Penetration Testing Services

What do you mean by "Threat Actor"?

Habitually in our articles we use the term “Threat Actors” where you might expect us to use a term like “attacker” or “cybercriminal”. So why do we do that? In short, we find that threat actor is a more accurate term where something like “cybercriminal” may, in some cases, be overly specific.

You see, there are a whole bunch of different individuals and groups out there which may cause damage to an organisation that the term “cybercriminal” might not cover. So, who might target your organisation?

Hardening SSL/TLS: Common Certificate Issues

I recently wrote a quick start guide to hardening SSL/TLS configurations, to help people to better understand all the different aspects of securing their transport layer security configuration – however, during that article I skipped over a big section: SSL Certificates.

In this article, we’ll focus on the certificates themselves and the impact of common certificate issues. It’s also worth noting that whilst they’re commonly called “SSL Certificates”, we learned in the last article that of course all version of SSL should be disabled, since we know SSL was deprecated in 2015 and is “comprehensively broken”.

Therefore, if you prefer the term “TLS Certificate”, or even the technically more accurate “X.509 Certificate” then that’s great – but you’ll rarely see the latter term used outside of technical documentation, it seems “SSL Certificate” has stuck as the common term.

Hardening SSL/TLS: Common SSL Security Issues

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was a protocol designed to protect network traffic in transit, however it was superseded by Transport Layer Security (TLS) in 1999. These protocols are well-known for protecting web traffic with HTTPS. However, they can be used to protect lots of different kinds of traffic, for example they can also be used to protect email traffic, instant messaging, and more.

Hashcracking with Hashcat and AWS

A couple of years ago I wrote an article about hashcracking with Hashcat and AWS; but that was back on Ubuntu 16.04 and it involved manually compiling the packages. So I thought I’d best update it for Ubuntu 22.04 and why not use the Nvidia ubuntu repos to make things easier too.

Preventing Username Enumeration

First of all, what is username enumeration? It is when a web application has a feature that allows a user to supply a username and the application will disclose (not necessarily intentionally) if the username is valid or not. This is closely related to Username Disclosure, except in the latter the application is including valid usernames in server responses in some way, which allows a threat actor to determine a username is valid without having to specify it first themselves. Both of these are an issue and both should be addressed.

Multifactor Authentication (MFA)

An authentication factor is something that is supplied to verify an identity – the most common example of an authentication factor is a password, a secret word used to authenticate yourself for access to an account. Multi-factor authentication is the requirement to supply several factors during authentication. This is often called “Two Factor Authentication” (2FA) as, most commonly, two factors are required, but it could, in some instances, be more and so MFA is the more general term.