I recently had a discussion as to whether PSExec, the legitimate Microsoft Sysinternals tool often abused by malicious actors for remote code execution, should be included on a list of indicators related to a recent intrusion event. While my overall opinion of indicators of compromise (IOCs) as they are used Read more…
Reuters reported on an interesting event from September 2019 today (16 October 2019): “The United States carried out a secret cyber operation against Iran in the wake of the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh blame on Tehran, two U.S. officials have told Reuters. Read more…
Writing during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes sought to identify the means through which humanity proceeds through an anarchical, violent natural state (the “nasty, brutish, and short” state of Man) to attain ordered, governed society. In formulating an idea of how such a society (or Read more…
Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Etherium, etc.) is quite possibly the most damaging, least useful, most reprehensible technological development of the past 20 years – which is definitely saying something given the rise of “social media”. While cryptocurrency advocates continually espouse benefits such as transactional anonymity, increased access to financial services, and financial Read more…
At present, I will assume anyone reading this possesses at least a basic familiarity with who Edward Snowden is and the general conception of his actions. The former CIA employee (removed from overseas duty for suspicious behavior in 2009) and former Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton contractor for the NSA Read more…
A common theme in metaphysics (and to some extent epistemology as well) since antiquity is understanding the relationships (or differences) between “things” and how we perceive or observe them. Examples extend from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and forms through Kant’s Transcendental Idealism to modern scientific variations such as Heisenberg’s Read more…
I am writing this only a few days removed from Black Hat 2019 and Def Con 27, where both events featured a number of presentations on critical infrastructure or industrial control system (ICS) threats – but with a continuing lack of scope (or imagination) for the threat landscape. While identifying Read more…
Something interesting came up in an extended (and wandering) Twitter thread discussing the relevance of certain legacy information security frameworks (like the CIA triad) to modern concerns like disinformation campaigns. The aspects of this discussion that most interested me were the following two items: “Which part of the CIA triad Read more…
I previously recorded some thoughts on the new US government strategy in cyber defense known as “defend forward”. Recently, I had the pleasure and opportunity to take part in a Naval War College exercise implicitly testing this strategy’s implementation and execution in the context of civilian critical infrastructure cyber operations. Read more…
The past several weeks have been an exciting time in the realm of cyber security – and especially the more narrow, less understood field of (potential) “cyber war”. Starting approximately two weeks ago (writing on 25 June 2019), there began a bombardment of news, with reports that: The XENOTIME activity Read more…