4 min
Komand
A Guide to Defending Pokemon Go Gyms: Lessons from Cybersecurity
You’ve probably heard of this Pokemon Go thing. We recently featured the game in
our latest newsletter, and have since been running around like PokeManiacs
trying to catch ‘em all. While discussing our Komand group strategy (Yes, we’re
playing as a team 😅), we couldn’t help but notice parallels between Pokemon Go
and cybersecurity. In particular, we see strong correlations between gym defense
and cyberdefense.
For those that aren’t privvy, the goal of Pokemon Go is to collect and train as
many
9 min
Komand
Local Cybersecurity Meetups Near You
Here at Komand, we understand the importance of being part of a community
[https://komunity.komand.com]. [https://komunity.komand.com/] Not everyone can
can afford the cost or time commitment necessary to attend large conferences.
But that shouldn’t stop you from staying current, connected and active with the
security community. Think local meetups: easy access, inexpensive, and in a
relaxing environment with familiar faces.
Recently, we featured US Cybersecurity Conferences
[/2016/06/22/us-cyb
5 min
Automation and Orchestration
AWS Series: Creating a Privoxy, Tor Instance
Synopsis:
If you want to increase your privacy or perform security research with Tor
[https://www.torproject.org/], Privoxy [http://www.privoxy.org/], etc. a virtual
server is an excellent choice. I’m using Amazon EC2 which provides a years worth
of a VM with limited resources for free. A few benefits are listed below
1. Low cost
2. Access from just about anywhere
3. Low resource allocation
4. Easy to spin up
Creating the Cloud Instance:
After logging into your Amazon cloud account select
6 min
Automation and Orchestration
AWS Series: OpenSWAN L2TP over IPSEC VPN Configuration
Synopsis:
We will look at how to configure an L2TP over IPSEC VPN using OpenSWAN
[https://www.openswan.org/] and how to connect to it using Mac OSX. This guide
is written for running the VPN software on a CentOS 7 x86_64 EC2 instance
(ami-6d1c2007) provided by Amazon Web Services. The VPN will be configured to
use local authentication and a pre-shared key. This is a great way to allow
access into your AWS VPC.
Procedure:
The procedure is broken into 3 parts:
* AWS – Create an EC2 instance
*
5 min
Automation and Orchestration
Bro Series: Creating a Bro Cluster
Synopsis:
This short article will demonstrate how to setup a minimal Bro cluster
[https://www.bro.org/sphinx/cluster/index.html] for testing. Because of its
minimal nature, this article will exclude discussion of load balancing traffic
across multiple bro workers (processes), security conscious permissions, and
other bro related tuning and features such as sending e-mail. Its purpose is to
get a Bro cluster up and running as quickly as possible so you can begin
familiarizing yourself with cluste
6 min
Komand
Defender Spotlight: Ryan Huber of Slack
Welcome to Defender Spotlight! In this weekly blog series, we interview
cybersecurity defenders of all varieties about their experience working in
security operations. We’ll inquire about their favorite tools, and ask advice on
security topics, trends, and other know-how.
Today, we're talking with Ryan Huber. Currently at Slack, Ryan has previously
held positions at companies such as Orbitz and Risk I/O, doing security,
engineering, or a combination of both. He enjoys computers, and can often b
11 min
Automation and Orchestration
GDB for Fun (and Profit!)
Who Should Read This?
Have you ever wondered why your code doesn’t work? Do you ever find yourself
puzzled by the way someone else’s program works? Are you tired of spending night
after tearful night poring over the same lines of code again and again,
struggling to maintain your sanity as it slips away? If this sounds like you or
someone you know, please seek help: use a debugger.
What Is a Debugger?
For those of you that have never used a debugger:
1. I’m so sorry
2. Please read on
A debug
4 min
Komand
How to Create a Culture of Security Ownership Across Your Organization
Company culture is a phrase that means different things to many people. From the
company mission statement to the performance of a team, culture is often an
amalgamation of leadership values and individual employee contributions.
Security, and its many variants (cybersecurity, infosec, et. al), isn’t always a
word associated with “culture”. But in today’s digital landscape, it absolutely
should be.
Building a successful company culture often comes down to three elements:
people, processes, and
3 min
Komand
SOC Series: How to Structure and Build a Security Operations Center
Building an effective security operations center (SOC)
[https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-operations-center/] requires
organizing internal resources in a way that improves communication and increases
efficiencies. Adding to a former post,When to Set Up a Security Operations
Center
[https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2016/06/01/to-soc-or-not-to-soc-when-to-set-up-a-security-operations-center/]
, we're now offering a framework for organizing the three key functions of a
SOC: people, proce
14 min
Automation and Orchestration
Working with Bro Logs: Queries By Example
Synopsis:
Bro [http://bro.org/], a powerful network security monitor, which by default
churns out ASCII logs in a easily parseable whitespace separated (column) format
from network traffic, live or PCAP. Because this logs are in the aforementioned
format it makes them very hackable with the standard unix toolset. If you’re an
experienced unix user with ample networking knowledge you probably have all the
know-how to immediately pull useful data from Bro logs. If you’re not familiar
with the stan
3 min
Komand
SOC Series: When to Setup a Security Operations Center
To build a successful security function, you need to coordinate across people,
processes, and technology. And the stakes have never been higher than they are
today when it comes to information security, which is why many businesses are
looking for ways to centralize security operations by way of a security
operations center (SOC)
[https://www.rapid7.com/fundamentals/security-operations-center/]
Check out our Ebook, Presenting Upward: How to Showcase SecOps Metrics that
Matter [https://www.rapid
15 min
Automation and Orchestration
Nagios Series: Deployment Automation Tips and Tricks
Synopsis:
In this article I will be sharing some ideas that I’ve used from my experiences
that will help streamline and take a lot of the work out of managing a Nagios
deployment. I will go into multiple ways to manage your deployment. As you read
on I will introduce a more complete solution. We will begin with git and cron,
extend that to use subtrees, and then move along to an enterprise deployment
with Puppet and ERB along with the aforementioned tools.
Git:
My philosophy is that just about
6 min
Komand
Building SVG Maps with React
Here at Komand, we needed a way to easily navigate around our workflows. They
have the potential to get complex quickly, as security workflows involve many
intricate steps.
To accomplish this task, we took an SVG approach to render our workflow
dynamically (without dealing with div positioning issues). This gave us the
power of traditional graphics to do a variety of manipulations on sub
components.
In this walkthrough, we will useInteractive SVG Components
[http://www.petercollingridge.co.u
4 min
Automation and Orchestration
Nagios Series: DNS Resiliency
Synopsis:
Host operating system resolver libraries are not very good at dealing with an
unreachable nameserver. Even if you specify multiple nameservers in resolv.conf
and one of them goes down you will experience a period where connections will
not be made because resolution is not known. There are a number of resolver
tuning options but even reducing the timeout to 1 second there will result in a
delay. This affects nearly all unix-like operating systems including GNU/Linux.
In this article w
4 min
Komand
The SOC of the Future: Predictions from the Front Line
There is no perfect security operations center, and I say that having worked at
one in the past [/2016/05/03/6-lessons-i-learned-from-working-in-a-soc/] and
collaborated with many others since then. That said, as an industry, we are
always evolving and improving.
Recently, I shared 6 lessons learned while working in a SOC
[/2016/05/03/6-lessons-i-learned-from-working-in-a-soc/], and today I want to
talk about where we at Komand believe the SOC is heading in the future and why.
Here are seven pr