“A common African Proverb we love to reference when we’re explaining infosec to our clients goes something like this; If you and your mate are being chased by a lion, you don’t have to outrun the lion, you just have to outrun your mate.” – Bradley Geldenhuys
The internet is not a safe place. The rate at which companies are being breached and leveraged today is frightening. FBI Director, Robert Mueller, has pointed out that there are only two types of companies out there, those that have been hacked and those that will be.
Your personal information is not safe online. Data breaches happen on an almost daily basis, exposing our email addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, ID numbers and other highly sensitive data.
We have learnt that the best defense is a good offense. With this in mind, we wanted to give you some insight on how you can increase your security and be more alert, aware and in the know when it comes to infosec.
We had such an overwhelming response to our first code:RED – InfoSec Briefing tour last year that we felt it was only right to host our second tour. Our team has been preparing for the tour for months prior to the event and really pushed the boundaries.
Our main aim behind code:RED is simple; raise awareness and help businesses to secure themselves. Our event consisted of session by some of the best infosec minds in South Africa, demo’s from our team, delicious food and some swag for our attendees to take home.
We were extremely privileged to have Chelin Sampson join us on the tour. Chelin is a huge name in the South African infosec community and is creating awareness on the importance of being apart and active in the community. Chelin discussed in detail how having a local and international community is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. Chelin explained how his community is always finding new threats and exploits and educating each other. Having Chelin with us proved invaluable and we are hoping he would join us again next year.
Our Technical Account Manager, Scott ‘Scotland’ McCann, showed us how to set up Office 365 Security. The features that come with Office 365 out-of-the-box (OOTB) are mindblowing and enable certain features such as password complexity, DLP, impossible travel and many more can improve your security instantly. One of the most fascinating things Scott showed us was that these features are not going to take you months to role out, it will take a few minutes. Scott also demo’ed Office 365 Secure Score and showed us the importance of getting your score up.
Our very own Red Team, Kyle and Farai, were on fire showing us in detail the danger of initial access. Initial access is the foothold attackers use to get access to and leverage your network. Without initial access, attacks can do very little damage. Kyle showed us how SQL Injection and BetterCap Network Sniffing are real and present dangers out there. Farai used Phishing with SET (Social Engineering Toolkit) and Excel Payload delivery to show us how initial access can be gained.
Coming up next was Bradley Geldenhuys, our co-founder and CEO, showing how lateral movement is achieved once initial access is gained. Brad took us through how you can leverage a C2 (Command & Conquer) server and start laterally moving through a network. He showed us how to jump move through networks and start pwning each computer.[
At the end of the day, we wanted to educate the public on the dangers on the internet and infosec. Ramsonware, payloads, misconfigurations are some of the topics we covered this year and we hope it has helped you gain a little insight into the mind of a hacker or malicious user. We are hoping to make our code:RED tour bigger and better next year. You can find a link below for all the presentations, videos, links and some goodies from this years event.