virtually in the studio to talk about his passion project, PlexTrac. Dan also shared his insight on all sorts of great topics, including: How to bleed "purple" and get comfortable playing on both the attacking and defending side of the house What areas are we failing in defending our networks - and what kind of things can we do make our networks more resilient?! What's the biggest challenge you see on both the blue and red team side (spoiler alert: communication is super important!)? How do you break into a cyber security position that requires X years of experience when you have zero experience (Dan offers a great tip: don't be intimidated by requirements on job postings...they're often excessive/unreasonable) Ways to show security aptitude on your resume without necessarily having a bunch of experience: Build a home lab Create a blog Bug bounties Make a podcast Get certs (or at least get enrolled in them) Some history on PlexTrac and what inspired Dan to create it

2 Jan 20191h