Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Introduction to Windows tokens for security practitioners

This blog series is aimed at giving defense practitioners a thorough understanding of Windows access tokens for the purposes of detection engineering. Here in Part 1, we'll cover key concepts in Windows Security. The desired outcome is to help defenders understand how access tokens work in Windows environments.

Detecting Windows Persistence

Persistence is effectively the ability of the attacker to maintain access to a compromised host through intermittent network access, system reboots, and (to a certain degree) remediation activities. The ability of an attacker to compromise a system or network and successfully carry out their objectives typically relies on their ability to maintain some sort of persistence on the target system/network.

macOS vs. Windows - What kernels tell you about security events: Part 2

This post continues this two-part blog series on further understanding the differences between macOS and Windows on the system level for effective endpoint security analysis. In Part 1, we covered process events. Here in Part 2, we’ll discuss file and network events. As with Part 1, my hope is to help cybersecurity professionals expand and enrich their experiences on a less familiar platform, ultimately helping them to be better prepared to face differences from past experiences.

Netwrix Auditor for Windows File Servers - Overview

Netwrix Auditor for Windows File Servers maximizes visibility into what's going on across Windows file servers by classifying sensitive data and providing actionable audit data about all changes made to files, folders, shares and permissions; and reporting on both successful and failed access attempts. Today, it’s hard to imagine an enterprise that doesn’t rely on file servers to store its data — including valuable and sensitive data. This makes file servers a key target for all sorts of attackers, including both anonymous hackers and disgruntled employees.

macOS vs. Windows - What kernels tell you about security events: Part 1

How would you compare the Windows and macOS operating systems? In what ways are they similar? Why do they each take different approaches to solving the same problem? For the last 19 years I've developed security software for Windows. Recently, I’ve started implementing similar features on macOS. Since then, people have asked me questions like this. The more experience I gained on these two operating systems, the more I realized they’re very different.

Hardening Windows security: How to secure your organization-Part 3

This is the final blog of our three-part blog series on living-off-the-land (LOTL) attacks. If you missed last week’s blog, you can read it here. LOTL attacks are also known as “malware-free” attacks because your own tools are used against you, either to hide malicious activities under a legitimate system process, or to leverage genuine system activities for malicious purposes.

PowerShell and 'Fileless Attacks'

PowerShell had its beginnings as a way to enable administrators to perform their tasks both locally and remotely with unprecedented access to underlying Windows components, such as COM objects and WMI. Since being included in every major Windows Operating System since Windows 7, PowerShell based tooling is well proliferated for both legitimate and malicious use and includes common tooling such as SharpSploit, PowerSploit, PowerShell Empire, Nishang and Invoke-Obfuscation.

Hardening Windows security: How to secure your organization - Part 2

We’re back with part two of our three-part blog series on living-off-the-land attacks. If you missed part one, you can read it here. In a nutshell, living-off-the-land (LOTL) refers to a type of attack where the attacker uses the tools and features that already exist in the target environment to carry out malicious activities. The concept of LOTL is not new, but LOTL and file-less attacks have been gaining popularity over the last few months.