📢 About

The main objectives of this repo

• This is a 'Open Source Study Guide' for Security+ SY0-501, gathering as many information as possible from many sources on internet to ensure to cover all topics presented on exam.

• The second objective is to help you pass the exam without paying any expensive training courses and also contribute to infosec community <3 .

ℹ️ About the exam

⚠️ Important Note: The SY0-501 exam is scheduled to be retired in July of 2021⚠️

CompTIA Security+ is the first security certification IT professionals should earn. It establishes the core knowledge required of any cybersecurity role and provides a springboard to intermediate-level cybersecurity jobs. Security+ incorporates best practices in hands-on trouble-shooting to ensure security professionals have practical security problem-solving skills. Cybersecurity professionals with Security+ know how to address security incidents – not just identify them.

Security+ is compliant with ISO 17024 standards and approved by the US DoD to meet directive 8140/8570.01-M requirements. Regulators and government rely on ANSI accreditation, because it provides confidence and trust in the outputs of an accredited program. Over 2.3 million CompTIA ISO/ANSI-accredited exams have been delivered since January 1, 2011. [+]

☑️ Exam Domains

✳️ Free Resources

• Practice questions - I recommend to test your knowledge after study all topics presented on the exam.

  1. Practice Questions - Passcomptia
  2. Practice Questions - Examcompass
  3. Practice Questions - Professor Messer
  4. Practice Questions - Github

• Training videos

  1. Professor Messer - 13 hours of content.
  2. PaceIT online - 5 hours of content.
  3. Lynda Prep Course - 30 day free trial - 21 hours of content.

• Index

  1. Securing Systems
  2. Security Tools
  3. Networks and Infrastructure
  4. Identity and Access Management
  5. Risk Management
  6. Incident Response & Forensics
  7. Testing the Infrastructure
  8. Cryptography

Brief Introduction

Information security, sometimes shortened to infosec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or at least reducing the probability of unauthorized/inappropriate access, use, disclosure, disruption, deletion/destruction, corruption, modification, inspection, recording or devaluation, although it may also involve reducing the adverse impacts of incidents.

Goals of Security

The CIA triad is put into pratice through various security mechanisms and controls. Every security technique, practice, and mechanism put into place to protect systems and data relates in some fashion to ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

The CIA Triad

Confidentiality

Keeping systems and data from being accessed, seen, read to anyone who is not authorized to do so.

Integrity

Protect the data from modification or deletion by unauthorized parties, and ensuring that when authorized people make changes that shouldn't have been made the damage can be undone.

Availability

Systems, access channels, and authentication mechanisms must all be working properly for the information they provide and protect to be available when needed.

Note: In addition, other properties, such as authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation and reliability can also be involved. (ISO/IEC 27000:2009)

Auditing & Accountability

Basically keep tracking of everthing, like, who's been logging in when are they loggin in whose access this data.

Non-Repudiation

Non-repudiation is the assurance that someone cannot deny the validity of something. Non-repudiation is a legal concept that is widely used in information security and refers to a service, which provides proof of the origin of data and the integrity of the data.

1. Securing Systems

Understanding Attacks

Denial-of-Service (DoS)

• Prevents others from accessing a system / comprimising the availability.

Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS)

• Uses multiple systems to attack a single host - Generally controlled by BotNets, which is a type of malware that uses remotely controlled malicious software to control a large range of computers.

• Volumetric Attack

  • Ping Flood
    • A ping flood is a simple denial-of-service attack where the attacker overwhelms the victim with ICMP "echo request" packets.
  • UDP Flood
    • A UDP flood is a form of volumetric Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack where the attacker targets and overwhelms random ports on the host with IP packets containing User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets.

• Protocol Attack

  • SYN Flood/TCP SYN Attack
    • A SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack in which an attacker sends a succession of SYN requests to a target's system in an attempt to consume enough server resources to make the system unresponsive to legitimate traffic

• Application Attack

  • SlowLoris Attack
    • Tries to keep many connections to the target web server open and hold them open as long as possible

• Amplification Attack

  • Generate a high volume of packets to flood the target website without alerting the intermediary, by returning a large reply to a small request. The basic defense against these attacks is blocking spoofed-source packets.

• Smurf Attack

  • Flooded with spoofed ping (ICMP) packets.

🛑 ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is an error-reporting protocol network devices like routers use to generate error messages to the source IP address when network problems prevent delivery of IP packets.

Common Host Threats

• Spam - Spam is electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited email. Real spam is generally email advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

• Phishing & Spear Phishing - The difference between both is that Spear Phishing is for targeted individuals with some type of information about the victim embeded.

• Spim - Phishing through instant messaging

• Vishing - Unsolicited use of voice to get sensitive information

• Click Jacking - malicious click bait sites that forces you type your PII or download some malicious software.

• Typo squatting - Mistype URL's (e.g. - facebook.corn)

• Domain Hijacking - the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of its original registrant, or by abuse of privileges on domain hosting and registrar software systems.

• Privilege Escalation - is the act of exploiting a bug, design flaw or configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user.

Man-in-the-Middle Attack

• Third-party intercepting between a two-party conversation
• Uses the information to the third party's advantage

• Wireless MITM

  • 802.11
  • Bluetooth

• Wired MITM

  • Spoof MAC address, IP address, ARP, DNS...

• Typosquatting - Type of URL hijacking (e.g facebook.corn / wikipdia.org)

• Domain Hijacking

• Replay atack - when an attacker detects a data transmission and fraudulently has it delayed or repeated. (e.g The attacker can capture a request sent from victim and replay it to the server).

• Downgrade attack - is a cryptographic attack that makes it change the encrypted connection to the older one (e.g. cleartext).

• Session Hijacking - Inject information on middle of connection

System Resiliency

Resilient systems don’t eliminate risk. Resilient systems fight off attacks more readily than systems with less resilience. They handle risks better, in other words. The principles here apply to individual systems and to larger systems.

• Generally they handle risks better, adding technologies and processes to enable the system recovery easily.

Scalability

• Adding more resources to take care the demand (manually added)

Elasticity

• The resources grow on demand as they required (e.g. IaaS)

Redundancy - Distributed Allocation

Is a form of distributive allocation.

• Web servers, database servers, middleware, security devices, monitoring systems

• Easier to add security between the segmented areas

• Mass storage

• Redundant systems

• Redundant networks

You can create more than one copy of non-OS critical data so that if one copy dies, another copy is ready to go to keep the systems up and running.

Redundancy and Fault tolerance

• Maintain uptime
  • The organization continues to function
• No hardware failure
  • Server keep running
• No software failure
  • Service always available
• No system failure
  • Network performing optimally
• Redundant hardware components
  • Multiple devices, load balancing power supplies
• RAID
  • Redundant Array of Independent Disks
• UPS - Uninterruptible power supplies
  • Prepare for the disconnections
• Clustering
  • A logical collective of servers
• Load balancing
  • Shared service load across components

Non-persistance

Is data that is collected but will not be saved on restart.

• Snapshots - take the current state of something (e.g binary level) and store. A snapshot reverts to known state.
• Virtualization
• Revert/rollbacks tools - The rollback method bring the system back to a previous state. (e.g. Bad Driver, broken Updated etc).
• Live boot

RAID - (Redudant Array of Independent Disks)

Different levels of RAID arrays or combination is for:

• Improve disk access.
• Improve fault tolerance and data integrity.
• Or both

RAID 0

• Has no data integrity.
• Improves speed - data striping(divide the data into pieces in X hard drives); RAID0 speeds up performance but has no integrity, because if one of these hard drives fail, the data is lost.

RAID 1

• Has data integrity - but doesn't have performance ; slow process because the data processed in all hard drives.

RAID 5

• Has disk striping with parity - parity information is spread across all disks evenly; 1/n of the total disk space available is used for parity. You can only loose one drive and keep the data, the problem is if you loose more than one drive.

RAID 6

• Disk parity with double distributed parity - Same as RAID 5 but has one more parity which you can loos two drives and keep your data safe.

RAID 0+1 (01)

• Disk striping with mirroring - combines both RAID levels 0 and 1 for performance and redundancy; a mirror of two striped arrays.

RAID 1+0 (10)

• Disk mirroring with striping - combines both RAID level 0 and 1 for performance and redundancy; a strip of two mirrored arrays.

🛑 The most common RAID styles includes 0, 1, 5 and 10.

🛑 RAID 1 and RAID 0 requires at least 2 drives.

🛑 RAID 5 requires 3 or more drives and RAID 10 requires 4 drives.

NAS and SAN

Storage Area Networks and Network-Attached Storage both provide networked storage solutions. A NAS is a single storage device that operates on data files, while a SAN is a local network of several devices.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

• Runs over a standard network
• Shows up as normal shares on network
• Good for small environments
• File-level

Storage Area Networks (SAN)

• SAN runs on block-level storage
• Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI
• Expensive implementation

Physical Hardening

Policies can control how system hardware acts or reacts to an action.

• Removable media controls

Data Execution Prevention (DEP)

DEP is refer to Windows, in generic term is Executable space protection; DEP is almost always on by default on Windows.

• Designate sections of memory as executing code or data
  • Code can't run from protected memory locations
  • Prevents malware and viruses from executing

🛑 DEP should be always be on, quietly protecting systems from buffer overflows. The need to turn off DEP is rare.

• Disabling Ports (can be done in the BIOS); Turn off legacy non-active ports to avoid vulnerable entry point.

RFI and EMI

Electromagnetic Interference (EMI)

Is a disturbance generated by an external source that affects an electrical circuit by electromagnetic induction, electrostatic coupling, or conduction.

• Shielded twisted pair (STP) cable.
• Creating a distance between the device generating the EMI, or shield the emanating device or media.

Security Concerns (without proper shielding)

• Injecting EMI by changing sensor data and other input
• EMI leakage
  • Determine data streams based on EMI emissions; Keyboards, hard drives, network connections

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI)

RFI is EMI that transmits in the radio frequency range. (e.g. 802.11, cellular WAN radio bands)...

• Both 802.11 and cellular WANs almost always have automatic channel-hopping features that automatically tune devices to the least congested channel.

Electrostatic discharge (ESD)

Discharge of an electrical current through the air, arcing from a point of a relative positive charge to a point of a relative negative charge.

• Protect equipment by shielding it in protective cases
• Only use properly grounded power supplies
• Anti-ESD wrist strap

Host Hardening

• Disabling Unecessary Services - e.g. SSH server, Apache server...
• Default Passwords - Simply avoid default passwords and use good password methodologies.
• Disabling Unecessary Accounts - e.g. Windows default guest account, Duplicate accounts...
• Patch Management
  1. Monitoring patches
     • Might not get reminders
  2. Testing the patches on Sandbox
  3. Evaluating
  4. Deploying the patch
     • Scheduling
  5. Document what is patched

Web server hardening

Make sure that have no data leaks; The server access must be secure.

• Most poupular servers are: Microsoft Internet Information Server, Apache, etc*

• Security Concerns:
  • Information leakege, banner information, directory browsing
  • Permissions: Run from a non-privileged account, configure file permissions
  • Configure SSL certificate
  • Log everything - monitor access and error logs

Anti-Malware

• Training for users
• Procedures
  • Best practices
• Monitoring
• IDS
• Third-party anti-malware tools

Host Firewalls

• Whitelist

  • Defines all the applications a user is allowed to install

• Blacklist

  • Blocked programs

Data & System Security

• Data integrity
• Speed/performance quick access
• High availability

Solutions to secure data:

RAID

• Provides Good integrity
• Provides Good speed
• Affordable

Clustering - Distributive allocation

The primary rationale for server clusters is protection against outages and downtime. There are three main reasons for server clustering. They are availability, scalability, and reliability. The key to a protected IT infrastructure lies in redundancy.

• Good method to protect not only Data, but system resources
• Clustering is Expensive

Load Balancing

Refers to efficiently distributing incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers, also known as a server farm or server pool.

• Distributes work loads across multiple machines

• Servers can be added and removed
  • Real-time response to load
• Performs constant health checks
  • If a server disappears, it is removed from the rotation

Virtualize the serves

• Scalability
• High-availability comes from elasticity
• Snapshots
• Affordable

Hardware & Firmware Security 💻🔐

Disk Encryption

• Full Disk Encryption (FDE)

  • Encrypt an entire drive
  • e.g. Windows - BitLocker

• Self-encrypting Drive (SED)

Trusted Platform Module (TPM)

Microchip built into a computer hardware that is used to store cryptographic information(public/private key). (e.g BitLocker 1.2+); The OS relies on this hardware of root trust to check for low-level changes at boot up.

Examples of disk encryption TPM and non-TPM:

• BitLocker (for Windows - TPM)
• PGP Disk (non-TPM)
• TrueCrypt (non-TPM)
• FileVault (for macOS - non-TPM)

🛑 BitLocker is a built-in Windows Utility Drive Encryption Tool; must have a recovery key to access the data.

Secure Boot - TPM

During the boot process, the TPM and UEFI generate reports about the process and can send those reports to a remote system, like a central authentication server. This process is called remote authentication / remote attestation.

🛑 Secure Boot is built into the UEFI BIOS specifications. If your system has a UEFI BIOS, it also has the Secure Boot functionality.

Remote Attestation

• During the boot, the TPM and UEFI generate reports about the process and can send those reports to a remote system, like a central authentication server. This process is called remote attestation.

🛑 This process is very useful when there are a high number of machines to manage.

🛑 'Remote Attestation' and 'Attestation' is the same thing.

Hardware Security Module (HSM)

Is any type of hardware that's designed to do security work. For ATMs, Web Servers, or other applications that perform an unusually high amount of key handling, it's usually a good idea to offload this work to other hardware.

• Designed for cryptoprocessing
• The gold standard for encryption key security
• Cryptoprocessors such as HSMs use algorithms to encrypt data to offer an increased level of security. HSMs can encrypt and decrypt information and can manage digital keys.

Secure OS Types

• Server OS - RedHat Server, Windows Server etc

  • Built-in functionality
  • Connections

• Workstation - Linux Ubuntu, Windows 10 etc

  • Desktop version
  • Workhorse

• Embedded Systems - Routers, CCTVs etc

  • Appliances
  • Their own OS / Usually a minimal OS

• Kiosk - e.g. Big Touch Screens on Museums, Mall etc

  • Public device with limited function
  • OS is tightly locked down

• Mobile OS - Apple iOS and Android OS

  • Designed for touch screen phones and tablets
  • Optimized for mobile hardware

🛑 Picking an OS based on least functionality is a good security practice.

Secure Peripherals ⌨️📱🖨

1. Wireless keyboards and mice
   • Wireless keyboards and mice communicate in the clear
     • Use proprietary wireless communication protocols
     • Over 2.4 GHz frequencies
   • Easy to capture keystrokes with a receiver
     • Inject keystrokes and mouse movements
     • Control the computer remotely
   • Some keyboard manufacturers support AES encryption
2. Printers/multi-function devices
   • Printer, scanner, fax
   • Network connectivity
   • Reconnaissance - log files for all activity, address books
   • Unauthorized access - print without authentication
   • Gather information - capture spool files
3. Displays
   • Eletromagnetic radiation
   • Firmware hacks
4. MicroSD cards
   • Transfering over the 802.11 Wi-Fi (without removing the SD card from the device)
   • SD card authentication vulnerabilities; Predictable access, easy to read files over Wi-Fi
   • API access to the SD card
5. External storage devices
6. Digital cameras
   • Operates as external storage when plugged into a workstation; Easy to move data around
   • Camera firmware can be compromised

Common security practices:

• Patch!
• Disable unecessary ports
• Avoid backdoors

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)

• Access badges
• Inventory/assembly line tracking
• Pet/animal identification
• Anything that needs to be tracked.

Security Concerns / Attacks

• Data Capture

  • View communication
  • Replay Attack

• Spoof the reader

  • write your own data to the tag

• Denial of Service

  • Signal jamming

NFC - Near Field Communication

Payment systems (Google Wallet, MasterCard partnership etc); Bootstrap for other wireless (helps with Bluetooth pairing); Uses an access token, identity 'card' (short range with encryption support)

Security Concerns

• Remote capture
• Frequency Jamming (DoS)
• Relay/Replay Attack (MITM)
• Loss of RFC device control (e.g stolen phone)

Bluetooth Security - Attacks 🔷⚔️

• Bluejacking - When bad actors connects with any Device that have Bluetooth enable by default.

• Bluesnarfing - When the attacker steals data from the target device by connecting to an unsuspecting user's device.

• Bluebugging - the most serious of the various Bluetooth attacks, involves an attacker attempting to take control of or use a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to place calls.

Types of bluetooth:

• Class1 is 328' foot (100 meters)
• Class2 is 33' foot (10 meters)
• Class3 is 3' foot (1 meter)

🛑 Most Mobile phones and Bluetooth headsets are Class2 (10 meters).

802.11

• Many peripherals can connect to an 802.11 network as a host. Printers and multifunction devices (MFDs) are very commonly connected with 802.11.

Malwares

Virus

• Piece of malicious software
• Attach to other files
• Propagate
• Spread to other devices
• Active

Adware

• Web-centric
• Programs that pop-up unecessary advertisment

Spyware

• Hide from system
• Tracking your web brownsing
• Stealing cookies

Trojans

• Standalone programs that must be installed disguised in programs
• Deliver payload without users knowledge
• Backdoor access
• How to secure: Don't run unknown software

RAT - Remote Access Trojan

• Mimic the behavior of legitimate remote control
• Can hide in common 'inofensive' programs like games
• Backdoor access
• How to secure: Don't run unknown software

Ransomware - Crypto-Malware

• Uses some form of encryption to lock a user out of a system.
• Usually encrypting the boot drive
• Then forces the user to pay money to get the system decrypted
• Can devastate systems

Logic Bomb

• Are triggered by an event (e.g. erasing file shares or disk storage at a certain time or date)
• Can devastate systems

Rootkit

• Piece of software that escalates privileges to execute other things on computer
• Modifies core system files - part of the kernel
• Hard to detect (e.g cannot see in Task manager)
• How to secure: use secure boot with UEFI (security in BIOS) and to remove you will need a specific rootkit remover.

Backdoor

• Piece of software that work on obfuscating an remote access.

Polymorphic Malware

• Changes his own code to confuse the digital signature of anti-malware programs
• Hard to detect and destroy

Armored Virus

• Design to make harder the detection by anti-malware programs.
• Hard to detect and destroy

Keylogger

• Record keystrokes
• Inject scripts
• How to secure: Use anti-virus/malware, keep signatures updated, Firewall rules and keylogging scanner.

Analyzing Output 🔍

Anti-Malware

• Almost all anti-malware tools include a point scanner and a mass storage scanner.

Host-based Firewall

• Inbound rules / outbound rules

• All host based firewalls are basically they exclude everybody, so it is called an implicity deny (not programs gets in or out)

• The output is really an Access Control List

• Use of Least privilege and whitelisting

🛑 False positive - scan results identify a file that may not actually harm a system or is allowed on the system. (e.g. you just downloaded the Cain & Abel to crack some passwords on your assessment, probably Windows Defender will try to block it out).

WAF - Web Application Firewall

• Not like a 'normal' firewall
  • Applies rules to HTTP/HTTPS conversations
• Allow or deny based on expected input
  • Unexpected input is a common method of exploiting an application
• SQL injection
  • Add your own commands to an application's SQL query
• A major focus of PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)

File Integrity Check

Verify the integrity of file is in good order and ready to run.

Basically to check if the file isn't:

• corrupted
• tampered
• version and date

🛑 To create a file integrity check, you can Generate a hash from source code - checksum. If somebody tamper the file or change from source code, the output hash will be different.

Application Blacklisting | Whitelisting

• Any application can be dangerous

• Security policy can control app execution with Whitelisting & Blacklisting

• ✅ Whitelisting:

  • Nothing runs unless it's approved
  • Very restrictive

• ❌ Blacklisting:

  • Nothing on the 'bad list' can be executed
  • Anti-virus, anti-malware

Everything about software management, application whitelisting, the main job - it's to make sure that users are running the right applications on each individual systems.

• Decisions are made in the OS
• Application hash - Only allows applications with this unique identifier
• Certificate - Allow digitally signed apps from certain publishers
• Path - Only run applications inside specific folders
• Network zone - The apps can only run from this network zone

IDS and IPS

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS)

• Lives inside the Network
• Watches within the network traffic
• Sends alerts on suspicious activity

Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)

• Active IDS
• IPS is usually close to the edge the network
• Takes action to prevent will occur at the IPS device

🛑 IDS: Notifies 🛑 IPS: Acts to stop 🛑 Firewall: Filters

⚠️ IDS and IPS will be explained with more details later below.

Automation Strategies

Automation is often used with various scans and updates based on configurable trigger.

• Repetitive
• Consistent
• Template restoration
• Continuous monitoring network devices (e.g. SNMP)
• Automatic update from OS
• Monitoring host for application whitelists
• Application Development - continuous integration tools like fuzzing, static testing
• Built-in tools vs Shell Scripting to Automate (Powershell(Windows) , Bash(Linux) ..)

Media Sanitization | Data Destruction

Data Sanitization Tools

• Sanitize entire hard drives:
  • Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN)
• Sanitize individual files or folders:
  • Microsoft SDelete

🛑 Cache and temporary files can be tricky to track sometimes.

Purge

Purging will process the device to remove data from the drive, the device might will no longer be usable. Means to use anything other than an internal command to sanitize the data on the media. (e.g. Degausser: machine with a strong magnetic field that destroys/purge the data from massa storage devices)

🛑 Purge also means that the device is basically not useful anymore

Clearing/Clear

Clear means to tell the device through user commands inherent to the massa storage device to sanitize the data. (e.g. send commands to a hard drive to erase data)

🛑 Can be done with commands such as erase, format and delete (these methods are not final)

🛑 Crypto Erase - In case you lost the keys to encrypted device.

Destroy / Data Destruction

Ruin the media in such a way tha it is no longer functional.

• Mass storage device
• Tape media
• Floppy disks
• Paper

Protect your rubbish

• Secure your garbage (fence and lock)
• Shred your documents (e.g. Governments burn the good stuff)
• Burn documents
• Pulp the paper

Physical destruction

• Shredder / pulverizer
  • Heavy machinery
  • Complete destruction
• Drill / Hammer
  • Quick and easy
  • Platters, all the way through
• Electromagnetic (degaussing)
  • Remove the magnetic field
  • Destroys the drive data and the electronics
• Incineration

Certificate of destruction

• Destruction is often done by a 3rd party
• Confirmation that your data is destroyed
• Paper trail of broken data
  • You know exactly what happened

Data Sanitization Tools

• Sanitize entire hard drives
  • Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN)
• Sanitize individual files or folders
  • Microsoft SDelete

🛑 Cache and temporary files can be tricky to track sometimes.

2. Security Tools

Passive Security

• You're a network ninja
• Watch packets go by
• There's a lot to learn
• Top talkers, servers, clients, applications, OS, services

Active Security

• Send traffic to a device, watch the results
• Query a login page
• Try a known vulnerability
• Check account access

Protocol Analyzers

Protocol Analyzers collect and inventory the network traffic.

• Sniffer - Some type of software that grab all the data that is going in and out of particular interface.

Why Protocol Analyze?

• Count all the packets coming through over a certain time period to get a strong ideas to your network utilization.
• Inspect packets for single protocols to verify they are working properly.
• Monitor communication between client and a server to look for problems.
• Look for servers that aren't authorized on the network.
• Find systems broadcasting bad data.
• Find problems in authentication by watching each step of the process.

Angry IP Scanner (GUI) - for Windows

Does a good job using simple protocols, mainly ping, to query a single IP address or an address range.

Wireshark

Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level.

• With Wirehsark you can inspect and detect ARP poisonings, Rogue DHCP servers, Broadcast Storm etc.

🛑 Broadcast Storm - when a NIC (or port on a switch) sends large amounts of broadcast traffic, thereby crippling network resources.

Wireless Scanners and Crackers

• Wireless Monitoring:
  • Packet capturing
• Wireless attacks:
  • Rogue access points
  • Deauthentication attacks
• Cracking:
  • Find a wireless netowrk key
  • WEP - Cryptographic vulnerabilities - relatively straightforward
  • WPA PSK and WPA2 PSK - Dictionary brute force, rainbow tables
• Many Open Source projects:
  • Aircrack-ng Suite, Fern

aircrack-ng

Password Crackers

• Passwords are stored as Hashes
• It's a one-way trip (you can't convert hash to plain-text password)
• Some are stored without much complexity - relatively straightforward to brute-force a weak hash
• As an attacker, After get the hashes you can use a good wordlist or rainbow-table to crack them.

Many tools available:

• John the Ripper:

• Ophcrack:

Vulnerability Scanners

• Gather as much information as possible

• Security Patches alert

• Popular tools:

  • MBSA - Microsoft Baseline Secuirty Analyzer
  • Nessus by Tenable
  • Nikto

⚠️ Vulnerability Scanners will be explained with more details later below at Chapter 7 - Testing Infrastructure.

Configuration Compliance Scanner

• The devices must meet minimum security configurations

  • Comply with internal requirements or industry regulations

• Check for varios configurations

  • OS version
  • Installed applications
  • Network settings
  • Anti-virus / anti-malware settings, versions and signatures
  • Server configurations

• Auditing may be ongoing

  • Report on current status, identify changes over time
  • Integrated with login process and/or VPN connection

Exploitation Frameworks

• On the browser, OS, applications, embedded devices, etc.

• Build an exploit using different techniques

• Those frameworks are heavily updated with newest CVEs and most common exploits

• Tools:

  • BeEF - The browser Exploitation Framework Project
  • RouterSploit - Router Exploitation Framework
  • Metasploit - Build your own vulnerability tests or use modules in the existing exploit database.

Metasploit Framework - exploits

OS Utilities - Command Line (Linux & Windows)

• Security+ covers simple Linux and Windows commands.
• To understand the functionality behind the commands I recommend to test them at your own.

ping

• Can be handful for DNS checks (up / or down) | is a DNS tool to resolves web addresses to an IP address.
• Test reachability - determine round-trip time, and uses ICMP protocol.

~#: ping www.google.com 

PING www.google.com (172.217.168.164): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.217.168.164: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=25.981 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.168.164: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=25.236 ms
--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 25.236/25.608/25.981/0.373 ms

🛑 In Windows you need to add a -t flag to keep running.

Most useful switches for Ping command - Windows:

netstat

• Network statistics

• Get info on host system TCP / UDP connections and status of all open and listening ports and routing table.

• Who you talking to?

• Who trying talking to you?

netstat -a # (show all active connections) (servers)
netstat -n # (hosts)
netstat -b # (Show binaries Windows)

tracert | traceroute

• Traceroute - how packets get from host to another endpoint. Traceroute is helpful to see what routers are being hit, both internal and external.

• tracert - Windows

• traceroute - Linux

• Take advantage of ICMP Time to Live (TTL) Exceeded error message

  • The time in TTL refers to hops, not seconds or minutes.
  • TTL=1 is the first router.
  • TTL=2 is the second router, and so on.

• As shown above, on HOP 2 the TTL exceeded and back to the device A, counting 3 on TTL for the next HOP.

~#: traceroute google.com

traceroute to google.com (172.217.17.14), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)  4.960 ms  3.928 ms  3.724 ms
 2  10.10.124.254 (10.10.127.254)  11.175 ms  14.938 ms  15.257 ms
 3  10.133.200.17 (10.137.201.17)  13.212 ms  12.581 ms  12.742 ms
 4  10.255.44.86 (10.255.45.86)  16.369 ms  15.100 ms  17.488 ms
 5  72.14.201.214 (72.14.201.214)  13.287 ms  29.262 ms  16.591 ms
 6  74.125.235.68 (74.125.242.68)  22.488 ms
    74.125.235.84 (74.125.242.84)  13.833 ms *
 7  74.125.252.202 (74.125.252.202)  24.147 ms
    108.170.252.241 ([email protected])  26.352 ms
    74.125.252.202 (74.125.252.202)  23.598 ms
 8  108.170.252.247 (108.170.252.247)  31.187 ms
    74.125.252.199 (74.125.252.199)  22.885 ms

arp

• Address resolution protocol - caches of ip-to-ethernet
• Determine a MAC address based on IP addresses
• Option -a: view local ARP table

~#: arp -a

? (192.168.1.3) at 00:11:22:33:44:55 [ether] on enp0s10
? (192.168.1.128) at e8:33:b0:70:2c:71 [ether] on enp0s10
? (192.168.1.4) at 2c:33:5c:a4:2e:8a [ether] on enp0s10
_gateway (192.168.1.1) at 00:31:33:8b:2a:da [ether] on enp0s10

ipconfig

• Show all IP configuration on Windows-only systems.

• Useful switches:

ifconfig

• Equivalent to ipconfig for UNIX/Linux OS.

~#: ifconfig
docker0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 00:11:22:33:44:55  txqueuelen 0  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

enp0s10: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.1.128  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255
        inet6 fe80::acf6:2ae2:ab5c:6316  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 156651  bytes 29382856 (28.0 MiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 76400  bytes 23111524 (22.0 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

iwconfig

similar to ifconfig, but is dedicated to the wireless network interface.

~#: iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

enp0s10   no wireless extensions.

wlp3s0b1  IEEE 802.11  ESSID:off/any  
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=19 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          
docker0   no wireless extensions.

ip addr

show / manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnels.

Show all the ip configuration, mac address, ipv6 etc.

~#: ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp0s10: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.1.111/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute enp0s10
       valid_lft 4761sec preferred_lft 4761sec
    inet6 fe80::acf6:2ae2:ab5c:6316 scope link noprefixroute 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

nslookup

• Query Internet name servers interactively; check if the DNS server is working

nslookup www.certifiedhacker.com

output:
Server:         192.168.1.1
Address:        192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.certifiedhacker.com canonical name = certifiedhacker.com.
Name:   certifiedhacker.com
Address: 162.241.216.11 inslookup www.certifiedhacker.com
Server:         192.168.1.1
Address:        192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.certifiedhacker.com canonical name = certifiedhacker.com.
Name:   certifiedhacker.com
Address: 162.241.216.11

dig

• DNS lookup tool - Functions like nslookup, but allows for further functionality.

dig www.certifiedhacker.com

output:
; <<>> DiG 9.11.14-3-Debian <<>> certifiedhacker.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 15708
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 2048
; COOKIE: 71bd915b07b3fd08757c9ad65e5d6f3e549d5187359e97cb (good)
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;certifiedhacker.com.           IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
certifiedhacker.com.    14400   IN      A       162.241.216.11

;; Query time: 419 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Mar 02 15:40:29 EST 2020
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 92

netcat

TCP/IP swiss army knife; you can make any type of connection and see the results from a command line. With nc you can connect to anything on any port number or you can make your system listen on a port number. Can be an agressive tool for recon.

• "Read" or "Write" to the network
  • Open a port and send or receive some traffic
  • Listen on a port number
  • Transfer data
  • Scan ports and send data to be a port
• Become a backdoor
  • Run a shell from a remote device

stat

stat can return the status of an entire file system, the status of the first hard disk and so on.

• Archive attribute - Windows - if something is created or changed

tcpdump

• Tcpdump is a data-network packet analyzer computer program that runs under a command line interface. It allows the user to display TCP/IP and other packets being transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached. Distributed under the BSD license, tcpdump is free software

Network Scanners

Useful for collect and inventory the hosts on a network, and is useful for reconnaissance of your system.

nmap

The Best way to query a system to check if they have open ports, services, system versions, service versions etc.

nmap -v -A -T5 scanme.nmap.org 

...
PORT      STATE SERVICE    VERSION
22/tcp    open  ssh        OpenSSH 6.6.1p1 Ubuntu 2ubuntu2.13 (Ubuntu Linux; protocol 2.0)
| ssh-hostkey: 
|   1024 ac:00:a0:1a:82:ff:cc:55:99:dc:67:2b:34:97:6b:75 (DSA)
|   2048 20:3d:2d:44:62:2a:b0:5a:9d:b5:b3:05:14:c2:a6:b2 (RSA)
|   256 96:02:bb:5e:57:54:1c:4e:45:2f:56:4c:4a:24:b2:57 (ECDSA)
|_  256 33:fa:91:0f:e0:e1:7b:1f:6d:05:a2:b0:f1:54:41:56 (ED25519)
80/tcp    open  http       Apache httpd 2.4.7 ((Ubuntu))
|_http-favicon: Unknown favicon MD5: 156515DA3C0F7DC6B2493BD5CE43F795
| http-methods: 
|_  Supported Methods: GET HEAD POST OPTIONS
|_http-server-header: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)
|_http-title: Go ahead and ScanMe!
9929/tcp  open  nping-echo Nping echo
31337/tcp open  tcpwrapped
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel
...

🛑 Zenmap is a GUI version of Nmap.

Logging

• Common Log Format (CLF) - Standard type of logs that every single type of web server generates.

127.0.0.1 - - [28/OCT/2012/13:12:44 - 0500] "GET /CertifiedHacker.png HTTP/1.0" 200 42213
    |      |             |                    |                                  |     |
  HOST    IDENT     DATE & TIME            REQUEST                             STATUS BYTES

IDENT - If the IdentityCheck directive is enabled and the client machine runs ident, then this is the identity information reported by the client.
GET - Request HTTP method command
STATUS - status, 200 = Everything is ok
BYTES - the number of bytes in the object returned to the client, excluding all HTTP headers.

There are two types of events: Network and Non-network events.

Non-Network Logs

• Operation System Events

  • Host starting
  • Host shutdown
  • Reboot
  • Service starting, stopping, and failling
  • OS Updates

• Applications Events

  • Application Installation
  • Application starts, stops or crashes

• Security Events

  • Logons
  • Logons successes and failures

Generic Log Structure:

• Date and Time
• Process/Source/ID
• Account associated/System
• Event Number
• Event Description
• Network Logs

Network Events

• O.S. / System-Level

  • Remote logon fail/not
  • Events on Shared Applicaton/Resources
    • Activity on Web Server (e.g. Apache)
    • Activity on Firewall

• Application-Level

Log Management

Descentralized Log management

In environments such as very small networks and don't have large infrastructure or in isolated network segments, descentralized log management is usually the norm.

Centralized Log management

Means that the log files from different machines are automatically sent to a centralized logging facility or server, such as a syslog server, administrators review logs from a centralized loogging facility on the network. Enterprise correlate them into one unifed management interface, so the administrator can look for trends or events. This can be achieved by using SIEM tools.

Centralized features:

• Uses a Central repository
  • Drag on system
• Use SNMP Systems
  • Pulls informaton needed and generates graphs and charts

🛑 Monitoring-as-a-Services (MaaS)

SIEM - Security Information and Event Management

Collects data points from network, including log files, traffic captures, SNMP messages, and so on, from every host on the network. SIEM can collect all this data into one centralized location and correlate it for analysis to look for security and performance issues, as well negative trends all in real time.

⚠️ SIEM will be explained with more details later below.

Continuos Monitoring

Is a proactive way of ensuring that the network administrator receives all the different logs and other data points throughout the network from all network devices and all systems, on a constant basis. This data is continually fed into.

Auditing

Important part of ensuring accountability on the network. Examines the logs and other data points of certain events and construct a time frame and event sequence surrounding an incident.

Auditing also consists of other activities, such as:

• Performing Network Sniffing traffic analysis
• Password Cracking
• Vulnerability Assessment
• Penetration Test
• Compliance Audits

🛑 Auditing can reveal weak security configurations

Trend Analysis

Enables network administrator to correlate different data sources and data points from various places in the network, such as log files, IDS logs, wireless and wired sniffing as well as other event sources, and seek to identify on-going trends in both performance and security. The goal is find patterns that can indicate a emerging issue.

3. Networks and Infrastructure

Switches

A network switch is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device. A network switch is a multiport network bridge that uses MAC addresses to forward data at the data link layer of the OSI model.

• Filter & forward data based on MAC address
• OSI Layer 2 [Data Link]
• Where VLANs are set up
• STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) prevents bridge loop / loop floods

🛑 Operates in the OSI Layer 2 (Data Link)

🛑 Bridge Loop/Switching Loop - A switching loop or bridge loop occurs in computer networks when there is more than one Layer 2 path between two endpoints. The loop creates broadcast storms as broadcasts and multicasts are forwarded by switches out every port, the switch or switches will repeatedly rebroadcast the broadcast messages flooding the network.

VLANs

A virtual LAN is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer. LAN is the abbreviation for local area network and in this context virtual refers to a physical object recreated and altered by additional logic.

• Provides layer 2 separation of networks
• Flood guarding
  • STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) - enable

Routers

Router is a networking device which helps in routing the data packets between home network & other networks.

• Filter & forward based on IP address
• OSI Layer 3 [Network]
• Allocates IP addresses to the devices connected to it using a DHCP server.
• It performs NAT (Network Address Translation)

🛑 NAT doesn't provide any security mechanisms. It's simply a way to convert from one IP address to another while the traffic is going through the network.

NAT example:

🛑 Generally operates in the Network layer

🛑 A firewall is a piece of software that is commonly run on a gateway router which protects us from the evils of the Internet, so it can forward and filter based on port numbers, based on IP addresses, URL's, all kinds of different stuff. So we would call this a network firewall because the gateway is running the firewall software and protecting us from the evil of the Internet.

Network Topologies - Basics

The actual organization of a network in terms of how is the data moving around and the best way to do it.

LAN - Local Area Network

• A LAN is a network that has a logical and physical borders that a computer can broadcast

WAN - Wide Area Network

• WAN is a multiple LANs or additional WANs with routing functionality for interconnectivity.

MAN - Metropolitan Area Network

Internet

Connecting WANs through WANs until complete the entire world = Internet.

• The protocol which runs the internet is TCP/IP
• As long you're using legitimate IPv4 address or IPv6

Intranet

If you're using the TCP/IP stack and making your own LAN or WAN = Intranet.

• Intranet is a private network which still runs TCP/IP

🛑 Extranet: example of some vendor who need to access the Intranet network. Works like a DMZ but for private access.

Network Zones - Concepts

• DMZ - Demilitarized Zone: Perimeter network; isolating untrusted network from LAN area. DMZ is a firewall configuration used to secure hosts on a network segment, in most DMZs the hosts on the DMZ are connected behind a Firewall that is connected to a public network(internet).

• LAN - the core of your network.

• VLAN - physical device that designate separate broadcast domains....

• Wireless Network - Basically a LAN connected to an Wireless Access Point (WAP).

• Guest Network - Optional network for meetings, demos, etc; Have no access to the internal network.

• Ad hoc - Wireless without an access point; Point to point communication; (e.g AirDrop, contact sharing apps, etc)

• Airgap - Simply means a disconnect to provide real isolation and the use of a completely separate internet from the world; Private internet. (e.g Military/governmental computer network/systems)

• Virtualization

🛑 NAT doesn't provide any security mechanisms. It's simply a way to convert from one IP address to another while the traffic is going through the network.

Network Segmentation

• Physical, logical, or virtual segmentation
  • Devices, VLANs, virtual networks
• Performance
  • High-bandwidth applications
• Security
  • Users should not talk directly to database servers
  • The only applicatons in the core are SQL and SSH

Physical Segmentation - Switches

• Devices are physically separate
  • Switch A and Switch B, and so on
• Must be connected to provide communication
  • Direct connect, or another switch or router
• Web servers in one rack, Database servers on another

Logical Segmentation using VLANs

• Separated logically instead of physically
• Cannot communicate between VLANs without a Layer 3 Device / Router

Virtualizing everything

• When you get rid of physical devices
• Servers, switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers
• Instant and complete control
  • Build a new network
  • Route between IP subnets
  • Drop a firewall between
  • Drag and drop devices between networks

Airgaps

• Remove any connectivity between components
  • No possible way for one device to communicate to another
  • No shared components
• Network separation
  • Secure networks
  • Industrial systems (SCADA, manufacturing)
  • Military/governmental computer network/systems

🛑 Removable media can jump the gap

Network Access Control (NAC)

Can be used to prevent hosts from connecting to the network unless they meet certain security requirements

Wireless Network, Remote Access, VPN Access

• Control from wherever you are (inside or outside)
• Access can be based on many rules (by user, group, location, application etc)
• Access can be easily revoked or changed

Posture assessment

BYOD, Malware infections, missing anti-malware, unauthorized applications.

• Before connecting to the network, perform a health check:
  • Is it a trusted device?
  • Is it a running anti-virus? Which one? Is it updated?
  • Are the corporate applications installed?
  • Is the disk encrypted?

Health checks from Posture Assessment

• Persistent agents
  • Permanently installed onto a system
• Dissolvable agents
  • No installation is required
  • Runs during the posture assessment
  • Terminates when no longer required
• Agentless NAC
  • Integrated with Active Directory
  • Checks are made during login and logoff
  • Can't be scheduled

🛑 If Posture Assessment fails, the quarantine network notify administrators, just enough network access to fix the issue.

Network Firewalls - Concepts

• Control the flow of network traffic
• Standard issue - home, office, and in your operating system

• Corporate control of outbound and inbound area (sensitive data)
• Control of inappropriate content
• Protection adware, spyware etc
• Firewall Rules
  • ACL - Access Control Lists
    • Allow or disallow traffic based on tuples
    • Grouping of categories (Source IP, Destination IP, port number, time of day, application, etc)
  • Can be very general or very specific
  • Implicit deny - prevents access unless specifically permitted.
• Filters traffic by port number
  • OSI layer 4 (TCP/UDP) - some firewalls can filter through OSI layer 7
• Can encrypt traffic into/out of the network
• Can proxy traffic
• Most firewalls can be layer 3 devices (routers)

🛑 A "deny any-any" rule denies all traffic from all sources, so it should be the last rule in the ruleset.

Stateless Firewall

• Typically faster and perform better under havier traffic loads.

They watch network traffic and restrict / block packets based on source and destination address or static values (ACL Rules) as shown below.

Stateful Firewall

• Are better at identifying unauthorized and forged communications.

Can watch traffic streams from end to end. They are aware of communications paths; Can implement varios IPSec functions (tunnels and encryption); Can tell what stage a TCP connection is in (open, open sent, synchronized SYN ACK or established).

Packet-filtering

• Inspect data packets (drop or forward), such as the destination and originiation IP address, packet type, port number and other surface-level information.

Circuit-level firewall

• Quickly approve or deny traffic; verify transmission protocol (TCP) handshake (session).

Application-level Firewall

• Filter traffic based on user group, group membership, application or services (works at layer 7 OSI [Application Layer] - also called proxy firewall as well).
• Every packet must be analyzed and categorized before a security decision is determined.

Proxy Servers

A box/piece of software running on a computer acts an intermediary between two different devices having a session.

• Useful for caching information, access control, URL filtering, content scanning.

Most proxies in use are application proxies; Many proxies are multipurpose proxies (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, etc)

• Application-specific
  • Web proxy
  • FTP proxy
  • VOIP proxy

🛑 One of the simplest 'proxies' is NAT (Network Address Translation) - a Network-level proxy.

Forward Proxy - Client

The proxy simply forward the requests of respective client and retrieve the response back to the client.

• Hides the client
• Provides:
  • Caching
  • Content filtering
  • Acts similar to firewall (block based on URL, content filtering and so on).

Reverse Proxy - Server

Like a forward proxy but complete reverse.

• Hides the servers
• Provides
  • High security
  • Protect the servers
  • Handle DoS attacks
  • Load balancing
  • Caching
  • Encryption acceleration

Open Proxy

• A third-party, uncrontrolled proxy

  • Can be a significant security concern
  • Often used to circumvent existing security controls

• A significant security concern about open proxies, is that the owner of the proxy can add whatever they'd like into the network communication. They can send URL request and response with malicious code or redirection to another malicious website.

Honeypots

Emulate a web server, vulnerable machine purposely to attack; Inviting target to keep away from targets.

• Benefit to see how threat actors, what techniques they're using, what vulnerabilities are they look for, what ports, and so on.
• Log all information (port information and the origin IP address)
• Usually located in the DMZ to get close to the source but still isolated to capture the traffic.
• Tools:
  • Project Honeypot
  • Honeyd

Honeynet

A honeynet is a vulnerable and simulated computer network using a decoy server. By design, honeynets are not authorized for any authentic uses. If a honeynet is accessed, a fair assumption is that the person accessing it is a bad actor.

UTM - Unified Threat Management

• All-in-one security appliance
• Combine a lot of security technologies in one device:
  • URL Filter / content inspection
  • Malware inspection
  • Spam filter
  • CSU/DSU
  • Router, Switch
  • Firewall
  • IDS/IPS
  • Bandwidth shaper
  • VPN endpoint

VPN - Virtual Private Networks

Organizations use virtual private networks (VPNs) to create an end-to-end private network connection (tunnel) over third-party networks such as the Internet or extranets. The tunnel eliminates the distance barrier and enables remote users to access central site network resources. The IP Security (IPsec) protocol provides a framework for configuring secure VPNs and is commonly deployed over the Internet to connect branch offices, remote employees, and business partners. Secure site-to-site VPNs, between central and remote sites, can be implemented using the IPsec protocol. IPsec can also be used in remote-access tunnels for telecommuter access.

The two types of VPN - Remote Access and Site-to-Site

Remote-access VPN

is created when VPN information is not statically set up, but instead allows for dynamically changing information and can be enabled and disabled. Consider a telecommuter who needs VPN access to corporate data over the Internet. The telecommuter does not necessarily have the VPN connection set up at all times. The telecommuter's PC is responsible for establishing the VPN, each host typically has Cisco VPN client software.

Site-to-Site VPN

is created when connection devices on both sides of the VPN connection are aware of the VPN configuration in advance.

VPN Setup Steps

1. Protocol to set up tunnel
2. Protocol to handle authentication and encryption

VPN Concentrators

• VPN appliances are usually located on the edge of the network
  • Internet-facing
• Sites connect from one site to another across the Internet

• The Appliances can be a standalone VPN devices or it may be integrated into another technology, such as Firewall.

Early VPNs Protocols

• PPTP - Point-to-Point tunneling Protocol

  • Oldest VPN protocol
  • Uses PPP for tunnel
  • Password only
  • TCP port 1723
  • Weak encryption

• L2TP - Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol

  • Cisco proprietary
  • SImilar to PPTP
  • L2TP tunnel
  • IPsec encryption
  • UDP ports 500, 1701, 4500

• 'Pure' IPsec

  • uses IPsec for tunneling and encryption
  • Great for IPv6
  • UDP ports 500, 4500

• SSL and TLS

  • TCP port 443
  • Often works within a web browser
  • TUN/TAP (virtual network driver) tunnel
  • TLS encryption

• OpenVPN

  • Unique tunnel
  • Encryption based on SSL/TLS protocol
  • TCP port 1194, but can be changed

IPSec - Internet Protocol Security

Is a suite of protocols developed to ensure the integrity, confidentiality and authentication of data communications over an IP network.

🛑 IPSec works at the Layer 3 - Network (IPv4)

IPSec Components

1. Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) – It provides data integrity, encryption, authentication and anti replay. It also provides authentication for payload.

2. Authentication Header (AH) – It also provides data integrity, authentication and anti replay and it does not provide encryption. The anti replay protection, protects against unauthorized transmission of packets. It does not protect data’s confidentiality.

3. Internet Key Exchange (IKE) – It is a network security protocol designed to dynamically exchange encryption keys and find a way over Security Association (SA) between 2 devices. The Security Association (SA) establishes shared security attributes between 2 network entities to support secure communication. The Key Management Protocol (ISAKMP) and Internet Security Association which provides a framework for authentication and key exchange. ISAKMP tells how the set up of the Security Associations (SAs) and how direct connections between two hosts that are using IPsec.

IPSec Transport Mode and Tunnel Mode

When IPsec protects traffic, it has a couple of services and modes to choose from.

Transport mode - preserving original IP header. Typically used in combination with GRE or other encapsulating protocols. (Host-to-Host)

Tunnel mode - encapsulating entire IP datagram within a new header, essentially tunneling the packet. (The gateway creates the tunnel)

1. Some TCP data will be sent over:

2. And now about how those IP protocols fit in the two modes.

The last mode is what is typically used with crypto map based IPsec VPNs.

Use of IPSec

• VPNs

  • Pure IPsec (using tunneling mode)
  • IPSec with L2TP (add a tunnel layer)

• RADIUS and TACACS+

• IPSec with IPv6

• Using IPSec with Non-security protocols / Encrypting Unsecured Protocols

  • e.g. IPsec over Telnet

NIDS and NIPS

Both technologies watch network traffic to detect exploits against OS, applications, etc.

• Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS)
  • Passive device that detect anomalies.
• Network Intrusion Prevention Systems (NIPS)
  • Active device that detect and prevents when something on the network traffic is suspicious by blocking it.

🛑 Attacks could be in the form of malformed network traffic or excessive amounts of traffic.

Prevention vs. Detection

Detection

• NIDS is a passive device and focuses on detection alone, making it a detection control. It detects network traffic issues and alerts and administrator to these issues, also logging the events in the process.

Prevention

• NIPS is /inline(Active) device and focuses not only on detecting network attacks, but preventing them. (e.g block things from router)

Identification technologies

NIDS/NIPS solutions act very much like firewalls in that they inspect packets.

There's 4 types of detection methods:

1. Behavioral/Anomaly - Comparing traffic with a baseline of patterns considered normal for the network
2. Signature - Preconfigured Signature-based
3. Rule - Preconfigured rules in a ruleset - like firewall
4. Heuristic - Use AI to identify (Anomaly and Signature)

🛑 Anomaly-based NIPS/NIDS detect new patterns and are much more efficient than signature-based, which can only work with known variants.

🛑 Remember all these technologies can report False positives or False negatives.

🛑 In simple words:

• IDS: Notifies
• IPS: Acts to stop
• Firewall: Filters

Sensors

NIPS uses In-band sensor

• NIPS sensor must be installed in-band to your network traffic. All packets must go through in-band sensor devices/

NIDS uses Out-of-band sensor

• NIDS sensor, being passive, is normally installed out-of-band of the communication. Just plugging it into a switch only allows the sensor to see traffic to and from the switch plus broadcast traffic. The common out-of-band devices is a network tap or a port mirror.

Network Tap

• Is a device that you can insert anywhere along a run to grab packets / intercepting network traffic
• Physical taps
  • Disconnect the link, the tap goes in the middle
  • Can be an active or passive tap

Port Mirror

Port Mirror is a software-based tap, also called a Switch Port Analyzer, or SPAN in Cisco devices, is a special port on a managed switch configured to listen for all data going in and out of the switch. Unlike a network tap, port mirroing is convenient and easily changed to reflect any changes in your NIDS/NIPS monitoring stragegy.

Other types of Sensors and Collectors

• Gather information from network devices
  • Built-in sensors, separate devices
  • Integrated into switches, routers, servers, firewalls, etc
• Sensors
  • IPS
  • Firewall logs
  • Authentication logs,
  • Web server access logs, database transaction logs, email logs
• Collectors
  • Proprietary consoles IPS, Firewall, SIEM consoles, syslo servers
  • Many SIEMs include a correlation engine to compare diverse sensor data

Mail Gateways

• Unsolicited email - stop it at the gateway before it reaches the user
• Can be on-site or cloud-based

• Email filtering - Inbound and outbound

  • Unsolicited email advertisments
  • Control of phishing attempts
  • Anti-virus - blocking bad attachments
  • DLP - Data Loss Prevention - Block confidential information in emails

• Another Features:

  • Whitelisting (only receive email from trusted users)
  • SMTP standards cheking - Block anything doesn't follow RFC standards
  • rDNS - Reverse DNS - Block email where the sender's domain doesn't match the IP Address
  • Tarpitting - Intentionally slow down the server conversation
  • Encryption - can be required on the gateway based on policy; force encryptionS

SIEM - Security Information and Event Management

SIEM tools aggregate and correlate data, allowing you to organize it into valuable information. You can get to the time sequence of an event in all the logs quickly, have alerts and the ability to notify you based on a configurable trigger.

• Aggregation: Collecting data from disparate sources and organizing the data into a single format. Any device within a SIEM system that collects data is called collector or an aggregator.

• Correlation: Is the logic that looks at data from disparate sources and can make determinations about events taking place on your network. (Could be in-band or out-of-band, depending on the placement of the NIDS/NIPS).

  • Alerts - For notification if something goes bad.
  • Triggering - Exceeding thresholds.

• Normalization: Will actually create multiple tables / organize in such a way that the data can become more efficient and allows our analysis and reports tools to work better.

• WORM - Write Once Read Many: The concept being is that log files are precious, and a lot of times you might want to look at them in an archival way, so that we can use optical media like WORM drives to store them.

Another SIEM features

• Time synchronization:

  • Switches, routers, firewalls, servers, workstation has its own clock.
  • Synchronizing the clocks becomes critical for Log Files, authentication information, outage details.
  • Automatic update with NTP (Network Time Protocol).

• SYSLOG:

  • Standard for message logging: Diverse systems, consolidated log
  • Usually a central loggin receiver: Integrated into the SIEM
  • Require a lot disk space
  • WORM drive technology

• Event de-duplication:

  • Preventing Event storms
  • Filter out the noise - focus on the real problems
  • Flapping (down / up / down)

• Automated alerting and triggers:

  • Constant information flow (important metrics in the incoming logs)
  • Track important statistics
  • Send alerts when problems are found (email, text etc)
  • Create triggers to automate responses (e.g open a ticket, reboot a server)

🛑 SYSLOG stands for System Logging Protocol and is a standard protocol used to send system log or event messages to a specific server, called a syslog server. It is primarily used to collect various device logs from several different machines in a central location for monitoring and review.

SIEM Logs Example

Most Popular SIEM Tools:

• Splunk

• ArcSight

• ELK - Elastic Search, Log Stash and Kibana (Open Source)

3. Networks and Infrastructure part 2 - Beyond the Basics

802.11

IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of LAN protocols, and speci fies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) Wi-Fi computer communication in various frequencies, including but not limited to 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency bands.

Wireless Access Point (WAP)

• Wireless Access Point is a Bridge between 802.11 and Ethernet.
• Every WAP have MAC address.
• SSID (Service Set identifier) associated to the MAC address on a WAP is known as BSSID - (Basic Service Set Identifier)
• When a large network is connected multiple WAP's through a Common Ethernet Broadcast Domain - turns out ESSID - (Extended Service Set Identifier)
• MAC Filtering - limit access through the physical hardware address.

🛑 WAP is a bridge - extends the wired network on the wireless network (operates on OSI Layer 2 - data link)

🛑 Not a wireless router! A wireless router is a router and a WAP in a single device.

🛑 Security Through Obscurity:

• Enabling MAC Filtering don't provide security - the addresses can easily spoofed.
• Disabling SSID broadcasting don't provide security - is easily determined through wireless network analysis.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) Controllers

• Controlling Multiple Access Points
• Centralized management

• Deploy new access points
• Performance and security monitoring
• Configure and deploy changes to all sites
• Report on access point use
• Usually a proprietary system
  • The wireless controlled is paired with the access points
• LWAPP
  • Lightweight Access Point Protocol - is a protocol that can control multiple Wi-Fi wireless access points at once.
  • Cisco proprietary - CAPWAP, based on LWAPP
  • Manage multiple access points simultaneously

Fat/Thick Access Point

• Thick/Fat access points
  • The access point handles most wireless tasks
  • The switch is not wireless-aware
• Good for small environments
• Management console to configure security controls
• ACLs
• White/black listing
• Encryption
• Manage individually
• Also called controller-based AP

Thin Access Point

• Just enough to be 802.11 wireless
• The intelligence is in the switch
• Less expensive

• Good for big environments. (e.g A building with multiple floors and hundreds of users might rely on one good switch (with a redundant backup) to control dozens of thin access points)
• Act as a repeater taking the wireless signal and pushing it ot a managed access control (AC) switch that handles encryption and other security. Also called Standalone AP

Vulnerabilities with Wireless Access Points

Rogue Access Point

• Unauthorized access point plugged into a wired one. (Can be accidental)

Evil Twin Attack

• Is a Rogue AP tha is broadcasting the same (or very similar) SSID.

802.11 Jammer

• Jamming is a form of intentional interference on wireless networks, designed as a DoS attack. This type of attack by overpowering the signals of a legitimate wireless AP, typically using a rogue AP with its transmit power set to very high levels.

Deauthentication / Disassociation Attack

• Deauth Attack Is a type of denial-of-service attack that targets communication between a user and a Wi-Fi wireless access point.

Technical details: The IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) protocol contains the provision for a deauthentication frame. Sending the frame from the access point to a station is called a "sanctioned technique to inform a rogue station that they have been disconnected from the network".

Cracking WEP, WPA, WPA2 and WPS ⚔️

WEP

• IV Attack - Initialization Vector is vulnerable to cracking.
  • Aircrack can grab WEP keys and crack them.
• WEP is the oldest security standard 802.11

WPA/WPA2

• WPA/WPA2 uses 4-way handshake
• WPA is vulnerable to a dictionary attack
• Can be cracked at the initial connection between the WPA/WPA2 client and the access point during the 4-way handshake
• Aircrack can grab WPA handshakes on authentication time and crack the PSK's (if they are common/weak).

WPS

Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) - is a push button configuration, which enables the router WPS enable to another WPS device (wireless printers are the most common).

• 8 digit key is actually only 7 digits, 2^7
• Key exchange is the first processed in 4-bit and 3-bit
• Can be cracked using Reaver or Brute forcing
  • The WPS validates each half of the PIN
  • First half, 4 digits. Second half, 3 digits.
  • First half, 10,000 possibilities. Second half, 1,000 possibilities
  • It takes about for hours to go through all of them
• The new generation of WPS enabled device can detect an attack and shut off.
• WPS Attack Prevention:
  • Get rid of older routers
  • Firmware updates
  • Upgrade to newer wireless routers

Hardening 802.11 Networks

• Survey installation issues
• Maintaining existing wireless networks
• Monitoring
• Define how to defend wireless clients

Site Survey & Installation

• Survey Tools

  • Find SSIDs
  • Find MAC addresses
  • Band, channels, and signals
  • Document everything around 802.11 device

• Maintanance Wireless Networks

  • Good Documentation
    • SSIDs
    • MAC addresses associated to
      • WAPS
      • AP locations
      • Heatmaps
  • Scanning

• WIDS - Wireless Intrusion Detection System - listen to what is going on inside the wireless network and help detect potential threats, or any abnormality.

  • Monitors wireless radios
  • Watches for rogue access points
  • Knows MAC address of authorized equipment
  • Watches working protocols

• Good Practice:

  • AP isolation enabled
  • 802.1X is more robust

Antenna Types

The most commonly used wireless antenna on both WAPs and wireless devices is an omnidirectional (or omni) antenna. Omnidirectional antennas transmit and receive signals in all directions at the same time. This allows wireless devices to connect to a WAP from any direction.

Another type of antenna is a directional antenna. A directional antenna transmits in a single direction and receives signals back from the same direction. Because the power of the antenna is focused in a single direction, the directional antenna has greater gain than an omni antenna, and it can transmit and receive signals over greater distances.

• Omnidirectional
  • Signals goes on every direction.
• Dipole
• Directional
  • Long individual beam, increased distances.
  • Yagi antenna
    • Very directional and high gain.
  • Parabolic antenna
    • Focus the signal to a single point.
• Patch Graphic
  • Half Omni (e.g stick to the wall the get one side signals).

Antenna Placement Examples

Antennas should be centrally located throughout different areas of the facility so that hey can adequately span all areas of coverage within a facility, without being too close to exterior walls or the roof whenever possible.

• Stadium like = Omnidirectional Antenna
• Outdoors = Dipole Antenna
• Shooting long distances (one building to another) = Directional Antenna

Example on 2.4 GHz Frequency Ranges

• Make sure to have multiple access points that were not overlapping any of the frequencies
• On 2.4 GHz frquency ranges to avoid one overlaps each other.
  • Channel 1
  • Channel 6
  • Channel 11

Band Selection - 2.4 vs 5 GHz

The higher the frequency of a wireless signal, the shorter its range. 2.4 GHz wireless networks, therefore, cover a larger range than 5 GHz networks. In particular, signals of 5 GHz frequencies do not penetrate solid objects as well as 2.4 GHz signals, and this limits the reach of 5 GHz frequencies inside homes.

2.4 GHz

• Longer range
• Penetrate walls easily

5 GHz

• Faster choice
• Automated channels
• Wider Channels = better

Virtualization

• Virtual version of host hardware

• Separate OS, independent CPU, memory, network, etc

• Multiple virtual servers on one box/physical device

• Hardware consolidation and reduced energy consumption

• System Recovery

Hypervisor

• Virtual Machine Manager
  • Manages the virtual platform and guest OS
• Hardware management (CPU, Networking, Security etc)

Types of Hypervisors

• Type II
  • Runs on top of host OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc)
• Type I
  • Runs directly on top of hardware, independent of host OS. (e.g bootable Linux thumbdrive)
  • Bare metal, embedded, native
• Application containerization
  • Run an application without launching an entire VM
  • Uses just the right resources for the application
  • Everything you need to run the app is in the image (container/cell)
• Cloud-based Virtualization
  • IaaS (e.g. AWS, MS Azure)

Virtualization Benefits

• Security Feature
• Patch management
• Centralized hardware maintenance
• Resilient and high availability
• Great for testing everything and sandboxing environment
• Snapshots and backups
• Network Separation

Virtual Threats

• VM sprawl - the out-of-control creation of VMs outside of security controls.
  • It becomes almost too easy to build instances
  • The virtual machines are sprawled everywhere in which become extremely difficult to deprovision
  • The correct way to deploy many instances is through a formal process and detailed documentation
    • You should have information on every virtual object
• VM escape - when a user inside a VM finds a way to break out the VM and get into the underlying hypervisor/host OS.

Virtualization Hardening

• Remove remnant data
• Make good policies
• Define user privileges
• Patch everything!
• CASB - Cloud Access Security Brokers: Intermediary between your infrastructure(in-house stuff) and the cloud; Make sure policies are controlled; watches for malware;
  • Visibility - determine what apps are in use; are they authorized to use the apps?
  • Compliance - are users complying with HIPAA, PCI?
  • Threat prevention - allow access by authorized users, prevent attacks
  • Data security - ensure that all data transfers are encrypted; Protect the transfer of PII with DLP

Containers

• Containers are self-contained applications that can communicate with network resources that have been explicity allowed
• Runs isolated instances of programs and services
• Can depend on each other, and can be configured to communicate with each other on a single host
• Runs a single program and all its dependencies, when the programs exists

IaaS - Infrastructure-as-a-Service

• Basically virtual machines hosted by a cloud provider's infrastructure; Users simply connect to them via RDP (remote desktop protocol) or another secure remote connection protocol and use the as they would any other computer.
  • e.g: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud.

PaaS - Platform-as-a-Service

• Offers a computing platform, such as Web application server or database server with easy setup focusing on quick deployment; Enables you to access a software development platform without the need to host it yourself.
  • e.g: Heroku, SalesForce.

SaaS - Software-as-a-Service

• SaaS is a subscription based license; Access applications via subscription;
  • e.g: Microsoft Office 365, Dropbox storage, Google Docs.

IaaS | PaaS | SaaS

🛑 On-premise: Your application are on local hardware; Your servers are in your data center in your building

Cloud Deployment Models

• Private Cloud

  • A group of virtual machines that only the organization can access.

• Public Cloud

  • Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure - Open for business

• Community Cloud

  • Is make up of infrastructure from several different entitites wich may be cloud providers, business partners, and so on. (members only type of thing)

• Hybrid Cloud

  • Any combination of the cloud models described above

• Virtual Desktop Environment (VDE)

  • Remote Access to a Remote System that is not virtualised

Security in the Cloud

• Virtual Desktop Integration (VDI)
  • The actual virtualized environment in the cloud
  • Enhanced security
    • Centralized and easier to manage
    • Changes can be easily controlled
    • The data never leaves the data center

Security as a Service (SECaaS)

• Instead of managing your own security solution, move it to the cloud
  • Pay of what you use
  • Scale up and down as needed
• Continuously monitoring
  • Uniformly applies to all traffic
• Anti-virus/anti-malware signatures are constantly udpated
  • Block emerging threats without deploying updates

Embedded Systems - Static Hosts

IoT (Internet of Things):

• Wearable technology
  • Watches, health monitors, glasses
  • Track our location
  • Where is that data and how is it stored?
• Home automation
  • Video doorbells (e.g Ring-Bot device)
  • Internet-connected garage door openers
  • It knows when you are home (and when you aren't)

HVAC - Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning

• Thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer
• Very complex system
  • Must be integrated into the fire system
• Workstation manages equipment
  • Makes cooling and heating decisions for workspaces and data centers
• Traditionally not built with security in mind
  • Very hard to recover from a infrastructure DoS

SCADA | ICS:

• SCADA - Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

  • Pretty much ICS with more funcionality

• ICS - Industrial Control Systems

  • HVAC - Heating Ventilation, and Air Conditioning

• Distributed control systems

  • Real-time information
  • System control

• Requires extensive segmentation

  • No access from the outside

SoC - System on a Chip

• Multiple components running on a single chip

  • Common with embedded systems

• Small form-factor

  • External interface support
  • Cache memory, flash memory
  • Usually lower power consumption

As shown above, you can see the Raspberry Pi 4 and the chip (Broadcom processor) controlling every interface on the device (HDMI ports, Ethernet, etc)

• Security considerations are important
  • Difficult to upgrade hardware
  • Limited off-the-shelf security options

Printers, Scanners and Fax machines

• All-in-one or multifunction devices (MFD)
  • Everything you need in one single device
• Printers have a very sophisticated firmware
• Some images are stored locally on the device
  • Can be retrieved externally
• Logs are stored on the device
  • Contain communication and fax details

Camera systems

• Video monitoring for home or office
• Video recorders and Cameras are IP devices
  • Authenticate using a specialized application
• Privacy concerns

Another Devices (Special purpose)

• Medical devices
  • Heart monitors, insulin pumps
  • Often use older OS
• Vehicles
  • Internal network is often accessible from mobile networks
  • Control internal electronics
  • Disable the engine
• Aircraft / UAV (Unmanned aerial vehicle)
  • DoS could damage the aircraft and other on the ground

Securing Static Hosts

• Change default passwords
• Turn off unnecessary services
• Monitoring security and firmware updates
• Defense in depth
  • Network Segmentation - VLANs with Firewalls; VPN to connect a pipeline securely.

SDN - Software Defined Networking

Technology that separates the control plane management of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic.

• Directly programmable
  • Configuration is different than forwarding
• Agile
  • Changes can be made dynamically
• Centrally managed
  • Global view, single pane of glass
• Programmatically configured
  • Orchestration without human intervention
• Open standards / vendor neutral
  • Standard interface to the network

Mobile Connectivity

• SATCOM - Sattelite communication phone
• Bluetooth
• Wi-Fi and Tethering
  • ADHOC, Wi-Fi Direct (Easy connection)
  • Tethering - Wired and Wireless Tethering: acts like a router
• NFC - Near Field Communication: Almost/Physical contact with another device (there's no security envolved when activated) - Easy connection
• ANT/ANT+ - Very simple form of wireless communication; slow and protected; (e.g Odometers, Heart Rate Monitors, Bikes)
• Infrared (IR) - Most Androids, communication Transmitter.
• USB, USB OTG (On-the-Go)

Mobile Enforcement

Set of policies to make sure what people are able to do on mobile devices.

Sideloading

• Installation of third-party applications that is different from original Application Store (Google Play, Apple Store)

Carrier Unlocking

• Security revolves around connectivity - Moving to another carrier can circumvent the MDM

Rooting/Jailbreaking

• Root Access

  • Install custom firmware

• Root Access Issues

  • Auto updates disabled
  • Trouble accessing the store
  • Exposure to malware

Things to AVOID on Mobile 🚫

To achieve this topics you will need a good policy.

• Firmware OTA updates (over-the-air) - turn off

  • Significant changes without connecting the device
  • This may not be a good thing - the MDM can manage what OTA updated are allowed

• Camera use

  • Can be use to take pictures of confidential information etc.

• SMS/MMS - Control of data can be a concern

  • Outbound data leaks, financial disclosures
  • Inbound notifications, phising and smishing attempts

• External Media

  • Limit data written to removable drives or prevent the use of them from the MDM

• USB OTG - USB On-The-Go

• Recording Microphone - Audio recordings

  • A legal liability - every state and country has different laws.
  • Disable or geo-fence - manage from the MDM

• GPS tagging - Location services

  • Every document may contain geotagged information on metadata (Longitutde, latitude embed on photos, videos, etc)
  • This may cause security concerns

• Payment Methods - Sends small amounts of data wirelessly over a limited area (NFC); Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay etc

  • Bypassing primary authetication would allow payment

• Wi-Fi Direct / AD HOC - Connect wireless devices directly without an access point

  • Simplicity can aid vulnerabilities - Invisible access to important devices

• Hotspot / tethering - Turn your phone into a WiFi Hotspot

  • May provide inadvertent access to an internal network

Mobile Device Management - MDM

• Content Management

  • Applications Management
  • Databases
  • Documents

• Geolocation

  • Knows the location of that device

• Geofencing

  • Geolocation with geographic trigger
    • Restrict or allow features when the device is in a particular area
    • e.g - Camera might only work when outside the office
    • e.g - Only allow logins when the device is located in a particular area

• Push notification services

  • Applications will push notifications if you want

• Passwords and PINs

  • Require use of passwords and PINs
  • Can recover passwords

• Biometrics

  • Fingerprints
  • Facial Recognition
  • Vocal Recongnition
  • Can lock and unlock devices
  • Use to configure applications

• Screen Locks

  • Make sure your screen is locked

• Remote Wipe

  • Great when the device is lost

Mobile Application Management - MAM

• Versioning

• Updates

• Patches

• Context-aware authentication

  • Where are they right know?
  • What OS are they using?
  • What time/day are they trying to authenticate?

• Storage segmentation

  • Dedicating a storage space for our applications

• Full Device Encryption

  • Encrypt the entire storage of the device

🛑 Some companies provides MDM solutions (e.g Google - Android: What applications people can install, security policies and so on)

Mobile Device Deployment Models

Any device connected to an organization’s network represents a potential risk. As a simple example, if someone connects an infected device to a network, it might be able to infect other devices on the network. To limit this risk, organizations take steps to monitor and manage mobile devices.

1. COBO

Corporate Owned, Business Only

• Company owned
• Company devices what to do with that device
• What applications are on that device
• Very specific security requirements
• The device is not for personal use
• What encryption is used?
• What wireless is connected?

2. COPE

Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled

• Company buys the device
• Used as both a Corporate device and Personal Device
• Everyone has the same device
• Great control because everyone has same device on environment
• People will still want to use their own devices
• Learning curve

3. CYOD

Choose Your Own Device

• Similar to COPE, but with the user's choice of device
• Users get to choose from a list af approved devices
• Less of learning curve

4. BYOD

Bring Your Own Device

• User get to choose to bring their own devices, based on their experiences
• Difficult to secure
• Learning curve is decreased
• Very heavy device management
• Mobile application management

5. VDI / VMI

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure / Virtual Mobile Infrastructure

VDIs host a user’s desktop operating system on a server; it’s also possible to deploy a VDI that users can access with their mobile device. This allows users to access any applications installed on their desktop. When the organization hosts a remote access solution such as a virtual private network (VPN), users can access the mobile VDI from anywhere if they have Internet access.

• The apps are separated from the mobile device
• The data is separated from the mobile device
• Data is stored securely, centralized
• Physical device loss - Risk is minimized
• Centralized app development
  • Write for a single VMI platform

Physical Controls

Deterrent Physical Controls

• Outside light, Parking Lot Lighting
• Signage (e.g Restricted Area)
• Security Guards

Preventive Physical Controls

• External

  • Fences, Gates, Barricades, K ratings(designed to stop vehicles)
  • Mantraps (some type of entry system, consisting of 2 doors)
  • Cabling systems
    • Airgap
      • Physical separation between networks
    • Protected Distribution System (PDS)
      • Protect your cables and fibers to prevent direct and inductive taps

• Internal

  • Safe - for important documents
  • Locked cabinets
  • Faraday cages - block eletromagnetic fields to protect sensitive electronic equipment
  • Locks
    • Key management system (where the keys are stored? who is in possession of those keys?...)

• Individual Workstation

  • Cable Locks
  • Screen filters

Detective Physical Controls

• Alarms
• Cameras
• Motion detectors
• Infrared detectors
• Log Files - can be important in terms of tracking
  • Caben be physical or digital
  • e.g - Entering the parking area; Identification upon entering the building; Badge assignment tracks door operation

Compensating & Corrective Physical Control

Temporary fixes when these controls are weakened.
e.g - If the outside fence in some way got a big hole, you need to place a security guard on that location until the fences got fixed.

HVAC - Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning

• Office Environment - room temperature, humidity

• Server Rooms - Super sophisticated HVAC's systems; Make sure keep cool and dry

• Infrared Camera - we can determine heats more easily

• Zone-based HVAC

• Hot & Cold aisles - Used in server rooms, HVAC use either hot and cold aisles a contained system to vent hot air out and away from ther server racks; Layout of data centers inteligently and efficiently. Aisles of equipment racks are set up such that there are alternating hot and cold aisles.

🛑 MAC filtering is a good idea on system controllers of HVAC

🛑 Remote Monitoring - VPN access, 802.1X

Fire Suppression

• Eletronics require unique responses to fire
  • Water is generally a bad thing
• Detection
  • Smoke detector, flame detector, heat detector
• Suppress with water
• Suppress with chemicals
  • FM200 is a great option

Types of Fires and Appropriate Fire Extinguishers

🛑 FM200 is a special extinguisher liquid that is great because it can stops fires, but can still save the electrical equipment; "Gold Standard" for fire suppression on server rooms.

🛑 Class C is best extinguisher for suppress fire on Server Room, but it may ruin some electronics due to the corrosive powder inside.

Protocols Security

Clear Text (Unencrypted) Protocols ❌🔓

Threats of Clear Text Protocols

• Good password policy doesn't help
• Same passwords for everything are a threat
• Is dangerous to use Telnet or FTP internally
• Confidentiality becomes a major problem using FTP, Telnet and SMTP
• Switched networks do not prevent sniffing
• Where ever you go wireless networks can be detected
• War driving could become a major issue

Sniffing Tools:

• Etheral
• Ngrep
• Ettercap, Bettercap
• Kismet
• Dsniff
• Drifnet

Encrypting Traffic ✅🔒

SSL and TLS 🔐

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), they are protocols that are designed to make secure connections between two points.

🛑 SSL and TLS originally designed for Secure Websites (HTTPS)
🛑 TLS is more robust and new solution for secure connection than SSL
🛑 SSL/TLS is not only for HTTPS, you can see in e-mails, VPNs, all over the internet.

• Making a Secure Connection
  • Client Hello - Body/Example (from Wireshark):
    • Symmetric Encryption (e.g AES 128 GCM)
    • Key Exchange (e.g ECDHE)
    • Authentication (e.g RSA certs)
    • HMAC (hash-based message authentication code) (e.g SHA 256)

SRTP protocol - Voice and Video

• Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol / Secure RTP
• Uses AES to encrypt the voice/video flow
• Provides Authentication, Integrity and replay protection
  • HMAC-SHA1 - Hash-based message authentication code using SHA1

NTP protocol - Time synchronization

• Classic NTP has no security features
  • Exploited as amplifiers in DDoS attacks
  • NTP has been arroun prior to 1985
• NTPsec
  • Secure network time protocol
  • Began development in June 2015
• Runs on Port 123

S/MIME - Email

• Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions
• Public key encryption and digital igning of mail content
• Requires a PKI or similar organization of keys
• Secure POP and Secure IMAP
  • Use a STARTTLS extension to encrypt POP3 with SSL or use IMAP with SSL
• SSL/TLS
  • If the mail is browser based, always encrypt with SSL

🛑 SMTP, POP and IMAP is not secure.

• SMTP over TLS/SSL

  • Encrypt the connection to the server
  • Uses port 465 or 587

• IMAP over TLS/SSL

  • Creates a TLS encrypted tunnel
  • Uses port 993

• POP over TLS/SSL

  • Creates a TLS encrypted tunnel
  • Uses port 995

HTTP /S - Web

• HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.
• HTTP is unencrypted
• HTTP over TLS / HTTP over SSL / HTTP secure = HTTPS
  • Uses public key encryption
  • Symmetric session key is transferred using asymmetric encryption
  • Security and speed
• HTTP Runs on Port 80
• HTTPS Runs on Port 443

🛑 TLS encryption is a protocol that you can plug it into different types of applications

SSH protocol

• Key exchange algorithms
• Designed to run in a tunneling mode (encrypted); And then can provide their own encryption (AES, DES...)
• Runs on Port 22

🛑 Almost any encrypted application or protocol number do some kind of key exchange.

File Transfer Protocols

LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

• Protocol for reading and writing directories over an IP network
• LDAP is lightweight and uses TCP/IP
• LDAP is the protocol used to query and update an X.500 directory
  • Used in Windows Active Directory, Apple OpenDirectory, OpenLDAP, etc.
• Runs on port 389

Securing LDAP :

• LDAPS (LDAP Secure)
  • A non-standard implementation of LDAP over SSL
• SASL (Simple authentication and Security Layer)
  • Provides authentication using many different methods (e.g Kerberos)

DNS - Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the phonebook of the Internet. Humans access information online through domain names, like nytimes.com or espn.com. Web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.

🛑 DNS is a nonsecure protocol

DNSSEC - Domain Name System Security Extensions

• Uses PKE (publick key encryption)
• Adds Integrity and Authentication
• Avoid Replay Attacks and Spoofing

🛑 DNSSEC is not encryption, is an authentication tool to avoid spoof and replay attack.

SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. Devices that typically support SNMP include cable modems, routers, switches, servers, workstations, printers, and more.

• SNMP v1 - does not support encryption

• SNMP v2 - added basic encryption

• SNMP v3 - added TLS encryption providing Confidentiality, Integrity and Authentication

• SNMP uses Port 161

Wireless Authentication Protocols

EAP - Extensible Authentication Protocol

Developed initially as an extension to the authentication part of PPP. EAP is only an extension for the protocol that having a connection, and was created as a better authentication method to PPP.

• EAP-MD5

  • basically MSCHAP
  • Takes those passwords and hashes them into MD5 hash

• EAP-PSK

  • Uses pre-determined symmetric keys
  • Similar to WPA and WPA-2

• EAP-TLS (EAP Transport Layer Security)

  • Cand handle an entire TLS
  • Needs server and client certificates

• EAP-TTLS (EAP Tunneled Transport Layer Security)

  • Support other authentication protocols in a TLS tunnel
  • Use any authentication you can support, maintain security with TLS
  • Uses the TLS exchange method
  • Only requires server certificates

Protocols that Encapsulates the EAP

• 802.1X - Full blown authentication standard that allows us to make connections between some type of client system. It provides an authentication mechanism to devices wishing to attach to a LAN or WLAN.

• Early EAP adaptations:

  • LEAP (Cisco) - LEAP is weak nowdays
  • PEAP (Microsoft) - PEAP is weak nowdays
    • Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol
      • Protected EAP
    • Created by Cisco, Microsoft and RSA Security
    • Encapsulates EAP in a TLS tunnel, one certificate on the server
      • Combined a secured channel and EAP
    • Commonly implemented as PEAPv0/EAP-MSCHAPv2
      • Authenticates to Microsoft MS-CHAPv2 databases

IEEE 802.1X

• IEEE 802.1X - Port-based Network Access Control (NAC)
  • You don't get access until you authenticate
  • Used in conjunction with an access database
    • RADIUS
    • LDAP
    • TACACS+

Network Models

The OSI model can be seen as a universal language for computer networking. It's based on the concept of splitting up a communication system into seven abstract layers, each one stacked upon the last. Each layer of the OSI model handles a specific job and communicates with the layers above and below itself.

TCP/IP & OSI MODEL

IP Addressing

Private IPv4 address range

• 32-bit address with 4 octets

IPv6 Address

• 128-bit address

• Link local: FE80 - generated automatically by individual hosts

• Internet addresss: 2000:0BD8:A388:0000:0000:A2E8:3844:1337

🛑 Very common within the IPv6 wolrd to have more than one IP address

Transport Protocols

TCP - connection oriented; lots of packets being set; three-way handshake is the cornerstone of TCP

UDP - connectionless, sends lots of packets. Have no acknowledgement.

ICMP - supporting protocol handling ARP and Ping.

Protecting Servers

SSL Accelerator

• Dedicated card placed behind the gateweay router between the internet, to handle all SSL/TLS encryption & decryption going across the network.

• Can be done on a dedicated machine
• The SSL Accelerator offloads the handshake process to hardware

🛑 SSL Offloading and SSL Termination are the same thing.

Load Balancer

• Load balancer is actually a proxy because he takes all the incoming requests for the Web site and then distributes it around to the servers
• Enhance security and efficiency
• Distribute the load for multiple servers
• Large-scale implementtions
• Fault tolerance
  • Server outages have no effects
  • Very fast convergence

• TCP offload
  • protocol overhead
• SSL offload
  • offloads the encryption process
• Caching
  • Fast response

Load Balancer - Scheduling

• Round-robin: each server is selected in turn
• Additional round-robin options
  • Weighted round-robin: Prioritize the server use
  • Dynamic round-robin: Monitor the server load and distribute to the server with the lowest use

DDoS Mitigator

• A box that can detect when denial of service attacks are coming through.
• Will send an alert to emergency response services which assist in traffic flow to the site under attack
• Act like a proxy for websites

Other Methods to Mitigate DDoS

• Cloud-base provider
  • Internet provider or reverse proxy service
• On-site tools
  • DDoS filtering in a Firewall or IPS
• Positioned between you and the internet

Secure Code Development

Waterfall Model

• Sequential design process - Traditional model
  • First step, then second step, then third step...

Agile

• Created to be better than Waterfall Model
• Sprints (small, rapid, measurable deliverables)
• Scrum

DevOps

• Create and deploy with Speed, Avaliability and Security
• Emphasis on automation and monitoring
• Shrinks deployment cycles

Benefits of DevOps:

• Speed
• Rapid Delivery
• Reliablity
• Scale
• Improved Collaboration
• Security

Secure Practices 🔐

• Run Security Automation Tools - to speed up security testing and eliminate human errors. Security testing like fuzzing.
  • Test against known vulnerabilities
  • Pentesting
  • Test the application
• Add strict Change Management and Version Controls - to ensure faults aren't introduced into the application.
• Introduce Security Concerns and Requirements - at the planning stage to ensure strong security integration.
• Integrity measurement - shows honesty, morality, and quality of the application.
• Baselining - defines security objectives that the application must meet.
• Immutable systems - are systems that once deployed are never upgraded, changed, or patched. They are simply replaced. This is easy to do in a VM environment.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - means to use preset definition files as opposed to manual configurations to set up servers. IaC prevents accidental vulnerabilities due to flawed server configurations.
  • Cloud computing - Relies on automation
  • Turn the infrastructure devices into code
  • Virtualize everything
  • Focus on what the application needs, rather than building the application based on available infrastructure

Code Quality & Testing

Static Code Analysis

• Look for standard types of errors
• They don't run the code
• SAST - Static Application Security Testing
  • Help identify security flaws
  • Can present false positive

Dynamic Code Analysis (Fuzzing)

• Send random input to an application
  • Fault-injecting, robustness testing, syntax testing, negative testing
• Looking for something out of the ordinary
• Actually runs the code
• Looks for logic errors
• Look for Security holes
• Memory Leak
• Database querying
• Many different fuzzing options (frameworks and fuzzing engines)

Staging

• Stress Test - aggressive test of issues such as multiple user simultaneous inputs, multiple server data syncing ...
• Sandboxing - Isolated testing environment; Test the systems, almost always virtual machines (VMs), that enable developers to run the application aggressively.

Model Verification

• Model defines how developers expect some feature of the final code to perform. Model Verification match the application to the aspect of the model. (e.g -This button drive the user to the home or not?)

• Verification

  • Does the software work properly?
  • Are there any bugs to address?
  • Are we building the product right?

• Validation

  • Did you meet the high level requirements?
  • Are we building the right product?

Production

• When the testing are done and it's time to pull the application online and running. (expose to the public / internet). The process of moving an application from the development environment to the production environment is called provisioning. The process of remove an application from the production is called desprovisioning.

Compiled vs. Runtime code

• Compiled code
  • You don't see the source code
  • The application is an executable compiled from the source
  • The compiled code is specific to an OS and CPU
  • Logical bugs can be identified at compile time
• Runtime code
  • Source code is usually viewable
  • The code instructions execute when the application is run
  • No opportunity to find compile-time errors, so errors are detected during or after the execution

Secure Code Techniques

1. Error Handling

• Proper Error Handling: isn't going to stop all errors, but it will prevent errors from apperaring on the user interface for easy viewing for attackes / bad actors.
• Bad actors loves mishandled exceptions that can allow execution of code
• Good practice is avoid default messages that give away the underlying architecture

2. Input Validation

• Proper Input Validation: helps prevent these types of attacks: command insertion, cross-site scripting, buffer overflows, and SQL injection.

3. Normalization

• Is a database term meaning to store and organize data so that it exists in one form only. For example, a user database has the three tables shown. (name table, zip code table etc).

• Check and correct all input
  • e.g A zip code should be only numeric characters long

4. Stored Procedures

• Stored Procedures harden web apps; Is a piece of code, custom written by devs of the app and stored in the Database.

• This code only respond to a specific query format defined by the developer, this can prevent SQL injection or common bad queries used by attackers.

• Using only stored procedures is a really secure practice; this practice can avoid attackers manipulate/abuse the SQL queries (SQL injection) to obtain sensitive information.

5. Encryption / Code signing

• Code signing means to sign an individual executable/interpred code digitally so that users have confidence the code they run is the actual code from the developer.

6. Obfuscation

• To make harder an attacker reverse-engineer the code

7. Code reuse / Dead Code

• Using old code to build new applications; If the code has security flaws and vulnerabilities, reusing the code spreads it to other applications.
• Get rid of dead code inside the web app. (e.g Commented unecessary code).
• All code is an opportunity for a security problem.

8. Server-side vs. Client-side

• In general, a server-side platform is more secure than a client-side platform, but client-side is generally faster and may receive big chunks of code to the client, to prevent that you can use encryption.

9. Memory Management

• Watch out the memory leaks to avoid buffer overflow attack and code reuse.
• Never trust data input - malicious users can attempt to circumvent the code.

10. Third-party libraries

• Security risks:
  • Application code written by someone else
  • Might be secure, Might not be secure
  • Extensive testing is required
• Weaknesses of third-party libraries can result on bad actor exploring this. To avoid this type of risk, maintain patch updates, stay on top of any announcements, check the dependencies of the third-party libraries using OWASP dependency checker.

11. Data Exposure

• If you have data that is a part of your app some of that data has risk of exposure. And our job as developers is to reduce if not eliminate any risk of that data exposure especially if it's personally identifiable information (PII) or personal health information (PHI). We almost always today go through aggressive encryptions any time.

• How is the application handling the data?

  • Is the data encrypted when stored?
  • The connection is encrypted?
  • What type of information is displaying to the end-user?

4. Identity and Access Management

Identification and AAA

Identification, Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting work together to manage assets securely.

Identification

The information on credentials identifies the user.

Authentication

• Authentication Factors:
  • Something you know (e.g. - password)
  • Something you have (e.g. - smart card)
  • Something you are (e.g. - fingerprint)
  • Something you do (e.g. - android pattern; manual signature)
  • Somewhere you are (e.g. - geolocation)

🛑 Multi-factor authentication generally uses two of this examples (e.g. - Something you Know(1) and Something you Have(2), never on same category

• Trusts and Federated Authentication:
  • Trust Relationship - Active Directory DS
  • Transitive Trust - The organization trusts another entity because they are trusted by someone else that the organization trusts.
  • Federated System - Common authentication and credentials database that multiple entities use and share. (Active Directory: Different Domains could be used in other domains in the same forest).
  • Other types of trust:
    • One-way trust: Domain B trusts Domain A, Domain A doesn't trust Domain B.
    • Two-way trust: Both domains are peers, both trust each other equally.
    • Non-transitive trust: A trust is specifically created and applies only to that domain.

Authorization concepts

• Permissions:
  • Applied to resources
• Rights / Privileges:
  • Assign at system level
• Authorization strategies:
  • Least privileged
  • Separation of Duties

Authorization Models

• Mandatory Access Control (MAC):
  • Every object gets a label
    • Confidential, secret, top secret, etc
  • The administrator decides who gets access to what security level; Users cannot change these settings
  • Used on old systems (e.g. Top Secret Gov. information)
• Discretionary Access Control (DAC):
  • Used in most OS
  • Owner of the data defines access
  • Very flexible access control; Very weak security
• Role-based Access Control (RBAC):
  • Access to resources is defines by a set of rules defined by a role in your organization/job function (Manager, Director etc)
  • Administrators provide access based on the role of the user
    • Rights are gained implicity instead of explicity
  • In Windows, use Groups to provide role-based access control
    • e.g. Admin Groups --> Rights and Perms,
    • Sales Group --> Rights and Perms
• Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC):
  • Users can have complex relationships to applications and data
    • Access may be based on many different criteria
  • ABAC can combine and evaluate multiple parameters
    • Resource information, IP address, time of day, desired action, relationship to the data, etc
• Rule-based Access Control:
  • Generic term for Following Rules
    • Conditions other than who you are
  • Access is determined through system-enforced rules
    • System administrators, not users
  • The rule is associated with the object
    • System checks the ACLs for that object
  • Rule examples
    • Permitting access for an account or group to a network connection at certain hours of the day or days of the week
    • Only Chrome browsers may complete this web form

🛑 Rule Based Access Control (RBAC) introduces acronym ambiguity by using the same four letter abbreviation (RBAC) as Role Based Access Control. Under Rules Based Access Control, access is allowed or denied to resource objects based on a set of rules defined by a system administrator.

🛑 Access is defined by ACL, Access Control List. 🛑 Implicity deny prevents access unless specifically permitted.

File system security

• Store files and access them
  • Hard drives, SSDs, flash drives, DVDs
  • Part of most OS's
• Accessing information
  • ACL - Access Control List
  • Group/User rights and permissions
  • Can be centrally administred and/or users can manage files they own
• Encryption can be built-in
  • The file system handles encryption and decryption

Database security

• Databases have their own Access Control
  • Username, password, permissions
• Encryption may be an option
  • Most databases support data encryption
• Data integrity is usually an option
  • No data is lost because of a fault
  • Part of the database server operation
• Applications can provide a secure front-end
  • Prevent SQL injections and inappropriate access to data

Triple AAA

Authentication, Authorization and Accounting

Two most popular protocols of triple AAA is RADIUS and TACACS+, providing centralized Authentication, Authorization and Account management and registry logging for computers to connect and use a network service securely.

RADIUS or TACACS+ server resides on a remote system and responds to queries from clientes such as VPN clients, wireless access points, routers and switches.

How RADIUS and TACACS+ works:

1. [Authentication] -> The server authenticates username and password
2. [Authorization] -> Determine if a user is allowed to connect to the client
3. [Accounting] -> Log the connection

RADIUS - Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service

Used for network access

1. Radius Server: Get the stack of usernames and passwords (can be MySQL, AD/DS, etc.)
2. Radius Client: The Gateway between users and servers
3. Radius Supplicant: The person that want to authenticate

RADIUS can use up to 4 different ports: Ports used by RADIUS | :-:|- 1812 | 1813 | 1645 | 1646 |

TACACS+ - Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus

Is really good to manage a big number of network devices.

Provide the same as RADIUS but the service decouple the authorization from the authentication. Manages the authorization better than RADIUS.

🛑 Uses TCP Port 49

🛑 TACACS encrypts all information between the client and server.

🛑 RADIUS only encrypts the passwords

Authentication Methods

• PAP - Password Authentication Protocol

  • Is the oldest authentication method. PAP sends username and password in the clear / plaintext

• CHAP - Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol

  • Uses a hash value of challenge message to authenticate

• NTLM - NT LAN Manager for Windows

  • Similar to the CHAP; uses a challenge hashed message with a different process than CHAP

  • 🛑 NTLM is vulnerable to a credentials forwarding attack (use credentials of one computer to gain access to another) -> Most secure systems migrate to Kerberos

Kerberos for Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS)

1. Authenticator (Encrypted with user's password)
2. TGT (Encrypted with KDC's key) [ticket-grant-ticket]
3. Resource Ticket (Encrypted with Resource's key by the KDC and issued to the user)
4. Resource Ticket used by Client to access the resources

🛑 Uses Port 88

SAML - Security Assertion Markup Language

Used exclusive for Web Application

LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Query Directories: Structured language that allows one computer to go into somebody's directory and query, update...

🛑 Uses TCP/UDP Port 389

Single Sign-On

Authenticate one time - gain access to everything

• LAN: Windows Active Directory is dominant for security SSO
• SAML: SSO for Web Application / used to manage multiple apps using a single account

PPP - Point-to-Point Protocol

In computer networking, Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is a data link layer (layer 2) communications protocol between two routers directly without any host or any other networking in between. It can provide connection authentication, transmission encryption, and compression.

• Transport layer protocol

  • Initiate connection
  • Get address information
  • Make connection

• Poor authentication mechanisms:

  • PAP - password authentical protocol (passwords in the clear)
  • CHAP - Challenge handshake authentication protocol - (use of hashing)
  • MS-CHAP (Microsoft CHAP)

Accounts Types 👤

User accounts

• This is the account type most people will use
• Storage and files can be private to that user
• No privileged access to the OS

Shared accounts

• Used by more than one person/guest login, anonymous login
• Very difficult to create an audit trail
• Password management becomes harder
• Best practice is simply DON'T use these dumb type of accounts

Service accounts

• Used exclusively by services running on a computer
  • No interactive/user access(ideally)
  • Web server, database server, etc
• Access can be defined for a specific server
  • Web server rights and permissions will be different than a database server
• Commonly use usernames and passwords using policy to determine best passwords practices

Privileged accounts

• Administrator, Root
• Complete access to the system
• This account should NOT be used for normal administration
• Needs to be HIGHLY secured - Strong passwords, 2FA, scheduled password changes

User Account Management

Least privilege

• Rights and permissions should be set to the bare minimum
  • You only get exactly what's needed to complete your objective
• This is apply to all users in the organization
• All users accounts must be limited
  • Applications should run with minimal privileges
• Don't allow users to run with administrative privileges
  • Limits the scope of malicious behavior

🛑 Privilege creep - when someone get a bunch of new privileges unecessarily; gradual accumulation of access rights beyond what an individual needs to do his or her job.

Continuous Access Monitoring

Monitoring all users account activity

• Track Log on and Log off activity
• Track file access

🛑 Shared Accounts = BAD!!!

🛑 Multiple Accounts = Use different user/pass

🛑 Use least privilege - enough necessary to accomplish task

🛑 Monitor and log activity of users with multiple accounts (LOG EVERYTHING)

🛑 Avoid default usernames on user accounts

Access Control Technologies

Proximity Cards

• Close range card - contactless smart card
• Passive deivce
  • No power in the card - powered from the reader
• Not a large data storage device
  • Often used as an identifier
  • Keycard door access, library cards, payment systems
  • The identifier is linked to data stored elsewhere

Smart cards

• Integrated circuit card - contact or contactless
• Common on credit cards - Also used for access control
• Must have physical card to provide digital access - a digital certificate
• Multiple factors - use the card with a PIN or fingerprint

Biometrics

• Fingerprints
• Facial Recognition
• Vocal Recongnition
• Can lock and unlock devices
• Use to configure applications
• Biometric acceptance rates:
  • False acceptance rate (FAR) - Type II
    • Likelihood that an unauthorized user will be accepted (This would be bad)
  • False injection rate (FRR) - Type I
    • Likelihood that an authorized user will be rejected
  • Crossover error rate (CER)
    • The rate at which FAR and FRR are equal
    • Adjust sensitivity to equalize both values
    • Used to quantitatively compare biometric systems

🛑 Type II and Type I errors - In statistical hypothesis testing, a type I error is the rejection of a true null hypothesis (also known as a "false positive" finding or conclusion), while a type II error is the non-rejection of a false null hypothesis (also known as a "false negative" finding or conclusion). 🛑 FAR and FRR can apply to many softwares that uses authentication and authorization methods.

Token generators

• Pseudo-random token generators - useful authentication factor
• Carry around a physical hardware token generator
• Use software-based token generator on your phone

HOTP - HMAC-based One-time Password algorithm

• One-time passwords
  • Use them once, and never again
  • Once a session, once each authentication attempt
  • Keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC)
  • The keys are based on a secrete key and a counter
• Token-based authentication
  • The hash is different every time
• Hardware and software tokens available

TOTP - Time-based One-Time Password algorithm

• Use a secret key and the time of day
• No incremental counter
• Secret key is configured ahead of time
  • Timestamps are synchronized via NTP
• Timestamp usually increments every 30 seconds
  • Put in your username, password, and TOPT code
• One of the more common OTP methods used by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc

Certificate-based authentication

• Smart card
• PIV (Personal Identity Verification) card
  • US Federal Government smart card
  • Picture and identification information
• CAC (Common Access Card)
  • US DoD smart card
  • Picture and ID
• IEEE 802.1X
  • Gain access to the network using a certificate on device storage or separate physical device

Account Policy Enforcement

Windows Group Policy Management

• Apply security and admin setting across many computers
• Different than NTFS or Share permissions that control the use of the OS
• Linked to Active Directory administrative boundaries
  • Sites, Domains, Organization Units (OUs)
  • Define by Groups, Locations, etc

Group Policy Management Editor - Windows

• Administrative Policies

  • Remove add or Remove Programs
  • Prohibit changing sounds
  • Allow font downloads
  • ONly allow approved domains to use ActiveX controls without prompt

• Security Policies

  • Specify minimum password length
  • Require smart card
  • Maximum security log size
  • Enforce user login restrictions

Password Security

1. Complexity

   • Length and character requirements

2. Expiration

   • Reset and time triggers

3. Password history

   • Reusage and retention

Local Security Policy - Password Policy - Windows

• Enforce Password History: determine the number of new unique passwords [1-24]
• Maximum Password Age: Password age [1-999 days]
• Minimum Password Age: Limit until request password change [1-998 days]
• Maximum Password Lenght: [1-20 characters]
• Password Complexity:
  • Not contain user account name or parts of full name
  • At least 6 characters lenght
  • At least three of four categories:
    • Uppercase [A-Z]
    • Lowercase [a-z]
    • Base 10 digits [0-9]
    • Non-alphabetic characters [!,@,#,$,...]

Account Lockout Policy

• Account Lockout Duration: Time (in minutes) for a locked-out account [0-99,999]
• Account Lockout Threshold: Number of failed logon attempts [0-999]
• Reset Account Lockout Duration: Period of time that must elapse before the account lockout counter is reset to 0 bad logon attempts. [1-99,999]

🛑 Local Security Policy applies policies for the host machine/local. 🛑 Group Policy Management applies policies for the organization through Active Directory Domains, Groups, OUs, etc.

1. Good practices - Password complexity

• AVOID single words or obvious passwords
  • Name of dog, parent, partner
• Use upper, lower case and special characters on each password
• At least 8 characters
  • Consider a phrase or set of words
• Prevent password reuse
  • System remember password history, requires unique passwords

1.1 Good practices - Password expiration and recovery

• All passwords should expire
  • Change every 30 days, 60 days, 90 days
• Critical systems might change more frequently
  • Every 15 days or every week
• The recovery process should NOT be trivial!
  • Some organizations have a very formal process

1.2 Good practices - Account lockout and disablement

• Always turn on the policy of Account Lockout to avoid brute-force try out
• Disable accounts is better than Delete account; Often users save data, encryption keys, etc; Makes easier to retrieve this information.

Group Policy Objects (AD DS)

• Set of rules that allow an administrator granular control over the configuration of objects in Active Directory, including user accounts, operation systems, applications and other AD objects. Can apply over multiple domains, groups and OU's.

Permissions - Windows

NTFS permissions are granted to users and groups on folders and files.

NTFS Permissions - Folder

• Full Control - Anything
• Modify - Read, Write and Delete Files and Subfolders
• Read/Execute - See contents and Run Programs
• List Folder Contents - See Contents of Folders and Subfolders
• Read - View Contents and Open data files
• Write - Write to Files and Create new files and folders

NTFS Permissions - File

• Full Control - Anything
• Modify - Read, Write and Delete files
• Read/Execute - Open and Run the file
• List Folder Contents - Open the file See Contents of Folders and Subfolders
• Read - Open the file
• Write - Open and Write to the file

🛑 Deny is stronger than allow.

Moving and Copying NTFS Objects

1. Copy and Move from drive X: to Y: - will take the NTFS permissions of the destination drive.
2. Copy from drive X: to the same drive X: - will loose the NTFS permissions.
3. Move from drive X: to the same drive X: - will inheritance the NTFS permissions

Permissions - Linux

Linux has three permissions and they can be set for the owner, group or other.

r = read - open a file, view a file. w = write - edit a file, add or delete files for directories. x = execute - run a file, execute a program or script, CD to a different directory.

• Viewing the permissions on Linux command-line:

ls -l

-rwxrwxr-x 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

Using chmod

chmod is the command and system call which is used to change the access permissions of file system objects on Unix and Unix-like OS.

• Clear out the permissions of the File to have no read, write and execute permissions on Other:
  (The flag equals to nothing[o=] deny the permissions)

ls -l

-rwxrwxr-x 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

chmod o= File

ls -l

-rwxrwx--- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

• Giving read and write permissions to Group:

ls -l

-rwx---r-- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

chmod g=rw File

ls -l

-rwxrw-r-- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

• Giving all permissions to everybody(Owner,Group and Other):

ls -l

-rwx---r-- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

chmod a=rwx File

ls -l

-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

Using chmod on oldschool way:

The chmod command will take the octal value and combine them to associate the permissions on three different positions for the Owner, Group and Other/Everyone. This boils down to a simple binary rule: 0 = off | 1 = on.

If you want to give all permissions to a group for example, the number will be 7 (4 + 2 + 1).

Examples:

• Giving read, write and execute permission to everybody:

ls -l

-rwx---r-- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

chmod 777 File

ls -l

-rwxrwxrwx 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

• Giving all permissions to the owner, read and write to group and no permissions to other/everyone:

ls -l

-r-x---r-- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

chmod 760 File

ls -l

-rwxrw---- 1 user user 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

Linux - File Ownership using chown (change file owner and group)

ls -l

-rwxrwxrwx 1 user001 user001 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

sudo chown root File

ls -l

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root user001 31337 Feb 11 13:13 File

The chown command requires sudo

Linux - Changing the Password using passwd

sudo passwd

5. Risk Management

Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.

Defining Risk

• Vulnerability: A weakness; System flaw.
• Threat: Exploit vulnerabilities to harm assets.
• Risk: The likelihood of a THREAT exploiting a VULNERABILITY, resulting in a loss.

Formula:

THREATS x VULNERABILITY = RISK OR THREATS -> VULNERABILITY = RISK

1) Asset:

Is a part of an IT infrastructure that has a value. You can measure value either tangibly or intangibly. A gateway router is an example of an asset with tangible value, if it fails, you can easily calculate the cost to replace the router.

Example of assets:

2) Probability

Probability means the likelihood - over a defined period of time - of someone or something damaging assets.

Quantitative likelihood: based on numbers and data, can be more easy to measure anually.

Qualitative likelihood: is more subjective like - LOW | MEDIUM | HIGH.

3) Threat actors

A threat actor can be a malicious person, such as a hacker accessing corporate secrets.

The exam cover six types of threat actor:

1. Script Kiddies

   • Can be external or internal
   • Not Very sophisticated
   • Runs pre-made scripts without any knowledge of what's really happening

2. Hacktivists

   • Hacker + Activist
   • A hacker with a purpose - social change or a political agenda
   • Can be sophisticated
   • DoS, Web Site Defacing, Information Disclosure, Leaking private documents.

3. Organized Crime

   • Professional Criminals
   • Motivated by Money
   • Very sophisticated
   • Crime that's organized
     • One person Hacks
     • One person Manages the exploits
     • One person Sells the data
     • Another Handles customer support
   • Lots of capital to fund hacking efforts operational

4. Nation States / APT

   • Governments - National Security, Job Security; Always an external entity
   • Highest sophistication
     • Military control, utilities, financial control
   • Constant attacks, massive resources
     • Advanced Persistent Threat

5. Insiders

   • Has institutional knowledge
     • Attacks can be directed at vulnerable systems allowing the bad guy what, when and how to hit
   • Can be sophisticated
   • Extensive resources

6. Competitors

   • Many different motivaions - Espionage, harm reputation
   • High level of sophistication
   • Many different intents
     • Shut down your competitor during an event
     • Steal customer lists
     • Corrupt manufacturing databases
     • Take financial information

Risk Assessment

1. Vulnerability Assessment

• NIST SP 800-30
• CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)
• Nessus scanner
• Penetration Testing

2. Threat Assessment

• Environmental: Natural disasters outside the control of humans
• Manmade: Any threat that is not environmental
• Internal: Threat generated by internal sources, usually an insider to the organization
• External: Threat generated from outside your infrastructure

Risk response techniques

After identified and analyzed risk, you must decide how to responde to the risks produced as a result of the analysis.

1) Risk Mitigation

Is an attempt to reduce the risk, or at least minimize its effects on an asset.

2) Risk Transference

Or Risk Sharing, deals with risk by sharing with third-party. Example buying insurance to protect against natural disasters.

3) Risk Acceptance

Means the organization has implemented controls and some risk remains (residual risk). Remember that risk can never be completely eliminated.

🛑 Residual risk is what risk remains after all mitigation and reduction strategies have been implemented.

4) Risk Avoidance

Means thtat the organization could choose not to participate in activities that cause unnecessary or excessive risk.

Change management

Provide more uptime availability and decrease the risk for the entire organization.

• How to make a change
  • Upgrade software, change firewall configuration, modify switch ports
• One of the most common risks in the enterprise
  • Occurs very frequently
• Often overlooked or ignored
• Have clear policies
  • Frquency, duration, installation process, fallback procedures

Risk Frameworks

• NIST - Risk Management Framework SP 800-37
• ISACA Risk IT Framework

Security Controls

Control Types

The cornerstone of IT security is understanding security controls and how to apply them.

1. Administrative Control (People -> IT Security)

   • Laws
   • Policies
   • Guidelines
   • Best Practices

2. Technical Control (IT Systems -> IT Security)

   • Computer stuff
   • Firewalls
   • Password links
   • Authentication
   • Encryption

3. Physical Control (Physical World)

   • Gates
   • Guards
   • Mantraps
   • Keys

Activity Phase Control Types

1. Deterrent control: Deters the actor from attempting the threat. (Warning Sign, SSH Login Banner)

2. Preventive control: Deters the actor from performing the threat. (Fence, Server Locks, Password Complexity, Firewall)

3. Detective control: Recognizes an actor's threat. (Background check, CCTV, IDS/IPS)

4. Compensating: Provides alternative fixes to any of the above functions

5. Corrective: Mitigates the impact of a manifested threat. (Backups can mitigate a ransomware; IPS can block an attacker)

Most of security controls are preventive phase controls

Another Security Controls

• Mandatory Vacation
• Job Rotation
• Multi-person Control
• Separation of Duties
• Principle of Least Privilege

Defense-in-Depth

Every IT infrastructure might be looked at as a series of concentric shells. The location of these shells depends on the types of threats you are mitigating.

Defense in Depth uses administrative, physical and technical controls.

1) Physical Controls

• Door locks, fences, rack locks, cameras, mantraps

2) Technical Controls

• Hardware and software to keep things secure
• Firewalls, active directory authentication, disk encryption

3) Administrative Controls

• Policies and Procedures
• On boarding and off boarding
• Backup media handling

Redundacy

Repeating the same controls at various intervals.

Diversity

Try different set of security controls in a random pattern.

• Vendor Diversity: Uses several vendors to supply equipament and services.

IT Governance

All about rules and requirements applied to an organization that dictate how it conducts business, protects data, and obeys the law. Governance comes in the forms of laws, regulations, internal rules, and industry standards.

• Influences how the organization conducts IT security.
• In its most core function is to actually make the right set of security controls.

1. Laws and Regulations
   • Regulations:
     • HIPAA - Health Insurance Portability and Accountability, (USA); Extensive healthcare standards for storage, use, and transmission of health care information.
     • SOX - Sarbanes-Oxley Act, The Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002.
     • GLBA - The Gram-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999; Disclosure of privacy information from financial institutions.
2. Standards
   • Governament Standards: NIST, ISO
   • Industry Standards: PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)
3. Best Practices
4. Common-Sense

Frameworks

• Structure and organization
  • What works best for IT?
• Process management
  • Getting the IT 'product' to work best with the organization
• Best practices
  • Guidelines and examples for IT management; Cost effective, agile
• Training - for everyone

Industry-Standard Frameworks:

COBIT - Framework

Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies

• Created by ISACA, formerly the Information Systems Audit and Control Association
• Focus on regulatory compliance, risk management and aligning IT strategy with organizational goals

ITIL - Framework

Information Technology Infrastructure Library

• Multiple stages of the IT lifecycle
• Multiple services:
  • Service Design
  • Service Transition
  • Service Operation
  • Service Strategy
  • Continual Service Improvement

🛑 By using these industry-specific frameworks, an organization can structure their IT departments to best serve the overall need of the organization.

Policies - Document that defines how we're going to be doing something. Define Roles and Responsabilities.

Procedures - Step by step process of how to do something.

• Security controls, Policies and standards help define and build the Procedures.

Organizational Standards

• Have much more detail than policies. Define the acceptable level of performance policy.

The security controls come from the policies and standards.

Security Policies

The Acceptable Use Policy (AUP):

• Defines what a person can or can not do when using company assets and equipament. (The paper you sign before entry a job position).

🛑 An acceptable use policy (AUP) defines what users may and may not do with regard to information systems, including e-mail.

Data Sensitivity and Classification Policies:

• Define the importance or nature of the data. (e.g. Applying labels on the Government, they use Top Secret, Classified, etc).

Access Control Policies:

• How people get access to data or resources
• What type of data do users have access to.
• Data access and classification restrictions (It cover a lot of things based on the job type).

Password Policy:

• Password recovery
• Password retention
• Bad login attempt
• Password reuse
• Complexity

Care and Use of Equipament:

• How you maintain company equipament.

Privacy Policy:

• Are often for customers; defines how your data or usage will be shared with other resoruces. (e.g. Services like Facebook etc).

General Security Policies:

• Social media policies
  • Balance the company reputation with employee participation
  • Extension of your code of conduct
    • Define requirements and expectations
    • Identification as an employee
    • Personal responsibility
  • Confidential information
    • Public companies are legally bound
    • There's company spokesperson for public comments
• Personal email policies
  • Qualify the use of email - business use not personal use
  • Prohibit disruptive or offensive use
  • Compliance use
    • Some organizations are legally required to prohibit personal email
  • The line becomes hazy when browser-based email is used

Personnel Management

On boarding:

New hires or contractors

• Background check
• NDA (Non-disclosure agrement)
• Standard Operation Procedures
• Specialized Issues (e.g. Clean Desk)
• Rules of Behavior (e.g. Good AUP)
• General Security Policies (e.g. Personal Email, Social network...)

Off boarding:

When the employee leaves the company

• Disable accounts (never delete an account)
• Return Credentials
• Exit interview
• Knowledge transfer

Personnel Policies:

• Background Check
• Mandatory Vacation
• Job Rotation
• Separation of Duties
• Multi-person Control

Personnel Management Controls

• Mandatory Vacation:

  • Required
  • Prevents collusion
  • Dependency issues
  • Makes fraud harder

• Job Rotation:

  • Redundancy and Backup
  • Allows for cross-training
  • Makes fraud harder

• Separation of Duties:

  • Requires dual execution (at least two people to do a sensitive function)

• Multi-Person control:

  • Moren than one person required in a task/function

Role-Based Data Controls

• System Owner:

  • Management level role
  • Maintains security of the system (defines security policies and backup policies)
  • Defines a system administrator
  • Works with all Data Owners to ensure data security

• System Administrator:

  • Day-to-day administration of a system
  • Implement security controls

• Data Owner:

  • Defines the sensitivity of the data
  • Defines the protection of the data
  • Works with System Owner to protect data
  • Defines access to the data

• User:

  • Accesses and uses the assigned data responsibly
  • Has least privileged access to the application and data

• Privileged:

  • Has special access to data beyond the typical user (additional application and data permissions)
  • Works closely with System Administrators to ensure data security
  • Area manager, report creation, user and password changes

• Executive User:

  • Read only access but can look at all business data
  • Responsible for the overall operation of the application
  • Evaluates goals and makes decisions about future directions

Risk Management Frameworks

A framework is a description of a complex process, concentranting on major steps and the flows between the steps. Describes the major steps and flows of the complex process of applying security controls in an organized and controlled fashion.

Frameworks come from a variety of sources including:

• Regulatory
• Non-Regulatory
• National
• Industry Standards (Best Practices)

Popular RMF

National Standard and Regulatory:

• NIST SP 800-37

Non-Regulatory:

• ISACA IT Infrastructure

International Standard:

• ISO 27000

NIST Risk Management Framework:

Quantitative Risk Assessment

Is based on objective data, typically numerical data; Exact values, for instance, can be used to describe impact or loss of an asset.

Asset Value (AV)

When valuing an asset, consider not only the replacement cost, but also the revenue the asset generates, as this will be lost as well if the asset is not available.

Example:

Exposure Factor (EF)

The percentage of an asset that could be lost during a negative event. Realistically, you will not always lose 100% (1) of the asset; you may lose only 20% (0.2) or 50% (0.5) for example.

Example:

Single Loss Expectancy (SLE)

Is the value that's computed simply by multiplying the asset's value by the exposure factor (percentage of loss).

Formula:
Single Loss Expectancy = Asset Value x Exposure Factor
SLE = AV x EF

Example (using data below):

SLE = €3100 (AV) x 1 (EF) = €3100

Annualized Rate of Occurrence (ARO)

How many times per year you would expect a particularly negative event to occur, resulting in a loss of the asset. This value relates more to likelihood than impact.

Example: Flood on Server room, base on data: one flood in about 10 years, 1/10 (0.1). [SLE x ARO = ALE]

Annualized Loss Expectancy (ALE)

Essentially looks at the amount of loss from the SLE and determines how much loss the organization could realistically expect in a one-year period.

• Formula:
  

ALE (Annualized loss expectancy) = SLE x ARO

• SLE x ARO = ALE

Evaluating risk

• Risk register
  • Every project has a plan, but also has risk
  • Identify and document the risk associated with each step
  • Apply possible solutions to the identified risks
  • Monitor the results
• Supply chain assessment
  • Get a product or service from supplier to customer
  • Evaluate coordination between groups
  • Identify areas of improvement
  • Asses the IT systems supporting the operation
  • Document the business process changes

Business Impact Analysis

Designed to mitigate the effects of an incident, not to prevent an incident.

• Determine mission process. (make sure servers are up)
• Identify critical systems.
• Single point-of-failure. (using Defense-in-Depth...)
• Identify resource requirements.
• Identify recovery priorities. (prioritize most important steps to kepp whatever essential function running)

Types of Impact

• Property
  • The risk to buildings and assets
• Safety | Life | People
  • Some environments are too dangerous too work
• Finance (Credit, Cash flows...)
  • The resulting financial cost
• Reputation
  • An event can cause status or character problems
• Privacy
  • Some compliance requires a public privacy statement
    • Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (financial information)
    • HIPAA (health care), etc

Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) and Privacy Threshold Assessment (PTA)

PTA

The first step in the compliance process

• Identify business processes that are privacy-sensitive
• Determines if a privacy impact assessment is required

PIA

Determine the impact on the privacy of the individuals who data is beign stored; and ensure that the organization has sufficient security controls applied to be within compliance of applicable laws or standards.

• Ensures compliance with privacy laws and regulations
• What PII is collected, and why
• How the PII data will be collected, used, and secured

🛑 To create a (PIA) - Privacy Impact Assessment, the organization needs to perform a (PTA) - Privacy Threshold Assessment on its infrastructure to locate personal information, what personal info. is stored and from whom the personal info is collected.

PTA and PIA - in order to understand the impact of the loss of personal information can do to a particular business.

Calculating Impact

Determine how long the particular equipament going to last. (qualitative)

• MTTF = Mean Time to Failure
  • The expected lifetime of a non-repairable product or system
• MTTR = Mean Time to Repair
  • Mean time to repair
• MTBF = Mean Time Between Failure
  • Predict the time between failures

Recovery Time Objective (RTO):

• Maximum amount of time that a resource may remain unavailable before an unacceptable impact on other system resources occurs.
• Get up and running quickly
• Get back to a particular service level

Recovery Point Objective (RPO):

• Defines the amount of time that will pass between an incident and recovery from backup.
• How much data loss is acceptable?
• Bring the system back online; how far back does data go?

🛑 Recovery priorities help define what needs to be addressed to maintain business continuity.

Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD):

• The maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) indicates how long an asset may be down or offline without seriously impacting the organization.

Calculating uptime and availability

• Expressed as a percentage over time
  • 99.999% availability
• 'Availability' is a negotiated definition
  • Especially if it's part of your bonus

• e.g. - The 'four nines' (99.99%) - means that during the year, you could be down for a total of 52 minutes and 56 seconds.

Removing single points of failure

A single point of failure is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working.

• A single event can ruin your day
  • Unless you make some plans
• Network configuration
  • Multiple devices
• Facility / Utilities
  • Backup power, multiple cooling devices
• People / Location
  • A good hurricane can disrupt personnel travel
• There's no practical way to remove all points of failure (money drives redundancy)

Organizing Data

The first step to dealing with data security is organization.

• Analyze individual chuncks of data (such as databases, files, access control lists..)
• Determine the importance - the sensitivity of data.

Data Sensitivity | Labeling

• Public Data: Has no restrictions. (stills needs integrity and availability)

• Confidential Information: Limited to authorized viewing as agreed by the parties involved.

• Private Information:social security number, passport number, PII - Peronally identifiable information...

• Proprietary Information: Information owned by a company that gives a certain competitive advantages. (e.g. The secret formula of Coca-Cola).

• PII - Personally Identifiable Information: Individual information (Name, birth, morther's name, biometric information, SSN, passport number)

• PHI - Protected Health Information: Not only Health information, PII may include on PHI.

Data Roles

• Data Owners: Legally responsible for the data, can be entity responsible.

• Steward: Responsible for data accuracy, privacy, and security; Associates sensitivity labels to the data and ensure compliance with any applicable laws and standards.

• Custodian: Manages the access rights to the data; Implements security controls; Sometimes the same person as the data steward.

• Privacy Officer: Ensures data adhere to privacy policies and procedures. Set policies, implements processes and procedures.

User Roles

• Users: Assigned standard permissions to complete tasks. | Must understand how system functions works and have proper security training to recognize common issues (Malware, etc).

• Privileged Users: Increased access and control over the data or system. (e.g. a Normal user can run anti-malware software, but the privileged can updated then).

• Executive Users: Concentrates on strategic decisions including policy review, incident response and disaster recovery.

• System Administrator: Has complete direct control over the data or system. (Can remove or add users, applying permissions, and doing system maintance...)

• Data Owner | System Owner: People or organizations who have legal ownership of this particular data set or particular system.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is the practice of detecting and preventing data breaches, exfiltration, or unwanted destruction of sensitive data. Organizations use DLP to protect and secure their data and comply with regulations.

• The DLP term refers to defending organizations against both data loss and data leakage prevention.

Organizations typically use DLP to:

• Protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and comply with relevant regulations
• Protect Intellectual Property critical for the organization
• Achieve data visibility in large organizations
• Secure mobile workforce and enforce security in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environments
• Secure data on remote cloud systems

Agreements Types

Business Partnership Agreement (BPA):

Most common used in private sector.

• Primary entities
• Time frame
• Financial issues
• Management

Service Level Agreement (SLA):

Used in private sector.

• Agreement between who is getting the service and service provider
• Service to be provided
• Minimum up-time
• Response time (contacts)
• Start and End date

Interconnection Security Agreement (ISA):

Is a technical Agreement used on public sector.

• Statement of Requirements
  • Why are we interconnecting?
  • What system is interconnecting?
• System secuirty considerations
  • What information is interconnecting?
  • Where is this information going?
  • What services are involved?
  • What encryption is needed?
• Topological drawing
• Signature authoring
  • Time frame for the interconnection
  • Technical and security reviews from them

Memorandum of Understanding/Agreement (MOU / MOA):

Agreement used in public sector.

• The purpose of the interconnection
• Relevant authorities (Who is on charge?)
• Specify the responsabilities
  • Downtime
  • Billing
• Define the terms of the agreement
  • Cost
• Termination/reauthorization

6. Incident Response & Forensics

Incident response is an organized approach to addressing and managing the aftermath of a security breach or cyberattack, also known as an IT incident, computer incident or security incident. The goal is to handle the situation in a way that limits damage and reduces recovery time and costs.

Examples of incident categories

• External/removable media
  • Attack used removable media
• Attrition
  • Brute-force attack
• Web
  • Attack executed from a web site or web-base application
• Email
  • Attack executed from an email message or attachment
• Improper usage
  • Attack resulted from a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)
• Loss or theft of equipment
  • Laptop or mobiel device stole
• Many others

Incident Response Process

NIST SP800-61 - Computer Security Incident Handling Guide

NIST SP800-61

The popular guideline for Incident Response process is the NIST SP800-61 - Computer Security Incident Handling Guide

• The incident response lifecyle:
  • Preparation
  • Detection and Analysis
  • Containment, Eradication, and Recovery
  • Post-incident Activity

1) Preparation

• Who's doing what
• Incident handling hardware and software
  • Laptops, removable media, forensic software, digital cameras, etc
• Organize types of incidents that might happen
• Incident analysis resources
  • Documentation, network diagrams, baselines, critical file hash values
• Incident mitigation software
• Policies needed for incident handling

2) Detection & Analysis

• Many different detection sources
  • Different levels of detail, different levels of perception
• Large amout of 'volume'
  • Attacks are incoming all the time
  • How do you identify the legitimate threats?
• Incidents are almost always complex
  • Extensive knowledge needed

Incident precursors

• An incident might occur in the future
• Web server log: vulnerability scanner in use
• Montly patch release
• Direct threats

Incident indicators

• When an attack is underway / or an exploit is successful
• Can be identified by IDS/IPS
• Anti-virus software identifies malwares
• Host-based monitor detects a configuration change
  • Constantly monitors system files
• Network traffic flows deviate from the norm
  • Requires constant monitoring

3) Containment and Isolation

• Mitigate the damage
• Stop the attack
• Sandboxes
  • The attacker thinks they're on a real system
• Segregate the network
• Shutdown the system
• Turn off a service

Recovery after an Incident

• Eradicate the bug
  • Remove malware
  • Disable breached user accounts
  • Fix vulnerabilities
• Recover the system
  • Restore from backups
  • Pull from snapshots
  • Hire replacement personnel
  • Monitor to ensure good operation
  • Tighten down the perimeter

Reconstitution

• Recovery may take a long time
  • Large-scale incidents require a large amount of work
• The plan should be efficient
  • Start with quick, high-value security changes
    • Patches, firewall policy changes
  • Later phases involve much 'heavier lifting'
    • Infrastructure changes, large-scale security rollouts

4) Lessons learned or Post-incident Activity

• Learn and improve
  • No system is perfect
• Post-incident meeting
  • Invite everyone affected by the incident
• Document the incident
  • Timestamp of the events
  • How did the incident plan work?
    • Did the process operate successfully?
  • What would you do differently next time?
  • Which indicators would you watch next time?
    • Different precursors may give you better alerts

Incident Response Plan

Cyber Incident Response Team - CIRT

This group is responsible for responding to security breaches, viruses and other potentially catastrophic incidents in enterprises that face significant security risks. In addition to technical specialists capable of dealing with specific threats, it should include experts who can guide enterprise executives on appropriate communication in the wake of such incidents. The CIRT normally operates in conjunction with other enterprise groups, such as site security, public-relations and disaster recovery teams.

• A group of people whose job is to response to all incident
• Full or part time - or both
• IT Security Team
• IT Department
• Human Resources
• Legal
• Public Relations

Document incident types / Category definitions

• Physical access
• Malware Phishing
• Social engineering
• Data access

Roles and Responsabilities

• Users
• Help Desk
• Human Resources
• Database manager
• Incident Hotline
• IR manager/ IR officer
• IR team

Reporting Requirements / Escalation

• Determine Severity
• Based on severity have a clear chain of escalation
• Informing law enforcement

Practice

• Annual scenario drills

Digital Forensics

Digital forensics is the process of uncovering and interpreting electronic data. The goal of the process is to preserve any evidence in its most original form while performing a structured investigation by collecting, identifying and validating the digital information for the purpose of reconstructing past events.

The context is most often for usage of data in a court of law, though digital forensics can be used in other instances.

Forensic procedures

• Collect and protect information relating to an intrusion
  • Many different data sources and protection mechanisms
• RFC 3227 - Guidelines for Evidence Collection and Archiving
  • A good set of best practices
• Standard digital forensic process
  • Acquisition, analysis, and reporting
• Must be detail oriented

Order of Volatility

• The order of volatility is a process that enumerates when, where, and how to gather the data/evidence before the data changes or disappears. (How long does data stick around?
  • Some media is much more volatile than others;
  • Gather data in order from the most volatile to less volatile

Memory

• Caches
• Routing tables
• ARP tables

Data on the Disk

• Optical, flash drives
• Cache files, temp files
• Write blocks enabled tools

Remotely logged data

• Web site data
• Remote file server logs
• Backups

Backups

• Trends
• Low volatility takes time to gather data

Chain of Custody

The whole idea of Chain of Custody is to show good integrity of the evidence itself.

• Gathering Evidence - data is of high integrity
  • Control evidence - Maintain integrity
• Everyone who contacts the evidence
  • Avoid tampering
    • Use hashes
• Label and catalog everything
  • Seal and store

Chain of Custody Process

1. Define the Evidence
2. Document collection method
3. Data/time collected
4. Person(s) handling the evidence
5. Function of person handling evidence (qualified person)
6. All locations of the evidence (e.g inital collection, moved to law enforcement...)

Forensic Data Acquisition

Checklist of issues you should consider when you're performing Digital Forensics.

1. Capture the system image

   • Bit-for-bit, byte-for-byte
   • Software imaging tools - bootable device
   • Remove the physical drive
   • Get the backup tapes

2. Netwrok traffic and logs

   • Firewalls log a lot of information
   • IDS/IPS logs
   • Raw network traffic data
     • Stream-to-disk
     • An exact recording of network communication
       • Rebuild images, email messages, browser sessions, file transfers

3. Capture video

   • Security cameras, mobile devices
   • Record time offset

4. Take Hashes

   • Ensure that there's no tampering
   • MD5 (Message Digest 5)
     • 128 bits, displayed as hexadecimal
     • Chance of duplication is one in 2^128
     • CRC (Cyclical Redundancy Check)
       • 32 bits, displayed as hexadecimal
       • One in 2^32
     • Create an MD5 hash for an image, file, or groups of files
       • Data can be verified at any time

5. Take screenshots

   • Capture the state of the screen
   • External capture (Camera, Mobile device)
   • Internal capture (PrintScreen)

6. Interview witnesses

7. Track man hours

Contingency Planning

Attempts to mitigate adverse incidents to preserve business continuity.

• How do we recover from a specific type of a disaster?
• What to do for keep the Business Continuity going?

Evidences on Computer forensics

1. Documentary evidence - directly supports or proves a definitive assertion.
2. Exculpatory - evidence proves innocence.
3. Inculpatory - evidence proves guilt.
4. Demonstrative evidence - which can be in the form of charts, graphs, drawings, and so forth, is used to help nontechnical people, such as the members of a jury, understand an event.

Disaster Recovery - Evacuation Plan

Backup Sites:

🔵 Cold site

• Empty site, no hardware, no data, no people
• It takes weeks to bring online
• Basic office spaces (e.g building, chairs, AC...)
• No operational equipment
• Cheapest recovery site

🟡 Warm site

• Somewhere between cold and hot - Just enough to get going (Big room with rack space, you bring the hardware)
• Hardware is ready and waiting - you bring the software and data
• It takes days to bring online
• Operational equipment but little or no data

🔴 Hot site

• Exact replica of production systems
• Applications and software are constantly updated
• Flip a switch and everyting moves
• It take hours to bring online
• Real-time synchronization
• Almost all data ready to go - often just a quick update
• Very expensive

Order of Restoration

1. Power
2. Wired LAN (is open and running)
3. ISP link (running)
4. Active Directory/DNS/DHCP server (up and cooking)
5. Account servers
6. Sales and account workstations
7. Production servers
8. Production workstation
9. Wireless access
10. Peripherals (Printers, Camers, Scanners, faxes...)

Annual exercises - Continuity of Operations

• Failover
  • Simple means the process of making recovery site happen.
• Alternative Processing Sites
  • Different types of processing sites
• Alternative Business Practices
  • Manual transactions, paper receipts, phone calls for transaction approvals
  • These must be documented and tested before problem occurs
• After-action Reports (AAR)
  • A clear and detailed documentation of everything that happened so that if it ever happens again you'll be ready to handle any form of business contingency planning.

🛑 Through planning and practice is what makes recovery plans successful when disasters occur

🛑 A fail-safe device responds by not doing anything to cause harm when the failure occurs.

🛑 A fail-secure device responds by making sure the device is using a secure state when a failure occurs.

Backups 📑

Media for Backups

• External hard-drive
• Tape
• Cloud

Offsite Backup

Remote backup is good for natural disasters in general (fire, flood, water pipe burst, hurricane, tornando).

• Vaulting
  • Send your backup media to an outside storage facility
  • E-valuating - Send the data electronically
• Organization-owned site or 3rd-party
  • Usually a secure facility
• Backups require extensive protection
  • Data loss and thef is a significant concern
• Many compliance mandates (SOX, HIPAA, etc)

🛑 Location selection have legal implications and Data sovereignty (data that resides in a country is subject to the laws of that country)

Cloud Backup

Cloud backups work beautifully, however, they have one big downside and that is they take up a tremendous amount of time to get the initial backups going.

Snapshots

Snapshots typically under virtual machines and they are an absolute perfect way of making a copy of something that's happened in the past.

Backup Utilities

• Protect from unexpected downtime
  • Malware infection
  • Ransomware
  • Server defacement
• Real-time file sync
  • rsync
• Regular partial backups - hourly incremental backups
• Full backups - complete file backups
• Complete coverage, fast recovery

Differential Backup

• Backup all the changes since the last full backup

🛑 Differential there are less backup sets but they get bigger.

Incremental Backup

• Only backs up changes made from last backup

🛑 Incremental more backup sets but smaller.

7. Testing the Infrastructure

Vulnerability Scanning Tools 👁‍🗨

• Advanced IP scanner - Advanced IP Scanner is fast and free software for network scanning. It will allow you to quickly detect all network computers and obtain access to them. With a single click, you can turn a remote PC on and off, connect to it via Radmin, and much more.
• Nmap - Nmap is a free and open-source network scanner. Nmap is used to discover hosts and services on a computer network by sending packets and analyzing the responses. Nmap provides a number of features for probing computer networks, including host discovery and service and operating system detection.
• MBSA - Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (determine the security state of a system by assessing missing security updates and less-secure security settings; report good information for vulnerability assessment)
• traceroute/tracert command - show how packets get from host to another endpoint. Traceroute is helpful to see what routers are being hit, both internal and external.

Scan Types:

1. Non-intrusive: Gather information, don't try to exploit a vulnerability.
2. Intrusive: You'll try out the vulnerability to see if it works.
3. Non-credentialed scans: the scanner can't login to the remote device.
4. Credentialed scan: You're a normal user, emulates an insider attack.

Intrusive vs. Non-intrusive

Almost all vulnerability assessments are non-intrusive. Scanning systems, gather information and identifying vulnerabilities are different than corrupt the entire database.

Credential vs. Non-credential

A Credential Vulnerability Asssessment basically means you've got usernames and passwords as a part of your assessment. Non-credential you don't touch on usernames and passwords on assessments.

Vulnerability Scanning Assessment

The purpose of Vulnerability Scanning is to identify vulnerabilities cause by lack of security controls, common misconfigurations, and so on.

Vulnerability Scan Results:

• Lack of security controls
  • No firewall
  • No anti-virus
  • No anti-spyware
• Misconfigurations
  • Open shares
  • Guest access
  • DNS/SPF records
• Real vulnerabilities
  • Especially newer ones
  • Occasionally the old ones

🛑 Sometimes Vulnerability Scanners show False Positives (a vulnerability is identified that doesn't really exist) or False Negatives (a vulnerability exists, but the scanner didn't detect it). To deal with this, update to the latest signatures and patch it.

Vulnerability Assessment Tools

• Nessus by Tenable

• Nexpose by Rapid7

• OpenVAS (Open Source)

Principles of Social Engineering 🗣👤

1. Authority
   • Impersonate or imply a position of authority
2. Intimidation
   • Frighten by threat
3. Consensus / Social proof
   • To convince of a general group agreement
4. Scarcity
   • The situation will not be this way for long
5. Urgency
   • Works alongside scarcity / act quickly, don't think
6. Familiarity
   • To imply a closer relationship
7. Trust
   • To assure reliance on their honesty and integrity

Social Engineering Attacks

• Phishing - the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication
  
• Spear Phishing - Directed towards a specific person or company
  
• Vishing - Uses Voice calls/telephone system to get private information
  
• Hoax - Warns someone that something bad is happening when its not (e.g Virus Alert)
  
• Watering Hole Attack - An attempt to infect websites that a group of end users would normally go to gain access to their information or network. (e.g Local Coffee Shop Network)
  
• Whaling - Spear phishing tha targets senior management and executives
  
• Tailgating - (e.g leave computer unlocked, door etc)
  
• Shoulder Surfing - technique used to obtain private information by looking over the victim's shoulder, either from keystrokes on a device or sensitive information being spoken and heard, also known as eavesdropping
  
• Impersonation - Pretend to be someone you aren't
• Dumpster Diving - Used to retrieve information that could be used to carry out an attack on a computer network.

Common Web Application Attacks

Source: OWASP

2018 | Source: ptsecurity

• Cross-site scripting (XSS) - Client-side script injected into trusted web site

  • Reflected XSS - non-persistent, allow scripts to run in user input
  • Stored XSS - script is stored in back-end database

• XML injections - Used to manipulate or compromise the logic of an XML application or service (e.g change the price of a product on ecommerce)

• Cross-site Request Forgery (XSRF, CSRF) - forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which they’re currently authenticated. With a little help of social engineering (such as sending a link via email or chat), an attacker may trick the users of a web application into executing actions of the attacker’s choosing.

• Click-jacking - Also known as a “UI redress attack”, is when an attacker uses multiple transparent or opaque layers to trick a user into clicking on a button or link on another page when they were intending to click on the top level page.

• Session Hijacking - Inject information on middle of connection (e.g Grabbing the request and copying the Session ID from the Cookie).

• Code Injection - is the general term for attack types which consist of injecting code that is then interpreted/executed by the application. This type of attack exploits poor handling of untrusted data. These types of attacks are usually made possible due to a lack of proper input/output data validation.

• Comand Injection - ommand injection is an attack in which the goal is execution of arbitrary commands on the host operating system via a vulnerable application.

• SQL injection (queries)

  • inner join
  • select from
  • insert into

• LDAP injection (queries info)

  • Based on X.500 protocol
    • DC = Domain Component
    • OU = Organizational Unit
    • CN = Common Name

• Buffer Overflow - overflows the input directly to the memory

• Integer Overflow - overflow an input variable (e.g typing a large number on calculate forcing an error)