In this episode I'm releasing a new document aimed to help organizations eliminate low hanging hacker fruit from the environment. The document contains (relatively) cheap and (relatively) easy things to implement. And my hope is it can be a living/breathing document that will bulk up over time. Got things to add to this list? Then please commen ...…

It's done! It's done!! It's DONE!!! That's right mom, my PacktPub course called Mastering Kali Linux Network Scanning is done! In today's episode I: Recap the course authoring experience Explain my super anal retentive editing process that takes 4 hours for every 10 minutes of produced video Admit some last minute mistakes that about made me qu ...…

In today's episode, I'm excited to be joined in the studio by Nathan Hunstad, Director of Security at Code42. Nathan and I had a great chat about Code42's new security offering called Code42 Forensic File Search, which helps IT and security teams figure out where files are located across their enterprise - even if the endpoints are offline. Thi ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at Netwrix. Their amazing Netwrix Auditor tool gives you visibility into what’s happening both on your local network and cloud-based IT systems and tells you about critical changes, and when and where people have been accessing data. Give it a spin right in your browser here, and then try it in yo ...…

This episode is a cavalcade of fun! Why? First, I've got a big announcement: I've accepted a new position. "What?!" exclaimed my mom. "I thought you were president of 7MS, what the what?" No worries, it's business as usual, and my responsibilities at 7MS aren't changing. But I'm also going to start writing blogs, nurturing a Slack channel and p ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at Netwrix. Their amazing Netwrix Auditor tool gives you visibility into what’s happening both on your local network and cloud-based IT systems and tells you about critical changes, and when and where people have been accessing data. Give it a spin right in your browser here, and then try it in yo ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by my friends at Dashlane, a fantastic password manager for you, your family and your business! Head to www.dashlane.com/7ms and use the code 7MS for 10% off a year of Dashlane Premium! Today I'm super pumped to be joined by Ryan Manship of RedTeam Security and Dave Dobrotka of United HealthGroup. Both these gu ...…

Today's episode is a follow-up to #304 where we talked about how you can integrate over 500 million weak/breached/leaked passwords form Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords into your Active Directory. To get started with this in your environment, grab Troy's updated passwords list here, and then you can check out my BPATTY site for step-by-step implemen ...…

It's been a while so I thought I'd update you on how things are going on the business front. Here are the big updates I want to share with you in today's episode: A new 7MS hire that's going to hunt sales opportunities! My approach to finding podcast sponsors (it seems to be working) Some kick-butt interviews that are on the horizon (including ...…

I'm putting together a general security awareness session aimed at helping individuals and businesses not get hacked. To play off the lucky number 7, I'm trying to broil this list down to 7 key things to focus on. Here's my list thus far: Passwords 2FA/MFA Wifi (put a good password on it, don't use WEP, don't use WPS Sign up for HaveIBeenPwned ...…

I had an exhilarating and terrifying experience this week doing my first ever live radio interview! As a quick bit of background, this interview was part of the 7MS radio marketing campaign that I've talked about my "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Crying" series (here's part 1, 2 and 3). The interview was conducted by Lee Michaels, a ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. Today's episode is a follow-up interview with Joe Klein, who is my good pal, a former coworker, and a SOC analyst extraordinaire. You might remember Joe from t ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. This week I sat down with Lane Roush of Arctic Wolf to discuss the big hairy beast that is...(insert dramatic music here) logging and alerting! I work with a l ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. In today's episode, I talk about my fun experience using the Sn1per automated pentesting tool. It's really cool! It can scan your network, find vulnerabilities ...…

Today's episode is brought to you by ITProTV. Visit itpro.tv/7ms and use code 7MS to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription. This week's show is another interview episode - this time with my pal Bjorn Kimminich of the OWASP Juice Shop. If you've never heard of the Juice Shop before, ...…

Today's interview features Justin McCarthy, CTO and cofounder of StrongDM, which offers both commercial and open source tools (like Comply) to help customers with SOC compliance. Justin schooled me (in a nice way) about a lot of things, including: What SOC and the various SOC types are all about What SOC compliance costs What to look for in sel ...…

In this episode I wanted to give you some cool/fun updates as it relates to 7MS the business! Specifically: A new member of the 7MS team (kinda!) The weird and varied projects I'm working on Upcoming podcast sponsors (probably in July) 7MS has a "real" office coming soon to the southern metro of MN (hopefully!)…

As a continuation of last week's episode I'm now making a bit of progress in finding a good backup solution that protects USB backups both at rest and when pumped up to the cloud. I mentioned I've been using BackBlaze for backups (not a sponsor), and they allow you to backup USB drives as long as they're connected at least once every 30 days. T ...…

You probably create DR plans for your business (or help other companies build them), but have you thought about creating one for yourself? Yeah, I know it's grim to think about "What will my loved ones do to get into my accounts, backups, photos, social media accounts..." but it's probably not a bad idea to prepare for that (spoiler alert: we a ...…

As I was preparing for my Secure 360 talk a month or so ago, I stumbled upon this awesome article which details a method for getting Domain Admin access in just a few minutes - without cracking passwords or doing anything else "loud." The tools you'll need are: PowerShell Empire DeathStar Responder Ntlmrelayx I've written up all the steps in a ...…

It has been a heck of a week (in a good way), and I'm taking a break from security so you can help me untangle a mystery that's been wrapped around my brain for years. I need you to help me figure out what this dude meant when he said that something was as frustrating "as boxing a cat." P.S. if you hate off-topic episodes no worries! We'll be b ...…

This week I dove into building a Cuckoo Sandbox for malware analysis. There are certainly a ton of posts and videos out there about it, but this entry called Painless Cuckoo Sandbox Installation caught my eye as a good starting point. This article got me about 80% of the way there, and the last 20% proved to be problematic. I got some additiona ...…

Last week I was in the recording studio to record three 7MS commercials aimed at churches. The goal was to educate them on some security topics and close with a "hook" to contact 7MS for help securing your church. The commercials themselves are embedded in this episode so please have a listen and let me know what you think! I'll also let you kn ...…

Cracking passwords in the cloud is super fun (listen to last week's episode to learn how to build your own cracking box on the cheap at Paperspace)! In the last couple weeks, customers have asked me about doing a password strength assessment on their Active Directory environment. I asked around and read a bunch of blogs and found a method that ...…

I had an absolute ball this week trying to figure out how to crack passwords effectively, and on the cheap, and in the cloud. Today's episode goes into much more detail, and embedded below is the Gist of my approach thus far. If you've got things to add/suggest to this document, let me know! P.S. if you don't see the gist because you're reading ...…

Hey, so this week I am without my main machine - thus no jingle or "jungle boogie" intro music. Feels weird. Feels real weird. Anyway, ya know how I teased last week that 7MS could possibly be coming to a radio station near you? Well I think it's more of a probability than a possibility at this point! I met with a radio exec a few weeks ago and ...…

We've dug into some pretty technical topics the last few weeks so we're gonna take it easy today. Below are some FAQs and updates I'll cover on today's show: FAQs What security certs should a sales person get? What lav mic should I get for podcasting? How do I know if I'm ready to take the OSCP? When are you gonna do some more YouTube videos? W ...…

Today is part two of evaluating endpoint solutions, where I primarily focus on Caldera which is an adversary simulation system that's really awesome! You can essentially setup a virtual attacker and cut it loose on some test machines, which is what I did as part of an endpoint protection evaluation project. The attacks simulated are from Advers ...…

I've been super pumped about Troy Hunt's Pwned Passwords project ever since it came out - especially when I saw a tweet about using it in Active Directory so that enterprises could essentially stop people from picking previously pwned passwords! That led me to explore the following two solutions: Pwned Passwords DLL This blog entry has everythi ...…

I'm working on a fun project right now where I'm evaluating endpoint protection solutions for a client. They're faced with a choice of either refreshing endpoints to the latest gen of their current product, or doing a rip and replace with something else. I've spun up a standalone AD environment with ~5 Win 10 VMs and nothing on 'em except a cur ...…

I've had a fun week with a mixed bag of security related stuff happening, so I thought I'd throw it all in a big stew and cook it up for today's episode. Here are the highlights: Bash bunny preso I had a fun opportunity this week to speak to some property managers about the threats the Bash Bunny poses to an environment. Specifically I showed t ...…

Intro CredDefense is a freakin' sweet tool from the fine folks at Black Hills Information Security that does some really nifty things: Password filter Lets say you use the out-of-the-box password policy that comes with Active Directory, and you want to change your password to Winter2017! - AD is gonna say "Yeah dude/dudette, go for it...it fits ...…

In today's continuation of last week's episode I'm continuing a discussion on using free tools to triage Windows systems - be they infected or just acting suspicious. Specifically, those tools include: FTK Imager - does a dandy job of creating memory dumps and/or full disk backups of a live system. You can also make a portable version by instal ...…

I had the privilege of creating a Windows System Forensics 101 course/presentation for a customer. The good/bad news is there is so much good information out there, it's hard to boil things down to just an hour. For the first part of the presentation, I focused on Mark Russinovich's technique of using Sysinternals as the primary surgical tool. ...…

Last week I talked about how business has been going with the LLC. Today I answer some additional questions that I didn't have time to address: How I'm finding leads/projects to work on (TLDR: I'm NOT sending 1TB of PDFs to people, spamming them, calling them endlessly or LinkedIn'ing everybody and their mom) The interesting conversations I'm h ...…

Intro Here's some of the "juice" that has helped 7MS have a successful start: Support system Ok so I think if you're going to have a successful business, you need an awesome support system. Mine consists of some of these things: Faith - I'm a Christian and pray about this business constantly. In fact I learned really quickly how easy it is to b ...…

WEFFLES are delicious! WEFFLES stands for Windows Event Logging Forensic Logging Enhancement Services and is Microsoft's cool (and free!) console for responding to incidents and hunting threats. I had a chance to play with it in the lab this week and for the most part, the install of WEFFLES went well, but I had one minor issue that was cleared ...…

Today I'm excited to be joined by my friend and advisor Kevin Keane (Twitter / LinkedIn) who is a lawyer, blogger, keynote speaker, business advisor, and just all around great guy. Kevin and I sit down to talk about: How SMBs can take some productive security baby steps How to get the most value out of your next security consultant engagement C ...…

GDPR in a nutshell GDPR, in a nutshell, is a set of legal regulations focused on the privacy of personal information for EU citizens - no matter where they are. Entities that store and/or process personal information about EU citizens must clearly explain to the citizens what data is being stored and processed, and any parties the data is being ...…

Back in episode 280 I talked about how I started working with PacktPub to start authoring a video course on vulnerability scanning using Kali. Since that episode I've found that recording and editing high quality video clips is taking waaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy longer than I'd like, but it's worth it to create good stuff! PacktPub authored a tool calle ...…

Hey folks, I had originally planned to cover the CredDefense toolkit but I couldn't get it working. I'm basically having the same issue that someone reported here. Sooooo....will have to save that for next week. In the meantime, this episode features a story about how I nearly knocked a retina out of my sister's face with an ice ball when I was ...…

Did I mention I love the Critical Security Controls? I do. And here's an absolute diamond I found this week: This site (http://www.auditscripts.com/free-resources/critical-security-controls/) offers awesome CSC-mapping tools (and they're free!), specifically: A spreadsheet with how the CSCs map to other popular frameworks like ISO and NIST A ma ...…

My pal and former coworker Joe Klein joins me in the virtual studio to discuss: His career as a diesel mechanic and insurance guru How to leave a stable job, take a huge pay cut and start a risky infosec internship (sounds like the name of a broadway musical!) The start of his new career as a SOC analyst The importance of having a career cheerl ...…

Two weird things happening in this episode: I'm not in the car, and thus not endangering myself and others while podcasting and driving! My once beloved lav mic made a trip through the Johnson family's washer and dryer. I don't know that she'll ever record anything again. We'll see once it fully dries out (fingers crossed). I spent some time th ...…

Sorry the podcast is late this week - but it's all for good reasons! I'm busy as a bee doing a ton of pentesting so I have a smattering of random security stuff to share with you: Mac High Sierra root bug Did you hear about this? Basically anybody could log in as user root on your system without a password because...there isn't a password! Read ...…

Well, after over-teasing this last week, I'm excited to announce that I've started my own company! 7 Minute Security, LLC gives me an outlet to do all my favorite infosec stuff, such as: Network assessments Vulnerability scanning Penetration testing Training Public speaking I welcome you to check out 7MinSec.com for more information. Or 7Minute ...…

We're continuing to hammer on the CSCs again this week. Here's some rad resources that can get your CSC efforts in the right direction: CIS Implementation Guide for SMEs CIS Cybersecurity quarterly newsletters Netdisco lets you locate machines by MAC or IP, show the corresponding switch port, and disable it if necessary. Defensive Security Hand ...…

Nothing to do with security, but I've heard this song way too much this week. I love the CIS Controls but it seems like there isn't a real good hands-on implementation guide out there. Hrmm...maybe it's time to create one? Speaking of that, check out the MacMon project and chat with us about it via Slack. After hearing rave reviews about Fingbo ...…

For a long time I've been electronically in love with the Critical Security Controls. Not familiar with 'em? The CIS site describes them as: The CIS Controls are a prioritized set of actions that protect your critical systems and data from the most pervasive cyber attacks. They embody the critical first steps in securing the integrity, mission, ...…

My plans for this week's podcast went hush-hush, kablooie, bye-bye, see ya, adios. So, I'm pinch-hitting and going off-topic and talking about...of all things...cops. Now wait! Wait wait! Don't run away. I'm not going all political on you or anything like that. Just wanna share some anecdotes and perspectives on the following: What it was like ...…