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J2SECOPS WEEKLY NEWS: This week in the J2 CSC, we bring you everything from IP Theft to the Cloud that rains data…

Intellectual Property Stolen! Again…

Too often I hear of intellectual property being stolen by competitors. A far less common practice is the theft of IP from an IT Security vendor – becoming more and more common...

I found this developing story of interest and thought you might enjoy it. CyberByte was using Malwarebytes’ IP to augment its AV engine. So Malwarebytes laid a trap to prove its theory.

Key take-away: how “honey” -tokens, -words and -pots can be used to catch someone with their hand in the proverbial cookie jar.

CyberByte steals Malwarebytes’ intellectual property | Malwarebytes


Why I (still) don’t trust Self-Driving Cars

March 18th, a dark day for Humanity and AI; when an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a woman pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.
The accident took place while the car was in autonomous (self-driving) mode, marking this the first death caused by a self-driving vehicle in the world.

Uber Self-Driving Car Strikes and Kills Arizona Woman | Bleeping Computer


(In)security (Mis)conceptions

I’ve been in the industry for a while now, and although sloppy security reporting is far too common, with common sense far too uncommon these days, nothing riles me more than idiots with opinions.

I discovered this little gem by one of my favourite bloggers, Javvad Malik on CSO Online.

Information Security Misconceptions | CSO Online


♪ I Can See Clearly now that the Rain is Gone ♫ – with my data…

The Cloud, it brings convenience, rain and plenty of storms; in this case it was used to store unprotected database files containing sensitive customer data online in the form of a vulnerable Amazon S3 bucket, which in 2018 is astonishing, and it is completely inconceivable that a company would store passwords in plain text instead of encrypting them…

Open AWS S3 bucket managed by Walmart jewellery partner exposes info on 1.3M customers | SC Magazine


Protecting Diddums aka DNS

When DNS is brought up in polite conversation, or in the hushed catacombs of the bowels of the IT dungeons, words like: “address protocol”, “packet priority”, “DNSSEC” and “Net Neutrality” are used in hushed tones. So, why do we care about “Diddums” - DNS?
DNS basically runs the Internet. Imagine, your mobile address book only with numbers in it without any names, strings of numbers are just simply not how humans identify information. They help, but in reality, words linked to numbers are what separate us from our impending “AI” masters.


Here is the definitive DNS Checklist to assist in slowing the AI advance

  • Set up and maintain your own internal DNS.
  • Block external DNS requests on port 53 (or any port).
  • Created exceptions to DNS requests only to port 53, with RNDC keys. Revolving them often.
  • Set low TTL value; like 30 minutes. A poisoned cache will only impact you for the duration of time you have selected.
  • Protect the “Hosts File” wherever you use it and make sure its disabled if not used.
  • SMTP traffic must be protected, don’t ever use defaults. Create and properly maintain your PTR zones, especially the local zones.
  • Use STUB zones for commonly accessed domains.
  • Use DNS forwarders ONLY to verified DNS servers. Learn how to use “dig” and use it often.
  • Block DHCP on the firewall, obviously other than yours - Prevent "rogue" proxies with DHCP and DNS on your network.
  • Skill yourself up on DNS, this is still one of the weakest links I a vast IT ecosystem and still one of the least understood.
  • Protect your DNS from DDOS attacks by subscribing to an online service that also comes with built-in load-balancing, automatic failover, rate-limiting, and filtering.
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