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The Man'ority Show - Law Enforcement

The Strange History of Port 0 (by Jim MacLeod)

The Strange History of Port 0

While reading the latest report from Arbor Network on DDoS activity across the Internet in Q2 2013, a particular phrase jumped out at me:

“ TCP fragmentation attacks (port 0) are up from about 10% last year to nearly 25% this year. ”

There are three reasons I don’t understand that statement. First, TCP is a streaming protocol, not a datagram protocol, so there’s no concept of “fragmentation” within TCP. Second, googling “TCP fragmentation” results in an IDS evasion technique using overlapping SEQ numbers in retransmissions to replace the contents of the receive buffer on the recipient, but not the IDS (see here for an awesome example including Wireshark screenshots), but that has nothing to do with port 0. Third, and the one I will explore here, port 0 isn’t defined as a valid port.

Know thy enemy!

Despite the fact that port 0 isn’t a valid port for traffic, network management tools will regularly report that you’ve got traffic headed there.  However, that’s not what the packets contain. 

Never Give Up While Freedom Is On The Line (by Casey Mullis)

I recently had the pleasure of assisting another Investigator from Carroll County with forensics on one of the new Macbook Pro 13 inch with a 128 GB SSD. The first thing you notice is there is no CD/DVD drive. There is also no Firewire port only a thunderbolt port and USB 3.0.

So now what? I first tried booting with Blackbag's  MacQuasition but it would not boot. I called Blackbag tech support and found out that the version I had did not support the new model of Macbook that we were working on. The hard drive in the Macbook was a SSD nonstandard drive. See image(s) below.

 

So what do you do? Do you give up on getting the forensic image of the hard drive or do you push forward and keep digging to find a solution?

Security Threats Continued: Why They Are Targeting Your Business? (by Jim MacLeod)

Over the last few posts, I’ve dissected the major security threats that are happening on your network today. The first piece dissected the “Who,” mainly how do you classify these perpetrators based on a set characteristics that they share. The next post took a look at the “How” hackers enter your network and what you can do to help safeguard it. For the final piece of this series we will look at the “Why.”

Where is your Attack Level?

While there are lots of sociological theories and studies on why people vandalize and steal, this post will focus the “Why” on the current most common motives that drive hackers to penetrate your network.

1. 1.    “Lulz”
2. 2.    Profit
3. 3.    Ideology

Who owns network history? (by Spencer Greene)

Network History a Key to network success!

The task of knowing exactly what has happened on a network isn’t always easy, but perhaps even more perplexing to IT organizations is determining who is actually responsible for culling this crucial information. Particularly, should network recording and flow collector tools be operated by the security team or by the networking operations team? 

The cop-out here would be to say, “It depends on the organization,” and then move on to the next question.  After all, both network and security groups need to use network history data, and both groups generally have the right skills to operate network recording equipment. Additionally, you could find examples of successful deployments from both directions. So to say there is a concrete answer that fits each and every situation would be presumptuous, however there are pretty compelling arguments that suggest the network operations side should likely own the task. Let’s take a closer look.

In point of fact, there is a clear trend here: Network history is becoming a core network service, and as such, the best practice in most organizations is for it to be owned by the network operations group.  Forward-looking network operations teams are keeping network history for their own purposes – to respond to difficult issues and understand network traffic patterns – and they are providing appropriate access to security teams and cooperating with them to deal with security incidents.  From the security side, we see more and more teams expecting and demanding network history to be provided by the network itself and deploying their own network history equipment only when the network operations team absolutely can’t be convinced.

 Why is this so?  Here are a few of the reasons we have encountered:

Six Reasons to Enforce Your Organization’s Web Security (by Casper Manes)

You know the Internet can be a dangerous place, full of threats to your systems and time sinks that users can spend hours in without even realizing it, but you may still be on the fence when it comes to whether or not you should do anything about it. Protecting your company and your users from the threats of unrestricted Internet access is a really easy thing to do, so if you are still trying to decide on this, here are six reasons why you should enforce your organization’s web security.

Technical issues

Technical issues usually come down to defending against malware. Whether the threats come from malware infected downloads, compromised websites serving infected media files, or phishing sites designed to steal your users’ credentials, you need to boost your organization’s web security.

Operation New Son (OpNewSon) – Are you ready??? This could happen to you! (by- Tim O'Neill)

Time to Prepare - Are you ready???

The FBI and international Law Enforcement are warning major companies World Wide of an impending DDOS attack on May 25^th.

Operation New Son  - Tomorrow May 25th, 2012 – Download Operation New Son FBI announcement 

Here is one of the attackers posts of their intention and info - http://pastebin.com/wq6KdgDg

This site also give hints of more info on Twitter, who may block the announcment tweet names –

@AnonymousWiki  - @AnonymouSpoon  - @MehIzDanneh  - @TibitXimer  - @Anonymau

They are asking for your help in attacking their targets.

I propose that it is NOT a good idea to neither support nor cause an attack, as you will be prosecuted!

Keeping Your Business Safe From Network Security Threats (by Lisa-Ann Short)

In a world where more and more business is being done exclusively on the web, network security has never been more relevant or more important. The same goes for all industries – from those that help in designing changing rooms, to tech and web companies. If you run a business, or you're responsible for the network of one, there are a great many threats that you could potentially be faced with. Some you may already know about and have accounted for, others may be new to you. So with that in mind, let's take a look at a few of the most common network security threats that a small business may come across - and how you can best avoid them.

Spam emails and other malicious email

Let's start with the most common form of network security breach: spam emails and other malicious forms of mail. Because a business often has a great many email addresses active at any one time, there is plenty of opportunity for unscrupulous individuals to compromise network security. Many times all it takes to create a breach is for a member of staff to click on a link that they thought was genuine. This can lead to malware being downloaded to the individual's workstation, giving whoever is operating that malware access to your entire network. To avoid email issues, it's recommended to always have a spam filter active on your network. In fact, it's best to have one that's too sensitive than one that misses certain threats.