16 January 2015
~1 min
By glenn
Hello world!
We’ve been busy squireling away on a much requested project – a commercial Snoopy offering. We’ve called it ShadowLightly, and we’d like to invite you to join the beta explorer program. We’re going to offer ten 3-month trials to the site (you’d need to buy sensors / build your own), and in return we’d ask that you help us debug any issues. To apply, please email explorer@shadowlightly.com – introduce yourself, and tell us a little about why you’d like to join the program.
We recently gave a talk at the ITWeb Security Summit entitled “Offense Oriented Defence”. The talk was targeted at defenders and auditors, rather then hackers (the con is oriented that way), although it’s odd that I feel the need to apologise for that ;)
The talks primary point, was that by understanding how attackers attack, more innovative defences can be imagined. The corollary was that common defences, in the form of “best practise” introduce commonality that is more easily exploited, or at least degrade over time as attackers adapt. Finally, many of these “security basics” are honestly hard, and we can’t place the reliance on them we’d hoped. But our approach doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge the problem, and much like an AA meeting, it’s time we recognise the problem.
01 April 2010
~3 min
By jeremy
Following on from Evert’s posting about the new BroadView v4, I’d like to showcase a specific aspect of BV that we’ve found useful, namely Attributes. These are small pieces of data collected and maintained for each host scanned by BV including somewhat mundane bits of info like IP address and OS but, they also include some really tasty morsels about remote hosts that are scanned. Attributes are collected on a per-scan-per-host basis, and are populated by each test that runs during the scan. Since attribute population is dependent on the selected tests, the set of Attributes available to you would vary according to you configuration.
30 March 2010
~2 min
By evert
Ever since Ron Gula’s RiskyBusiness talk #142 about their Nessus philosophy, I decided to come out of the closet and share with our readers the work we do in the vulnerability management field. [Ed: If you don’t listen to Risky Business then, as we say in South Africa, eish.] Ron explained that with Nessus they aim to give users a tool that can be used for monitoring and auditing – not enforcing. The “sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes” mantra comes to mind. For 9 years now we have been building two vulnerability management solutions named HackRack (for hosted, external scanning) and BroadView (for internal scanning) and it was especially HackRack that has claimed the limelight. The runt of the litter has always been BroadView, but alas (luckily?), no more.