Black Hat 2024 – Las Vegas

In infrastructure design there used to be a philosophy of putting components in silos (segmenting them). This was not really done for security, but more to limit impacts across an organization or environment. The use of different subnets, ACLs, routers, and firewalls was just part of how you built things. This philosophy seems to have died out as environments became more physically disbursed and technologically complex. With the advent of OT and IoT devices being able to access everything without the need to physically visit a site or needing to connect to a different system which then connected to another control plane was just not something that modern businesses would tolerate. Networks got flatter and, sadly, in some cases restrictions and controls for accessing sensitive devices disappeared. Now far too many organizations (especially Hospitals and Infrastructure) need that segmentation but cannot afford the time needed to rebuild their entire networks with this in mind.

Black Hat 2024, Las Vegas, NV

(Scene Black and White view of a frazzled IT/cybersecurity engineer looking at a box on a cluttered desk. Campy after school special music is playing)
Narrator – So you finally bought an Enterprise Class Virtual Private Network appliance?

Frazzled Engineer Looks up and nods slowly

Narrator – Great! Do you have your ACLs for network segmentation, secure access to your IAM systems, internal account lock down policies, geo-fencing plan, device recognition design, certificate governance, Multi-factor….. voice trails off

Frazzled Engineer slowly starts to bang his head on the table.

Black Hat 2024, Las Vegas, NV

There is an old, sarcastic, adage which says, why do something right now that you can spend hours automating. This is usually applied to development, IT, and cybersecurity tasks which are repetitive and dull. However, what if it didn’t take hours to automate those tasks, what if you could quickly and efficiently build automation workflows for the dull drudge work for your IT and cybersecurity teams enabling them to spend their time more effectively on bigger issues? Well, I talked with Eoin Hinchy, CEO and co-founder of Tines about this very topic.

DEF CON 32 Las Vegas, NV.

To most people a Web Browser is just an application that show them the sites they visit either via a typed in URL or a link clicked from somewhere. What they often fail to realize is that behind that display is quite a bit of code execution and rendering to product the visuals which we consume. Threat Actors and other malicious individuals have known about this for years and take advantage of the automated code and script execution during the rendering phase of a website for different types of attacks. The cybersecurity industry is also very aware of this and has developed many (man) tools and techniques to limit potential attacks via the browser.