Parsing the O365 Unified Audit Log with Python

The Unified Audit Log contains crucial elements when you want to investigate an incident in O365. You can do this live (with PowerShell, for example via Hawk). Sometimes however you receive the log file offline, with no live access to the environment.

I could not find a tool that gives me a quick overview of what was in the log. So I decided to write my own simple Python script to parse the exported O365Read more.

When Is an Attack not an Attack? The Story of Red Team Versus Blue Team

I published an article on the IBM Security Intelligence blog : When Is an Attack not an Attack? The Story of Red Team Versus Blue Team. This article is a high level overview of a red team vs blue team engagement. It starts with the reconnaissance of the victim, the red team scenario building, attack delivery and also how the blue team can discover the activities from the read team.

Read more at https://securityintelligence.com/articles/red-team-versus-blue-team-attack/.

Install Elastic Filebeat as daemon on OSX

Filebeat is a lightweight shipper for logs. You can use it to collect logs from endpoints and store them centrally in Elastic. You can use it to collect logs from Linux systems, but it also works on Apple OSX. Installing filebeat is straightforward

After installing filebeat you have to enable the system module

Then update the configuration file (filebeat/filebeat.yml)

I used the information from a support post on the Elastic site: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deploying-filebeat-on-macos-x/37785/11. This post describesRead more.

Use Mobile Verification Tool to check if your iPhone is affected by Pegasus spyware

The Pegasus spyware made by the Israel-based company NSO Group has been used in targeted surveillance attacks against activists, journalists and businesspeople. Its details, and methods to detect it, were revealed by CitizenLab (hacks from the Bahraini government on activists) with a forensic methodology report made available by Amnesty International.

Because both the tools and the indicators of compromise are made available it’s fairly easy to do these checks yourself.

Setup a Python virtual environmentRead more.

Identify malicious servers / Cobalt Strike servers with JARM

For a new assignment I wanted to use JARM to group servers with a similar configuration. Why JARM? Because it’s an easy way to quickly identify and group servers based on their configuration.

JARM is an active fingerprinting of TLS servers made available by Salesforce Engineering. It sends 10 TLS Client Hello packets to a server and captures specific attributes of the responses. These responses are then aggregated and hashed. A JARM fingerprint consists ofRead more.

Cobalt Strike Hunting – Key items to look for

Cobalt Strike (S0154) is a commercial penetration testing platform which is used by many red teams and, unfortunately, also by many criminal threat actors. In this post I summarise the findings from a SANS Digital Forensics and Incident Response keynote by Chad Tilbury : Cobalt Strike Threat Hunting. The YouTube video provides much more details but below you can find those findings that were relevant for me during an IR case.

This post includes referencesRead more.

Legal and cooperation frameworks between CSIRTs and law enforcement agencies

For a recent assignment, I had to summarise some of the legislation and cooperation frameworks that exist between CSIRTs and law enforcement agencies. This list is certainly not complete but already gives you an overview of what’s available. I first list the frameworks and then provide an overview of some of the existing cooperation mechanisms.

2001 – International

This convention, also known as the Budapest Convention is the first international treaty to addressRead more.

MISP and Threat Intelligence

I shared a presentation with a high-level overview of Threat Intelligence and MISP on the MISP Presentation Github repository.

Have a look at MISP/MISP-presentations 2021. The deck also includes one slide for using MISP in an industrial / ICS environment. Both PPTX and PDF versions are shared.

Postfix with client authentication

For a new project I had to foresee an SMTP relay server that supported client authentication. I love the simplicity of Postfix but setting it up with client authentication required more than just ‘a push of a button’. Below are some -unstructured- notes on how to achieve this.

The client authentication in Postfix is handled by Cyrus SASL. The Simple Authentication and Security Layer or SASL is a specification that describes how authentication mechanisms canRead more.

Health Care Ransomware Strains Have Hospitals in the Crosshairs

I published an article on the IBM Security Intelligence blog : Health Care Ransomware Strains Have Hospitals in the Crosshairs. This article covers ways on how hospitals and other facilities can against health care ransomware attacks. Two strains stand out in recent health care ransomware attacks: Ryuk and REvil. Although they are distinct when it comes to details, they also have some common elements.

Read more Health Care Ransomware Strains Have Hospitals in the Crosshairs