Why you need to be purple!

 It's Bad

For those who have worked with me for longer periods, you would have heard me say at least once that I don't believe in the commonly prescribed structure of blue and red team operations as much as there are good intentions behind the separation of operations, human behaviour has prevailed and there exists a quite toxic environment between the two (wrongly opposing) sides. This is a direct contradiction to our purpose in cybersecurity which is to harden environments and increase resiliency to cyber-attacks.





We need to change

While purple teaming was not created to replace blue and red operations I have adopted it to do exactly that. Too often I experience clashes between red team operators and defenders whether its online shouting contests or during client engagements behaviour that does not support the iterative improvement of cybersecurity is simply not welcome. Particularly SOC analysts will know this as they will have experienced their fair share of red team engagements and end up in politics and communication nightmares because of poor attitudes on both sides.

We can do it!

With purple teaming, I aim to eliminate this from the industry because purple teaming focuses on working together, delivering new positive improvements for all teams in an engagement and identifying weaknesses and subsequently better protections for organizations. So if that sentence sounds like why you are here in the industry, then you're a purple teamer. Being a purple teamer means we must have strong skills across the spectrum of attack and defence mechanics whether that's having the skills to plan attacks that hold relevance to a business, executing attacks with your own system knowledge or building infrastructure to detect attacks, use cases for new telemetry streams and making architectural recommendations. Beyond attack and defence mechanics we need strong interpersonal skills as its ultimately people sat on seats that are responsible for the different concepts we are looking to enhance with our purple team workshops



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Endpoint on Adrenaline : One

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Introduction   This blog series will capture how to maximise the protection of an endpoint using the various technologies in the Defender suite. The controls outlined in the series will each need to have their own considerations taken into account for a given environment but hopefully at a minimum it will be clear just how powerful of an offering Microsoft has.  Unfortunately due to the highly modular and distinct diversity in controls Microsoft offers things are often overlooked and misconfigured when tests are conducted. With this in mind, the shortest possible route to a solution for this is utilizing the recommendations, CSPM and Secure Score technology contained within Defender 365 and Defender for Cloud as it will automatically conduct posture assessments and inform you of things you have missed and may want to turn on (IE dont take these recommendations lightly) Lastly, I would recommend reading the book “Defender for Endpoint in depth” from packt as it showcases the complexitie
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Brilliance in the Basics

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Introduction Tired of watching you and your friends get compromised, do exactly what's in this blog and start beating adversaries. Avoiding the memes adversaries win because of simple mistakes and neglect and we all already know what they are so I'm going to list them for you. Its all for free too. Enumerate To put it simply, there shouldn't be anything you don't know about your environment, you should know who all your users are, where all your electronic devices are and what they do, what applications you have and what versions they are. Enumeration is the jet fuel for making good defensive decisions. I wrote about how to enumerate your environment here  Securing your estate: The First Step (goblinloot.net) . Follow these steps and become the arbitrator of your own environment  Your perimeter is a bridge, not a wall Monitor your perimeter as best as you can but always assume it has already been defeated. Monitor endpoint system and process telemetry and southwest traf
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Investigate

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  Introduction This document details how an analyst should conduct investigations and triage in the normal duties of their job. It will describe concepts and logic that enable analysts to look at data, ask investigative questions, evaluate those questions and arrive at assertions about what they have found. An Alert For the most part, analysts begin their investigative work when an alert is generated. Alerts are fantastic because they are a statement that something has happened and something needs to be done about it. Typically alerts are filled with information that an analyst can then use in their investigation. Alerts are generated by detections and these detections can come in many shapes and sizes. Some just look for a particular action like someone unlocking their car door, others might have access to more context like someone who isn’t the owner of the car unlocking the door. Going even further some detections might look at how the car door was opened or at what
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Endpoint on Adrenaline 3

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Introduction Now that I have covered the advanced features obtained from Defender for Cloud and the complexities of Defender for Endpoint with the objective of delivering as much protection as possible to the endpoint, I will now explore how to expand on this greatly and open up even more use cases. Microsoft Sentinel This technology will allow us to unify and correlate data generated by other controls. I have decided to deploy Microsoft Sentinel into 4 primary categories : System Administrator - Asset Uptime, Application Inventory, Device configuration and Troubleshooting Network Engineers - Netflow and session traffic, violations and alerts for potential issues Threat Detection - Analytics and playbooks Threat hunting - Workbooks & Machine learning Using Microsoft Sentinel we can achieve a plethora of incredibly powerful use cases with Defender 365 endpoint data. Below is an illustration of how my SIEM works to enable analysts to prevent and detect threats Data Sources In order t
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Writing detections when stuck with EDR

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Introduction Making the leap to purchasing and maintaining an EDR solution can be huge for organisations so huge in fact that they never really progress from there when it comes to visibility on assets. This is an important consideration because organisations should aim to achieve some level of detection engineering but will likely never get to explore the associated complexities. So how can organisations effectively and easily write detections that actually help to protect them when they are only able to leverage an EDR tool. Understanding your tools limitations To most people EDR tools are incredibly verbose in the telemetry they capture from any given asset but unfortunately relative to overall telemetry available they actually only capture what the vendors think is the most pertinent. This is for obvious reasons because ingesting telemetry at the scale vendors do comes at a significant cost so they implement "cost-saving measures" like limiting the amount of any one given
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Endpoint on Adrenaline Two

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Introduction Continuing on from my last post that captured using Defender for Cloud to gain powerful additional features on top of defender for endpoint to protect your endpoints we are going to take a closer look at Defender for Endpoint itself and extend into some endpoint-specific use cases for Defender for Identity that tie directly back into Defender for Endpoint. Firstly a really important consideration when configuring Defender for Endpoint is that alot of the heavy lifting from a prevention standpoint actually happens in Defender Anti virus. This means that while im going to briefly cover some settings to make sure Defender Anti Virus isnt hindering Defender for Endpoint im going to reserve further Defender Anti Virus controls to the next part in this series. This also of course means that when your doing your own testing just installing the MSSense agent (What you get from the scripts, intune etc) is actually not Defender for Endpoint in its totality so you simply can not m
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Investigate Two

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Introductions How you as an analyst handle true positives is life and death in the eyes of potential victims. Traditionally the industry elected to prioritize overzealousness and sending more than not to cover their failings, This however is no different to guesses and it is possible to arrive at strong data-backed decisions on events that could be the compromise of an estate True Positive True positives exist at the heart of all our jobs, they are what we wake up for in the morning and why we endlessly pursue understanding how to protect our clients. The strictest possible definition of true positive is where an outcome of a prediction or model is returned true. This broad definition is important because the assumption carried with a predication or model can change. As an example many security technologies aim to identify when an application often unwanted by an organization is present within a system, these are commonly dubbed PUPs. (Potentially Unwanted Programs). The general cons
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Securing your estate: The First Step

Introduction A commonly forgotten fact within the cybersecurity industry is that most organizations are not equipped nor have started to form any sort of security program. This is the case for many reasons because most organizations are SMBs so they don't and likely will never have funds to purchase people and technology and the fact that the cybersecurity industry is incredibly toxic for low expertise and or low capability teams as the well of knowledge we all rely on has been poisoned by vendors and 'thought leaders'. With this in mind, I have created a small resource that will guide you through what you need to do to make a start. This resource won't reference vendors and I will try to avoid specific jargon. Enumerate The term 'You can't secure what you don't know' stands strong even to this day and should be your primary focus before you do anything else. Understanding what assets, you have both physically (computer hardware) and logically (applicati
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Standardized Note Taking Format For Analysts

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  Introduction This post outlines a format for note-taking designed to aid analysts and ensure the knowledge they acquire over time is kept so that it can easily be consumed later. This format is designed to be technology agnostic so it can be applied to a note-taking tool or platform of the analyst’s choice. I designed this format because analysts often received what you could call unplanned information whereby at any given moment during their day they could learn something highly impactful to their role via any medium. This really exasperates the need for good note-taking practices for analysts. Illustrated above is the wireframe that analysts can implement into their note-taking platforms. Each section contains sub-sections that allow for different knowledge to remain segregated and more searchable. Meeting Notes Within any given week analysts can have countless meetings and so it is important to note down items from meetings for future review. Not every meeting needs to be capt
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Attack Simulations for your SOC

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 Introduction SOC analysts spend 99 percent of their time looking at the same data and patterns over and over again. They develop muscle memory that helps them use their platforms without much effort but also in grains in them potentially poor practices. Most analysts are new to the industry and are taking certifications like CompTIA Cysa+ and Azure SC200 but none of these certifications teach them what genuine malicious actions look like. So how do you train a team of people how to detect malicious activity and respond in the ever-morphing threat landscape? You throw them through the ring of fire. You make them triage real (as close as possible) incidents and appropriately monitor their behavior and progress to tune the processes perpetually. Analysts are arguably the single most important role within a SOC, they carry the burden of triaging alerts and correctly identifying whether malicious activity is occurring. They are the first, middle and last line of defense. However, despite t
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