Eoin & The Security

Cyber Security: Keeping Pace with Change. Getting breached can really ruin your day. Actually it normally happens on a friday evening as you are about chill for the weekend. The cause of must breaches is not rocket science, its more to do with the poor approach we have accepted because we underestimate the threat actor.  - An attacker does not scan your website/network once a quarter with a commercial or open source scanner or perform an annual penetration test against your systems to see if there is any low hanging fruit, so how do we expect to defend against such an advisory using that approach? Systems change now more frequently than ever due to the ease of cloud deployments and the speed of software deployments due to iterative development techniques. The rate of change increase results in exposures quickly manifesting and the organisation not even being aware of the exposure in the first place. Many organisations dont know what they have exposed on the public Internet. We ne...

I recently was interviewed by the Irish times on why is everything getting hacked and how can we change the game.... https://www.irishtimes.com/special-reports/cybersecurity-focus/criminals-have-an-inbuilt-advantage-in-the-great-cyber-arms-race-1.4651078  A recording of the Panel with Andy Purdy, CSO of Huawei North America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQJ1uSQ4IEk&t=33s Both are decent and worth a listen.

  Attack Surface Management (ASM), a new sexy approach to cyber security visibility.  "How about we try to see what systems are exposed to the public Internet  so we can make sure they are being secured." ASM is not Vulnerability management (detection of cyber security weaknesses) but rather takes a step back to answer the question, "What do I need to secure?" but is can also help identify the SBoM (Software Bill of Materials) across deployed systems. Attack Surface Management (ASM) which provides you the ability to see all services exposed to the public internet across your global estate. As new systems are deployed, decommissioned or a system changes, ASM can inform you of the event.  This is done in real-time and on a continuous basis in most cases. I wrote a bog in 2018   when we first introduced Edgescan's ASM solution which has evolved since by including both API discovery and multi-region monitoring. API discovery  locates exposed API endpo...

BBQ Cyber Security Thoughts...... During lockdown, I've taken to standing over the BBQ staring at the temperature gauge, lifting the lid occasionally and slow cooking various meats. Given the lockdown situation this provided a focal point for the day; something to attend to for the afternoon.  When standing there in a mindful stasis things go through your head, these are some of mine... "Software testing Software, who thought that would work?" "Using systems with potential vulnerabilities to discover potential vulnerabilities in systems" "Shift Left would make more sense if development was linear" "The reliance on automation to defend against a human adversary, sounds fair.....💀" "We cant improve what we cant measure; We cant secure what we cant see." "We accept false positives in scanners (Software getting it wrong) but we don't accept vulnerabilities (Software getting it wrong)." - Software testing software. "T...

  Web Application Scanning...Evolution For the past 24 months Edgescan has been developing a new Web Scanning engine, namely " Weasel ". Its a core component to the edgescan SaaS web security aspect of the service. We built it for many reasons: Faster Assessment speed. Increased coverage. Better Accuracy. More user control and configuration. Improved API support and navigation. More metrics. Javascript/Single-Page-Application (SPA) improvement. Improved content discovery. Dynamic Learning A cool thing about weasel is it has a dedicated team that not only consists of developers but also analysts and researchers. This was exciting as some of our penetration testers trained and pushed the engine and our developers implement ongoing changes. Developing a web scanning engine is certainly a treadmill and a never-ending process. Change is good, and to change often is to live well. Dynamic Learning - Once aspect that is exciting for us is the idea of continuously integrated test ca...