WEBINAR | A Deep-Dive into 2023 Cyber Threats
Reduce Alert Noise and False Positives
Boost your team's productivity by cutting down alert noise and false positives.
Automate Security Operations
Boost efficiency, reduce burnout, and better manage risk through automation.
Dark Web Monitoring
Online protection tuned to the need of your business.
Maximize Existing Security Investments
Improve efficiencies from existing investments in security tools.
Beyond MDR
Move your security operations beyond the limitations of MDR.
Secure with Microsoft 365 E5
Boost the power of Microsoft 365 E5 security.
Secure Multi-Cloud Environments
Improve cloud security and overcome complexity across multi-cloud environments.
Secure Mergers and Acquisitions
Control cyber risk for business acquisitions and dispersed business units.
Operational Technology
Solve security operations challenges affecting critical operational technology (OT) infrastructure.
Force-Multiply Your Security Operations
Whether you’re just starting your security journey, need to up your game, or you’re not happy with an existing service, we can help you to achieve your security goals.
Detection Investigation Response
Modernize Detection, Investigation, Response with a Security Operations Platform.
Threat Hunting
Locate and eliminate lurking threats with ReliaQuest GreyMatter
Threat Intelligence
Find cyber threats that have evaded your defenses.
Model Index
Security metrics to manage and improve security operations.
Breach and Attack Simulation
GreyMatter Verify is ReliaQuest’s automated breach and attack simulation capability.
Digital Risk Protection
Continuous monitoring of open, deep, and dark web sources to identify threats.
Phishing Analyzer
GreyMatter Phishing Analyzer removes the abuse mailbox management by automating the DIR process for you.
Integration Partners
The GreyMatter cloud-native Open XDR platform integrates with a fast-growing number of market-leading technologies.
Unify and Optimize Your Security Operations
ReliaQuest GreyMatter is a security operations platform built on an open XDR architecture and designed to help security teams increase visibility, reduce complexity, and manage risk across their security tools, including on-premises, clouds, networks, and endpoints.
Blog
Company Blog
Case Studies
Brands of the world trust ReliaQuest to achieve their security goals.
Data Sheets
Learn how to achieve your security outcomes faster with ReliaQuest GreyMatter.
eBooks
The latest security trends and perspectives to help inform your security operations.
Industry Guides and Reports
The latest security research and industry reports.
Podcasts
Catch up on the latest cybersecurity podcasts, and mindset moments from our very own mental performance coaches.
Solution Briefs
A deep dive on how ReliaQuest GreyMatter addresses security challenges.
White Papers
The latest white papers focused on security operations strategy, technology & insight.
Videos
Current and future SOC trends presented by our security experts.
Events & Webinars
Explore all upcoming company events, in-person and on-demand webinars
ReliaQuest ResourceCenter
From prevention techniques to emerging security trends, our comprehensive library can arm you with the tools you need to improve your security posture.
Threat Research
Get the latest threat analysis from the ReliaQuest Threat Research Team. ReliaQuest ShadowTalk Weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research.
Shadow Talk
ReliaQuest's ShadowTalk is a weekly podcast featuring discussions on the latest cybersecurity news and threat research. ShadowTalk's hosts come from threat intelligence, threat hunting, security research, and leadership backgrounds providing practical perspectives on the week's top cybersecurity stories.
April 18, 2024
About ReliaQuest
We bring our best attitude, energy and effort to everything we do, every day, to make security possible.
Leadership
Security is a team sport.
No Show Dogs Podcast
Mental Performance Coaches Derin McMains and Dr. Nicole Detling interview world-class performers across multiple industries.
Make It Possible
Make It Possible reflects our focus on bringing cybersecurity awareness to our communities and enabling the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
Careers
Join our world-class team.
Press and Media Coverage
ReliaQuest newsroom covering the latest press release and media coverage.
Become a Channel Partner
When you partner with ReliaQuest, you help deliver world-class cybersecurity solutions.
Contact Us
How can we help you?
A Mindset Like No Other in the Industry
Many companies tout their cultures; at ReliaQuest, we share a mindset. We focus on four values every day to make security possible: being accountable, helpful, adaptable, and focused. These values drive development of our platform, relationships with our customers and partners, and further the ReliaQuest promise of security confidence across our customers and our own teams.
More results...
The team were fortunate to go to Black Hat and DEFCON this year, and we wanted to share back some of our favorite sessions with you all. Let us know which sessions you enjoyed – tweet at us at @Photon_Research.
Every year infosec professionals flock to Black Hat to get their stickers and swag, but we have also heard about others going for the talks, training, product demos and networking opportunities. Either way there is plenty to be had by everyone.
This year was no exception, there were great training courses lined up, covering, malware analysis, social engineering, secure software development, offensive and defensive techniques just to mention a few. We have even had the opportunity to have a few of the team on a couple courses.
Advanced Cloud Security and Applied DevSecOps
One of the trainings attended was Advanced Cloud Security and Applied DevSecOps. The rapidly evolving devops environment and the cloud services dependencies (IaaS, SaaS) make this course really helpful and valuable. It was a demanding high-pace hands-on course with practical examples and real world use cases. Basic and advanced cloud security principles were analyzed and applied in practice. Identity management, logging, monitoring and alert and response activities were extensively analyzed with several tools and solutions.
Key takeaways were that cloud security needs its own focused effort heavily based on proper configuration and effective log monitoring. The recent CapitalOne incident revealed part of the problems need to be addressed and highlighted the importance of properly configured security controls and managing the gaps in deployed controls.
SpecterOps – Adversary Tactics: Detection
The SpectreOps Adversary Tactics: Detection course focused on network defense through proactively hunting for threat actors. The course taught attendees about Hunting operations, with an emphasis on building robust detections for attacker Tactics, Techniques and Procedure (TTPs) within a network. This involved mapping threat intelligence reports to techniques listed within the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and using this in conjunction with The Open Security Events Metadata project (OSSEM) to identify potential data sources which can be used for building a detection. Students performed deep dives into specific adversary techniques, learning how they work and what artifacts are left behind when used. Information gathered from this process was used to build robust detections for a specified technique, and detections were documented using the Palantir Alerting and Detection Strategies Framework.
The course used a variety of free and open source data collection and analysis tools such as System monitor (Sysmon) and HELK. HELK was used as the hunting platform and came preloaded with host endpoint data to test detections against. The 4-day training culminated in the final day, where teams of students tested their new-found skills against a Windows enterprise environment undergoing active compromise.
Infiltrating Corporate intranet Like NSA – Pre-auth RCE on Leading SSL VPNs by Meh Chang and Orange Tsai of DEVCORE. https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Wednesday/us-19-Tsai-Infiltrating-Corporate-Intranet-Like-NSA.pdf
The presenters provided a wealth of information relating to SSL VPN issues in popular products and how they found and exploited vulnerabilities in the services. A lot of the information provided was focused on the more technical side of the discoveries and exploitation, though the key takeaways were for anyone with an SSL VPN service exposed to the internet, and that is, even security solutions can be exploited. While patching is often advised to fix vulnerable applications and devices, this does not prevent the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities.
While VPN’s are often seen as a necessity, like any of service publicly exposed can be exploited under the correct conditions. Successful risk reduction of internet facing services often requires removing the service from the untrusted network (internet) or implementing access controls and traffic filtering such as IP whitelisting and IPS solutions. We need to be mindful of what services we have directly exposed to an untrusted network and think about how we might be able to reduce the risk of compromise for that solution, and the risk of attacks using it as a foothold.
WebAuthn 101 – Demystifying WebAuthn by Christiaan Brand of Google https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Brand-WebAuthn-101-Demystifying-WebAuthn.pdf
One of the shorter talks that we had the pleasure of attending, yet one of the more interesting and one very much relevant to a lot of work we have done recently around Two-factor Authentication (2FA) in our recent white paper released shortly before Black Hat, Two-Factor in Review. The talk provided a high level overview of current multi factor authentication technologies and how Google work to enhance authentication for its user base. Christiaan Brand detailed, how WebAuthn can be used in combination with various authenticators be it hardware U2F tokens such as Yubico’s YubiKey or using your mobile phone to act as an authenticator over Bluetooth. It was very exciting to see such a great turn out, and hopefully more people will begin to adopt the technologies discussed in the talk and move away from Single factor, and even one time passwords, to a more phishing resilient authentication method.
You can read our white paper below:
DevSecOps : What, Why and How https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Shrivastava-DevSecOps-What-Why-And-How.pdf
This was a nice talk on the hot topic of applying security in the DevOps pipeline. This is an issue that concerns several organizations these days with the devops evolvement causing negative effect in applied security. Issues like how and when to integrate security testing in application development were addressed with the commonly agreed conclusion to be “as early as possible”. Continuous security assessment and mitigation activities were also presented with recommendations and solutions coming from open source market. While Jenkins was used as the use case every solution can be integrated to any platform. Additionally another issue that was described is the need of culture change from the devops perspective. Apparently security needs to be adopted in their daily workflow and become solid part of the SDLC. Many open source tools and techniques were analyzed giving enough information to start planning and implementing their own DevSecOps program.
Google Project Zero – 5 years of making 0day hard https://i.blackhat.com/USA-19/Thursday/us-19-Hawkes-Project-Zero-Five-Years-Of-Make-0day-Hard.pdf
Ben Hawkes of Google Project Zero gave an excellent talk on the history, success and lessons learned of running the P0 team. Ben lead with a quote that is near and dear to my heart: “Good defense relies upon a detailed knowledge of offense”. That’s about as near-perfect encapsulation of the Purple Team philosophy as you could make! Hawkes then went on to detail how making 0-day hard is more than just popping shells and devoloping exploits, but rather is about motivating and delivering structural changes. One example that was provided was around the Spectre and Meltdown suite of hardware vulnerabilities which led to an increased focus on hardware security by chip vendors, OS vendors and browser vendors. Ben closed out his talk by a call-to-action, asking attack research teams to work together with P0 to protect the Internet and its users.
One of my favorite areas at Black Hat to loiter is there arsenal tool demonstration area. This is a great place to watch the developers over various open source tools showcase their work. This is great for us to have a better understanding of the tools that are readily available to anyone and how we might be able to detect and defend against them. Interesting new tools are also often tried out in our labs and if they prove useful may then be used as one of our regular purple team exercises. A prime example of this would be Vectr Purple team framework. We deploy Vectr on one of our last internal exercises and even published a blog post detailing some of its features and benefits in engagements (Purple Teaming with Vectr, Cobalt Strike, and MITRE ATT&CK), so it was great to see the tool being demonstrated to a large crowd at Black Hat Arsenal this year.
Some tool highlights from the Arsenal which the team enjoyed:
Richard Gold presenting at DEFCON 27, Recon Village
This year’s DEFCON experience was a lot more comfortable, with the conference being spread over four hotels, giving everyone a lot more space to move about and get to where they want to go. The badges this year made for a surprisingly fun and sociable experience, each attendee was provided with a badge containing electronics that allowed badges to interact with each other, different types of attendees received different badge colors (types) that when interacting with another type would collect points used to level up your badge. This provided for a really nice vibe at the conference, giving people a bit of a boost in interaction.
There were plenty of interesting talks going on throughout, though due to the team’s involvement in recon village where our very own Richard Gold announced our new open source asset discovery and OSINT framework Orca (source code: https://github.com/digitalshadows/orca blog summary: https://www.digitalshadows.com/blog-and-research/recon-village-panning-for-gold/).
To add to the already busy trip the team delivered a DEFCON workshop (https://github.com/digitalshadows/mindthegap) on evading EDR detection on *nix systems, due to this there was less time than we had hoped to attend many talks. We did however get some time to loiter around the villages, which was a great experience, whether you are into car hacking, drone hacking or even maritime and aviation, there was always something interesting going on. Since over 30,000 people attended DEFCON there also was also always someone interesting to have a conversation with and to learn something new, one of us even snagged a few flags in the ICS village CTF.
All in all, it was a fantastic experience, can’t wait for the next time!
To stay up to date with the latest from our Photon Research Team and our other threat intelligence updates, subscribe to our email list below.