Sure, being an adversary-emulating red teamer sounds thrilling when you’re hired to phish a CFO and sneakily bypass a company’s security defenses, but nobody ever talks about all the paperwork.

Red teams frequently have to document the many steps of their path inside a company–and then present those notes to blue-team defenders for review. A “Stepping Stones” logging tool from NCC Group, released in June 2024, aims to help organize the infiltration.

“It helps with that retrospective tracking for the blue team, because all of the events are logged at a specific time against a specific machine. So the blue team knows where to go and hunt for any logs that might have been missed,” Stephen Tomkinson, principal security consultant at NCC Group, told IT Brew.

As a member of NCC Group’s Full Spectrum Attack Simulation (FSAS) team, Tomkinson often infiltrates the IT systems of big companies, including those in the financial sector. An exercise may feature a red team phishing their way into one laptop, which then potentially leads to access to additional company systems, or leads to the testers installing the adversary-simulation program Cobalt Strike, which simulates attacker tactics like recon and lateral movement.

Read the rest here.—BH

Imagine all the things that could damage your IT equipment: intense heat, electric shocks, jarring vibrations, spills, dust, debris, you name it. Even scarier? These potential dangers are all over most industrial and manufacturing environments.

That’s why you need Eaton. They offer a full suite of products and services to take your manufacturing IT up a whole lotta notches. To help you bring IT to OT, Eaton put together this super-handy infographic.

Eaton offers all kinds of solutions to a variety of industrial IT challenges, like:

• rack cabinets and enclosures that protect against spills and debris
• USB hubs that defend against electrostatic charges
• DIN Rail UPS and industrial-grade cabling to heat-proof
• wireless access point enclosures that keep Wi-Fi modems out of the way

Secure your systems.

When global network behemoth Cisco bought data processing company Splunk in March 2024, the two came together more like a merger than an acquisition.

That meant new job titles for some Splunk executives, like former SVP and General Manager of Security Mike Horn. Today, Horn is SVP and General Manager of Splunk Security Products at Cisco, a role that reflects his work to help ease the transition from an 8,000-strong company to one that in 2023, claimed more than 84,000 employees.

“We weren’t small,” Horn told IT Brew at Cisco Live in early June. “But Cisco has a much bigger operating environment where we can take advantage of [things like] ‘Hey, you’re making an investment in AI. Can we piggyback on that investment? We’re both doing work on ML—how can we get our teams working together so we can get an expanded set of capabilities?’”

On the lookout. Horn’s still keeping an eye on security threats. And in a sector that’s changing fast, especially with the introduction of AI on both the defender and attacker side, he said it’s important to stay on top of trends—be they new technologies or new ways of distributing attacks.

Read more here.—EH

Voluntary commitments to fighting deepfakes just aren’t going to cut it, according to one of the nation’s top cybersecurity officials.

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Chief Jen Easterly warned at the Washington Post’s Futurist Summit last month that generative AI is certain to “inflame” existing threats around the spread of disinformation online before the November elections. Tech firms which have promised to fight deepfakes might skirt those commitments given they are not actually obligated by law to do so, and face fewer regulations around AI development in general than they do in the European Union, Easterly added.

“I do think efforts to ensure that anybody can tell whether a video is generated with AI capabilities, whether it’s a deep fake, that is very important,” Easterly told attendees. “And so the problem is, however, there is no real teeth to these voluntary agreements.”

Keep reading here.—TM

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