Sophisticated, state-based actors?
Sophisticated, state-based cyber actors? As you will be aware of by now, the Prime Minister warned Australians of “sophisticated, state-based cyber actors” targeting Australian organisations and all tiers of government. But is the sky really falling and if it is, will we all be equally devastated when it crashes down? And what are the risks […]
Scareware v1 – Just silly… probably
Scareware v1 – Just silly Probably Along with lots of other people on the Internet, you’ve probably received an unsolicited email, not only threatening you but claiming to have stolen your password and hacked your web cam. The emails generally go along the following lines: While poorly worded, the email can certainly appear alarming and […]
It’s not what you know…
It’s not what you know! (Actually, that’s exactly what it is!) Monitoring eCommerce sites for compromise DotSec knows that securing eCommerce sites properly can be tricky. Various best-practice guides to securing eCommerce software such as Magento do exist (see [1], [2] below) but despite the efforts of all concerned (including system owners, third-party providers, developers […]
Security for Australian law firms
2023 State of Cyber Maturity for Australian Law Firms The 2023 State of Cyber Maturity for Australian Law Firms survey invited legal professionals to share their approaches, motivations, decision making, and management towards cyber security. DotSec commissioned independent market research firm Momentum Intelligence to conduct the survey in collaboration with Lawyers Weekly. The survey was conducted on behalf […]
Not the patches you’re looking for
If a vulnerability scan identifies that a system is missing medium-risk vendor-supplied security patches, these patches must still be applied in order to be compliant with PCI DSS requirement 6.2, as described above. The fact that a vulnerability scan identified the issue and reported it as only a medium risk has no bearing as to […]
Splunk for IDCR.
Splunk for compliance and incident response. We recently delivered a presso that described how DotSec has used Splunk for a number of interesting projects. (In preparing the presso, I was a bit shocked to discover that we’ve actually been using Splunk now for over 12 years! Fun times!) Anyhow, our presentation was quite interactive, and […]
IRAP compliance for national provider
New IRAP case study! We’ve compiled a case study that summarises 18 months of very challenging, rewarding and ultimately successful work, guiding the development of an IRAP-compliant information security management practice. Our client was an international service-provider to governments in Australia and overseas. In order to be able to provide services to the Australian federal […]
Magento as the coal-miner’s canary
Using Magento as the coal-miner’s canary Overview Regular review of web-application logs is not only a requirement for various compliance regimes (such as the PCI-DSS or various IRAP-based programs), it can actually give you good insight into vulnerabilities which arise outside of the web-application itself. In this post we describe how clever analysis of blocked-request […]
Honing our blue team skills
Honing our blue team skills Cybersecurity is a never-ending game of cat and mouse that is played between attackers (who seek to damage or otherwise misuse information assets) and defenders (who seek to ensure that those assets are only available for use as intended). In this post we’ll summarise some of the ways we are […]
It’s still borked?
What? It (still) doesn’t work (again)? Just a quick update to our most recent blog-post… Things do change so quickly on the interwebs you know! A long time ago*…… Back in 2013, high-end retailer Neiman Marcus was breached, resulting in a loss of data related to about 370,000 customers. Well needless to say, those 370,000-ish […]