Cyber Security Through Technology Risk Management

URL Shortening Shortened URLs  offers several benefits by playing a vital role in digital marketing by  transforing lengthy URL into short and simple URL which can be shared on social media, blogs, emails and more. It is a technique that will redirect your short URL to specific website of your choice.  How ever short URLs produced by services like bit.ly and goo.gl, can be brute-forced.  And searching random shortened URLs could yield all sorts of secret documents. Plus, many of them can be edited, and can be infected with malware. Below image depicts the technique used by shortened URLs

RBI Cyber Security Framework(RBI-CSF) History RBI stands for Reserve Bank of India, a India's central bank and regulatory body establish in 1 April 1935 in accordance with Reserve Bank of India Act 1934. Purpose & Objective RBI's basic function as a reserve bank is to " to regulate the issue of Bank notes and keeping of reserves with a view to securing monetary stability in India and generally to operate the currency and credit system of the country to its advantage; to have a modern monetary policy framework to meet the challenge of an increasingly complex economy, to maintain price stability while keeping in mind the objective of growth ." The primary objectives of RBI are to undertake initiatives to: Define the  framework and guidelines and act as monitoring regulatory body for financial sectors  consisting of commercial banks, financial institutions and non- banking financial companies (NBFC),  Urban co-operative bank (UCB) etc. Fortifying the role of statutor...

What is the need for this PowerShell script. This script is needed when there is a discrepancy reported by vulnerability scan claiming that a set of windows systems are missing particular patch however the centralized patching tool is showing them as installed. This script could be handy for auditors, control validator/tester to test if patches are installed periodically or to check recently patched dates etc. Option 1 $cDate = Get-Date   # Get the date 30 adys ago $DaysAgo = $cDate .AddDays(-30)  # Get all the Updates installed since 30 days ago Get-HotFix | Where-Object { $_ .InstalledOn -gt $DaysAgo } $LastPatch = Get-HotFix | Sort-Object InstalledOn -Descending | Select-Object -First 1 Option 2 Get-CimInstance -Class win32_quickfixengineering | Where-Object { $_ .InstalledOn -gt ( Get-Date ).AddDays(-30) } Option 3 $Hosts = Get-Content -Path '.\hosts.txt'   #contains list of hosts #For each of the hosts in that file, run a command to gather patches in...

Introduction. We are going to discuss various file transfer options in brief and the security concerns associated with them. By understanding how these solution operate we can have an informed decision over its usage across the organization . Let's see if we could find answers to below question.  Differences between FTP, SFTP, FTPS and FTP over SSH? Why not just use FTP? Why should I use SFTP instead of FTP? Is SFTP better than FTPS?

WPAD protocol is a mechanism used by web clients to locate a browser configuration file ( WPAD.dat ) to obtain nearby proxy server details.

Assume you are supporting a big datacenter where multiple Access Switches are connected to the core switches or routers and  then tracing a device like a PC or a server for troubleshooting or security purposes is one of those tasks  that you often end up doing. This is not a difficult task but can certainly  a time consuming.

What is PAC File? Proxy Auto Configuration file is text file having a single function containing various rules coded in JavaScript that instructs web browser to forward traffic to a proxy server or directly to the destination server. Along with proxy server details there are optional and additional parameter that specify when and under what circumstances a browser forwards traffic to proxy server. Example: function FindProxyForURL(url, host) { if (shExpMatch(url, "*.google.com/*"))        return 10.10.10.1:8080;        return DIRECT' } Advantage of PAC file: PAC file can be hosted on a centralized place such as workstation, internal web server, or server outside the corporate network. Perform Load distribution Handle proxy failover. Supported by all browsers. Exceptions rules can be configured for internal or external sites. Provides critical security, ensuring that traffic is always proxied when it should be. History Original...

SANS Institute and Center for Internet Security (CIS) together with other organizations, developed the 20 Critical Security Controls (CSC) for Effective Cyber Defense. CIS Controls are not a replacement for any existing compliance framework such ISMS, NIST, CSF, PCI etc, rather it’s core building block toward any GRC journey.

In remote management, upstream or downstream interfaces of a network device are configured to accept the console connection such Telnet or SSH. The management traffic flows along with other transiting data traffic thru same interface.

Lets have a brief look at data security terms, also it becomes interestingly necessary to understand the different between those terms such as, their objectives, algorithm and applications. Once we have clear distinction then we know where to apply these data security provisions.

Summarised list of Chapter and Articles from EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this is useful for quick reference and can be used a cheat sheet.

"You can't amend the model clauses!" I always hear this people saying that  you cannot amend the model clauses, even the lawyer make such statement when I approached them for consultation during singing model contractual clauses.  We absolutely can amend the model clauses, provided your terms are purely commercial in nature and do not impact the protection of the data, nor the rights of data subjects or supervisory authorities.

Which certification is right for you or your job requirement? Recently I came across an request to advice on training requirement on security certification for furnishing one of our customer job requirement, The training team came up with some name, since some of the certification name were not exactly related, this made me to do some quick research and come up with the certification and their respective objective and focus.

In Linux/Unix like operating systems everything is logged. Many valuable log files are automatically created for you by Linux. You can find them in your /var/log directory.  This folder contains logs related to different services and applications. In this folder apart from other logs files we have some files such as utmp , wtmp and btmp . These files contains all the details about login’s and logout’s which are from local as well as from remote systems and system status such as uptime etc.

There are lot of buzz words related to cyber security in terms of technology, processes and regulations in terms of compliance but very less is talked about the people i.e. human factor.  moreover it's the people who use these technologies and data, who develops and follow these processes and regulations and hence its utmost important element in this trilogy PPT (People Process Technology).

CapTipper is a Python tool independently developed by one of checkpoint researchers, Omri Herscovici, which is used to analyze, explore and revive HTTP malicious traffic. It provides the security researcher with easy access to the files and understanding of the network flow, and is useful for researching exploits, as well as various pre-conditions, versions, obfuscations, plugins and shellcodes.

Outsourcing to India especially from EU is not a straightforward business when it come to EU Data Protection Act there are many myths and confusion floating around. This article is about understanding some important factor to be considered while outsourcing from EU to India.

Why do we need a password manager? Today is the world of social media, online business trading, online banking hence creation of different password became a necessasity and remembering them become nightmare. Writing these passwords on pieee of paper and pasting those paper on desk became a common practice which became easy target for cyber criminals to sucessfuly launch cyber attack, credential theft, financial fraud etc. Having a universal user name and password is impossible .  As every site or service has its own password requirements and hence its practically it is hard to keep track of all your different passwords.  Help improve security posture by providing a secure way for password storage rather than storing passwords in plain text compromising security posture.  It’s unreasonable to expect any person to remember complex passwords.  Its better to have something rather than nothing.  A Password Manager is a software application that allows users to secure...

TCPING is an utility written in GO language that operates similarly to PING however it works over a tcp port, This utility can be very useful for troubleshooting network connectivity and performance issue at Layer 3 and Layer 4. Support Windows, Darwin, Linux, Android, ios, Freebsd, Netbsd, Openbsd, Aix, Dragonfly, illumos, Plan9, Solaris and other operating systems.