Speaker 1: You know, when you look at cybersecurity, it really feels
Speaker 1: less like some orderly game like chess and more like this,
Speaker 1: I don't know, this endless game of hide and seek,
Speaker 1: but with really high stakes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a constant push and pull, isn't it a
Speaker 2: real cat and mouse situation between the attackers trying to
Speaker 2: breach systems and the defenders, you know, scrambling to keep.
Speaker 1: Them out exactly, And it goes way beyond just the tech,
Speaker 1: the firewalls and stuff. It's so much about strategy, deception
Speaker 1: and just trying to adapt faster than the other side.
Speaker 2: It really is a continuous loop, like attackers find a
Speaker 2: new way in, defenders build a patch or a detection
Speaker 2: for it. Then the attackers have to tweet their method,
Speaker 2: maybe bypass the new defense, and the whole cycle just
Speaker 2: speeds up.
Speaker 1: And really getting inside that dynamic understanding how it works.
Speaker 1: That's what we want to do in this deep dive.
Speaker 1: We're pulling insights directly from the book Adversarial Tradecraft and
Speaker 1: Cybersecurity Offense Versus Defense, and well specifically focusing on the
Speaker 1: parts about practical techniques and the sort of the ideas
Speaker 1: driving this conflict.
Speaker 2: Right The author Dan Boris. He brings this really interesting
Speaker 2: mix of experience. He's worked in the real world, you know,
Speaker 2: places like uber Mandy and CrowdStrike, but he also has
Speaker 2: deep experience in those big collegiate cyber competitions like CCDC
Speaker 2: and CPTC, so he's seen it all from multiple angles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that perspective shows the book seems aimed at practitioners,
Speaker 1: people actually doing the work, maybe folks starting out who
Speaker 1: might need to google a few things, up to say
Speaker 1: intermediate level people. It shows how lessons from those competitions
Speaker 1: really do apply to real world enterprise security absolutely.
Speaker 2: So our mission here really is to give you a shortcut.
Speaker 2: We want to distill the key takeaways, the most important
Speaker 2: bits from this source material to give you a clearer
Speaker 2: picture of the strategies, the tools, the techniques attackers use.
Speaker 1: And then how defenders try to counter that, and how
Speaker 1: each side is constantly reacting to the other.
Speaker 2: Exactly understanding that interaction is key.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. The source starts by laying out
Speaker 1: some foundational building blocks for information security. Talks about the
Speaker 1: CION attributes.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, CIAN that's confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, authorization, and
Speaker 2: non repudiation. Right, think of these as the sort of
Speaker 2: fundamental qualities of data and systems. They're what the attackers
Speaker 2: are trying to undermine and what the defenders are desperately
Speaker 2: trying to protect.
Speaker 1: And the Source really highlights non repudiation because of the
Speaker 1: defender's eyes and ears. What does that mean? Practically speaking?
Speaker 2: It basically means logging, good logging, creating solid, ideally unchangeable
Speaker 2: records of who did what, when they did it, where
Speaker 2: they did it from. If you don't capture that information,
Speaker 2: especially stuff that only happens in memory and disappears, well
Speaker 2: it's just gone pretty much. It's the main way defenders
Speaker 2: can piece together what happened after an incident or spot
Speaker 2: something shady going on.
Speaker 1: So if an attacker can mess with those logs, can
Speaker 1: erase their tracks effectively like blinding the defenders.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, right. Beyond those basic attributes, the Source digs
Speaker 2: into several key principles of this computer conflict ideas that
Speaker 2: seem to guide the strategies for both sides. What are
Speaker 2: some of the big ones.
Speaker 1: Well, the principle of deception seems huge.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, It's all about making abnormal things look totally normal.
Speaker 2: For an attacker, this is critical. If they can blend in,
Speaker 2: they can operate for much longer without getting caught.
Speaker 1: Like hiding in plain sight. And you can't really talk
Speaker 1: about this stuff without bringing in the human factor, right,
Speaker 1: the principle of humanity.
Speaker 2: Definitely, there's always a person involved somewhere targeting people, you know,
Speaker 2: social engineering, phishing emails that can often bypass even the
Speaker 2: best technical defenses. The source mentions that old classic getting
Speaker 2: a password off an employee at a bar faily works
Speaker 2: huh surprisingly often. Yeah. Then there's the principle of physical access.
Speaker 2: This one's pretty fundamental.
Speaker 1: Meaning if you can actually touch the machine, or if.
Speaker 2: You own the management interface for cloud stuff like AWS
Speaker 2: or the hypervisor like ESXi. If you have that level
Speaker 2: of a control, you generally win. You can dump the memory,
Speaker 2: reinstall the OS, just walk away with the hardware. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it usually trump's purely digital.
Speaker 1: Remote access makes sense total control versus like partial access
Speaker 1: through the network. Planning also seems key, oh for sure.
Speaker 2: The principle of planning. The book quotes sense, you know,
Speaker 2: plan for what is difficult while it is easy. You've
Speaker 2: got to have a plan, write it down, even practice it.
Speaker 2: If you can identify the weak.
Speaker 1: Spots, and that applies to both guides.
Speaker 2: Absolutely offense planning their attack path, defense planning their detection
Speaker 2: and response strategy. It's crucial for everyone.
Speaker 1: And then there's timing, the principle of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, timing is critical in strategy. The source makes a
Speaker 2: good point about how the environment changes things. Short competitions
Speaker 2: like CCDC might allow for really noisy, aggressive tactics because time.
Speaker 1: Is limited, but in the real world.
Speaker 2: In the real world, attackers often need to be much
Speaker 2: more patient, slow, and low, you know, to maintain access
Speaker 2: long term without tripping alarms. Defenders, on the other hand,
Speaker 2: use time to build up those complex layered defenses we
Speaker 2: talked about gotcha.
Speaker 1: And finally, innovation non negotiable.
Speaker 2: The source quotes the MMA fighter Georgia Saint Pierre basically
Speaker 2: saying standing still is asking for failure. Both sides have
Speaker 2: to constantly adapt, create new techniques, find ways around existing.
Speaker 1: Ones, because as soon as your trick is known.
Speaker 2: It's effectiveness drops sometimes to zero. So if your tool
Speaker 2: gets detected, you need a plan B, maybe a Plan C.
Speaker 2: You have to pivot fast. That constant need to innovate
Speaker 2: really drives this whole adversarial game.
Speaker 1: Okay, that gives us a really solid strategic foundation. Now
Speaker 1: let's get into the specifics. What does the offensive playbook
Speaker 1: actually look like? How do attackers get in, and maybe
Speaker 1: more importantly, how do they stay hidden? The source mentioned
Speaker 1: a big shift away from like traditional disc forensics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a really key point. For a long time
Speaker 2: to defenders could often find attacker tools and evidence by
Speaker 2: analyzing the hard drive after the fact. You know, dead
Speaker 2: disc forensics. Right, So attackers adapted. They started moving their
Speaker 2: operations beyond the disc. They operate live in memory in RAM,
Speaker 2: and the big difference there is volatility. When the malicious
Speaker 2: process stops or the computer reboots, poof the evidence in
Speaker 2: RAM is gone. This makes life much much harder for
Speaker 2: defenders relying only on those older disc based methods.
Speaker 1: Wow, operating purely a memory that sounds like a defender's nightmare.
Speaker 1: What kind of techniques do they use for that?
Speaker 2: Well, process injection is a really common one. The basic
Speaker 2: idea is to run your malicious code, often something called
Speaker 2: shell code, which is just low level machine instructions inside
Speaker 2: the memory space of a completely legitimate, trusted process that's
Speaker 2: already running.
Speaker 1: So instead of running like Evil dot ex. They sneak
Speaker 1: their code into something that looks normal. Maybe explore dot
Speaker 1: ex on Windbows exactly.
Speaker 2: That. The whole point is deception. It makes the malicious
Speaker 2: activity look like it's part of a normal, trusted program,
Speaker 2: so it's way harder for security tools to flag it.
Speaker 2: S suspicious. Very common on Windows, and there are different
Speaker 2: ways to do it, like DLL.
Speaker 1: Injection DL injection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, injecting a malicious dynamic link library a DLL file
Speaker 2: into another process is memory space, so that process loads
Speaker 2: and runs the malicious code.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they're hiding where their code is running, but
Speaker 1: they still need to communicate back home right to their
Speaker 1: command and control server, their C two. How do they
Speaker 1: hide that?
Speaker 2: Ah? Right, that's where covert C two comes in command
Speaker 2: and control. They need to maintain that connection for instructions
Speaker 2: and sending data back, but without their network traffic setting
Speaker 2: off alarms. So they try to make it blend in.
Speaker 1: Oh, by using protocols you'd expect to see anyway.
Speaker 2: Precisely tunneling their C two data over common stuff like ICMP,
Speaker 2: which is normally used for ping requests or DNS, the
Speaker 2: Domain Name lookup system, the source mentions tools like ikempdoor,
Speaker 2: or how the popular C two framework Sliver can use
Speaker 2: DNS for its C two channel.
Speaker 1: There was that specific example, and the source about Sliver
Speaker 1: and innovation wasn't there.
Speaker 2: Yes, good point. It mentions that Sliver's default setting for
Speaker 2: checking in over DNS might be, say, every second, which
Speaker 2: is pretty frequent. Potentially noisy on a network.
Speaker 1: Could get spotted. Good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But because Sliver is often open source, an attacker
Speaker 2: can just go into the code and change that interval,
Speaker 2: maybe make it check in only every sixty seconds or
Speaker 2: even longer. Slower, but stealthier, much stealthier. It's a perfect
Speaker 2: example of that principle of innovation in action, taking an
Speaker 2: existing tool, tweaking it slightly based on defensive knowledge, and
Speaker 2: making it way harder to detect.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. Such a small change, big impact. Okay, so
Speaker 1: they're in their communicating stealthily.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What about covering their tracks after they've done something on
Speaker 1: a system?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is crucial if they want to stick around.
Speaker 2: Remember non repudiation, the logs being the defender's eyes. Will
Speaker 2: attackers know that? So clearing logs is a fundamental offensive technique.
Speaker 1: How do they do that? Just delete the files?
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's that crude, but smart attackers use more sophisticated methods,
Speaker 2: especially on Windows. Tools like event cleaner might use Windows
Speaker 2: API functions to manipulate the event log files directly, sometimes
Speaker 2: bypassing the usual ways files are locked, making it harder
Speaker 2: to spot the tampering. The source even mentions older techniques
Speaker 2: that could modify specific records or fix id numbers to
Speaker 2: make it look.
Speaker 1: Seamless, wow actually rewriting the history inside the logs, but
Speaker 1: the source said defenders can sometimes still spot this often.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you look closely, you might see gaps in
Speaker 2: record numbers, or the file size or modification times might
Speaker 2: look weird. On Linux, maybe they just pipe logs through
Speaker 2: e repdac V to filter out their activity, but that
Speaker 2: can leave traces.
Speaker 1: Too, So a more subtle.
Speaker 2: Way, the source suggests backdooring the service that creates the
Speaker 2: logs in the first place, like using a modified Apache
Speaker 2: web server module. A patchy to backdoor mod is mentioned
Speaker 2: that just doesn't write log entries for the attackers' specific actions.
Speaker 1: Ah, so the incriminating log entries never even created. Much
Speaker 1: harder to find what.
Speaker 2: Isn't there exactly, and that leads into the last big
Speaker 2: hiding technique mentioned root kits.
Speaker 1: Root kits that sounds serious It can be.
Speaker 2: Broadly speaking, root kits are techniques designed to actively change
Speaker 2: how the operating system or defensive tools perceive the system state.
Speaker 2: Their goal is to hide the attacker's presence, their files,
Speaker 2: their running processes, network connections, you name it.
Speaker 1: So they're not just hiding passively. They're actively manipulating what
Speaker 1: the system reports, like lying to tools like task manager
Speaker 1: or else.
Speaker 2: That's the core idea. Whether it's deep down in the
Speaker 2: kernel or using user level tricks, the goal is deception,
Speaker 2: make the malicious stuff invisible to standard system checks. Another
Speaker 2: direct hit on that principle of deception.
Speaker 1: Understanding all these offensive moves must be critical for the defenders.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, You can't build effective defenses if you don't
Speaker 2: understand how the attackers think and what techniques they're likely
Speaker 2: to use, which brings.
Speaker 1: Us perfectly to the defensive side of things. The source
Speaker 1: really hammers home that difficulty defenders face. They have to
Speaker 1: be right essentially one hundred percent of the time stop
Speaker 1: every attack, but the offense they just need one success
Speaker 1: one way in.
Speaker 2: It's a fundamental asymmetry, a real challenge and That's why
Speaker 2: the source emphasizes that preparation is paramount for defenders. You
Speaker 2: have to patiently, methodically build your defenses. The analogy used
Speaker 2: is like a spider building a web, but maybe a
Speaker 2: web with many, many.
Speaker 1: Layers, so that concept of defense in depth precisely.
Speaker 2: The goal isn't always to prevent that initial breach, because
Speaker 2: sometimes you just can't. It's about having multiple layers of
Speaker 2: detection and control so you can spot the attacker as
Speaker 2: they try to move deeper into the network or achieve
Speaker 2: their objectives.
Speaker 1: And preparing for the inevitable.
Speaker 2: Yes, preparing your response processes too, because realistically you will
Speaker 2: get compromised at some point. Knowing what to do when
Speaker 2: that happens is just as vital as trying to prevent it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so how do they build this defensive web and
Speaker 1: how do they spot the attacker moving around inside? It
Speaker 1: sounds like it all comes down to data data.
Speaker 2: It really does. Defenders are hugely reliant on monitoring and logging,
Speaker 2: collecting as much relevant data as possible from everywhere they.
Speaker 1: Can, starting on the individual computers, the endpoints.
Speaker 2: YEP host based data. This is where modern EDR endpoint
Speaker 2: detection and response platforms are so important. Tools like oscary,
Speaker 2: gr Rapid Response, Wazoo, velociraptor. There are great open source
Speaker 2: options plus commercial ones.
Speaker 1: What did These eder tools give.
Speaker 2: You incredible visibility, detailed telemetry about processes like what programs started, what,
Speaker 2: what files did it touch? What network connections did it make?
Speaker 2: They also look at behavior spotting anomalies, and many offer
Speaker 2: live response capabilities, letting defenders investigate or contain a machine remotely.
Speaker 1: So it's not just about looking for known bad files,
Speaker 1: it's watching what things do exactly.
Speaker 2: Watching behavior is key and all this data is also
Speaker 2: crucial for threat hunting, where analysts proactively search through the
Speaker 2: data using hypotheses about potential threats. Looking for subtle signs
Speaker 2: of compromise that might not have triggered an automated alert.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, but you also need eyes on the traffic
Speaker 1: between machines right absolutely.
Speaker 2: Network based data is the other critical piece. You get
Speaker 2: this by setting up network taps or using inline devices
Speaker 2: like firewalls or intrusion prevention systems IPS. These let you
Speaker 2: see the traffic flowing across the network.
Speaker 1: And the sorts had that analogy, Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: good one.
Speaker 2: Host data is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Speaker 2: Sometimes network data is more like watching the traffic on
Speaker 2: a highway. You can spot unusual patterns like unexpected connections
Speaker 2: between servers, data moving where it shouldn't, or those covert
Speaker 2: C two channels we talked about.
Speaker 1: Okay, and the tools mentioned here were things like snort
Speaker 1: cercata Zeke for analyzing protocols, and wire shark or t
Speaker 1: shark for really deep packet inspection. Controlling those network joke
Speaker 1: points seems vital.
Speaker 2: It really is, and you can't forget application logs either.
Speaker 1: Logs from specific programs.
Speaker 2: Right logs from your security tools themselves, email gateways, web
Speaker 2: application firewalls, wafs, but also so logs from your core
Speaker 2: business applications think e commerce platforms, internal APIs. These can
Speaker 2: show things like weird log in patterns, super fast browsing
Speaker 2: that looks like scraping, or other signs of abuse.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is a mountain of data coming from endpoints,
Speaker 1: the network applications. How on earth do defenders actually make
Speaker 1: sense of it all.
Speaker 2: That's where SIME and SORE platforms come in. SIME stands
Speaker 2: for Security Information and Event Management, SAR is security orchestration
Speaker 2: automation and response tools like Splunk or the open source
Speaker 2: ELK stack Elastic Search Logstash cabana, sometimes called HLK. They
Speaker 2: exist to pull all this diverse log data into one central.
Speaker 1: Place, so you can actually search across everything at once.
Speaker 2: Yes, and maybe even more importantly, you can correlate events
Speaker 2: across different data sources. A single weird login attempt from
Speaker 2: the firewall might not be alarming. But if you see
Speaker 2: that plus some strange process starting on the target machine
Speaker 2: in your EDER logs at the exact same time.
Speaker 1: Okay, now that looks suspicious exactly.
Speaker 2: That correlation is powerful. This is where defenders can figure alerts,
Speaker 2: often using complex logic. If you see event A and D,
Speaker 2: event boor event C, then trigger an alert.
Speaker 1: And the sore part adds automation like playbooks.
Speaker 2: Right, If a really high confidence alert fires, a saucer
Speaker 2: system can automatically run a predefined playbook. Maybe it quarantines
Speaker 2: the affected computer off the network, blocks the suspicious IP
Speaker 2: address at the firewall, or temporarily disables the user's account,
Speaker 2: all without needing immediate human intervention.
Speaker 1: Okay, So all this infrastructure, the data collection, the sign
Speaker 1: the alerts, it's all geared towards finding the threat. The
Speaker 1: source really emphasizes that idea, no normal find evil.
Speaker 2: It's a fundamental concept in defense. If you have a
Speaker 2: solid understanding of what normal, legitimate activity looks like on
Speaker 2: your network and your systems, what processes usually run, who
Speaker 2: usually logs in from where, what traffic patterns are typical,
Speaker 2: then the anomalies the evil will stand out much more clearly.
Speaker 1: It requires baselining, and once they do find a threat,
Speaker 1: The source talks about the importance of root cause analysis
Speaker 1: or RCA. Why is digging into the how so critical?
Speaker 2: Because just kicking the attacker out isn't enough if you
Speaker 2: don't figure out how they got in originally. Was it
Speaker 2: a phishing link, an unpatched server, stolen credentials, You haven't
Speaker 2: fixed the underlying vulnerability.
Speaker 1: And they'll just get back in the same way exactly.
Speaker 2: You have to close the door they used, otherwise you're
Speaker 2: just playing whack a mole. RCA is about learning from
Speaker 2: the incident to prevent it from happening.
Speaker 1: Again, and defenders use all this data and analysis to
Speaker 1: try and spot the attacker's attempts at deception, like the
Speaker 1: root kits and covert c two.
Speaker 2: We discussed absolutely. Detecting root kits might involve looking for
Speaker 2: weird inconsistencies like a process is running but doesn't show
Speaker 2: up in task manager, or you can CD into a
Speaker 2: directory that sells claims doesn't exist. For covert C two,
Speaker 2: they might use frequency analysis on DNS requests, looking for
Speaker 2: hosts making unusually regular lookups, or analyzed traffic patterns for
Speaker 2: other anomalies.
Speaker 1: I thought it was interesting that source also mentioned defenders
Speaker 1: using deception themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fighting fire with fire, right, Yeah, deploying deception technologies
Speaker 2: like honeypots. These are decoy systems deliberately made to look
Speaker 2: attractive to attackers, like bait exactly. They sit there looking vulnerable,
Speaker 2: and the moment an attacker touches them, alarms go off.
Speaker 2: Tools like teapotter artillery can set these up, or you
Speaker 2: can use honey tokens things like fake awskeys, fake database credentials,
Speaker 2: or even fake user accounts scattered around.
Speaker 1: And if anyone tries.
Speaker 2: To use them, bingo, you know someone's poking around where
Speaker 2: they shouldn't be. It turns the attacker's own methods against them.
Speaker 1: Clever, Okay, So an attacker is found, maybe the root
Speaker 1: cause is being investigated. What are the immediate actions defenders.
Speaker 2: Take response and containment. You need to stop the bleeding
Speaker 2: and get the attacker out. This can range from simple
Speaker 2: things like killing their processes kill nine toutch nine on
Speaker 2: Linux as the classic, or blocking their IP addresses using
Speaker 2: firewall rules like with iptables. More significant yeah like network
Speaker 2: quarantine taking the compromise machine completely off the main network.
Speaker 2: This stops the attacker from using it to jump to
Speaker 2: other systems lateral movement while the security team investigates and
Speaker 2: cleans it up.
Speaker 1: The source also mentioned ways to lock down files even
Speaker 1: if the attacker gets high privileges.
Speaker 2: Right using native OS features. On Linux, there's a command
Speaker 2: chat wise plus I. Setting the immutable flag on a
Speaker 2: file means nobody, not even the root user, can modify
Speaker 2: or delete it without first removing that flag. It's a
Speaker 2: great way to protect critical configuration files.
Speaker 1: Or logs, simple but effective, and limiting the blast radius
Speaker 1: if they do get in.
Speaker 2: Using techniques like crute. This basically creates a little jail
Speaker 2: for a process, restricting its view of the filesystem to
Speaker 2: just one specific directory. So if an attacker compromises, say
Speaker 2: a web server running inside a cruite jail, for Verlado.
Speaker 2: They can only see and affect files within Varderdoo. They
Speaker 2: can't easily access the rest of the system.
Speaker 1: Not perfect security, but slows them exactly.
Speaker 2: It limits the scope of the compromise. And of course
Speaker 2: a crucial step is always rotating any passwords or credentials
Speaker 2: that might have been exposed during the incident.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered a lot of the tactical back and forth,
Speaker 1: but the source also widens the lens a bit. Talks
Speaker 1: about this ongoing intelligence war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, both sides are constantly doing research and gathering intel.
Speaker 2: For attackers, it's offensive research before they even launch an attack.
Speaker 2: They're mapping the target's network, trying to understand user privileges,
Speaker 2: figuring out the org chart for potential social engineering targets.
Speaker 1: Why do they do that?
Speaker 2: Tools like Bloodhound are amazing for visualizing relationships in Windows
Speaker 2: active directory environments, finding attack paths. They might scrape internal
Speaker 2: company wikis if they get access, look for leaked passwords online,
Speaker 2: or use tools like Hydra to try and guest passwords
Speaker 2: by spraying common ones across many.
Speaker 1: Accounts, basically casing the joint before the break.
Speaker 2: In pretty much, and defenders are doing their own defensive
Speaker 2: research and threat hunting. This involves threat modeling basically trying
Speaker 2: to think like an attacker, where are weak spots, how
Speaker 2: would someone try to.
Speaker 1: Get in, anticipating moves right, and.
Speaker 2: Threat hunting, which we touched on proactively searching through all
Speaker 2: that log data for signs of threats based on the
Speaker 2: latest intelligence about attacker techniques or just based on security hypotheses.
Speaker 1: The source had that example of the University Virginia CCDC
Speaker 1: team building their own tool, blue Spawn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a perfect illustration. They were in these competitions,
Speaker 2: they saw common attack techniques and they used their research
Speaker 2: time to build a tool specifically to detect that stuff automatically.
Speaker 2: That's defensive innovation driven by understanding the offense, and.
Speaker 1: That innovation cycle just keeps spinning, right. The source mentioned
Speaker 1: that rocket Chat zero day from the CPTC competition.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that was wild. It showed how valuable research
Speaker 2: during downtime can be. Some students basically found a brand
Speaker 2: new vulnerability, a zero day in the rocket Chat software
Speaker 2: by digging into an API function and finding a flawed
Speaker 2: assumption the developers made and.
Speaker 1: They use did during the competition against.
Speaker 2: The competition's own infrastructure. Yeah, it was a powerful demo
Speaker 2: of deep research finding unexpected flaws. The source also brings
Speaker 2: up things like dependency hijacking or supply chain attacks like
Speaker 2: that work by Alex Persan exactly. He showed you could
Speaker 2: sometimes trick companies internal build systems into pulling malicious code
Speaker 2: from public package repositories like piper I or NPM, just
Speaker 2: by giving your malicious package a higher version number than
Speaker 2: the real internal one. Now defenders use tools like repodiff
Speaker 2: to try and spot suspicious changes in dependencies.
Speaker 1: It shows attackers are looking at every single step in
Speaker 1: the process, not just the final application. The source also
Speaker 1: touched on more advanced ways attackers hide where they're coming from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, going beyond just basic VPNs or tour we're talking
Speaker 2: about building complex anonymity networks, chaining multiple encrypted tunnels through
Speaker 2: different cloud providers for instance.
Speaker 1: Why has that helped them.
Speaker 2: Because no single provider sees the whole picture. The entry
Speaker 2: point doesn't know the final destination and the exit point
Speaker 2: doesn't know the original source. It makes tracing the traffic
Speaker 2: back incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1: And those specialized competition networks like CCDC's grid.
Speaker 2: That simulates millions of fake Internet addresses in a real
Speaker 2: attack that could be like using a massive botnet. It
Speaker 2: just overwhelms simple defenses like IP address blocking. It forces
Speaker 2: defenders to look beyond simple indicators like IPS and focus
Speaker 2: more on behaviors.
Speaker 1: And even hiding data within other data stiganography.
Speaker 2: YEP, hiding messages or code inside image files, maybe by
Speaker 2: slightly altering the color values of pixels a significant bit
Speaker 2: or LSB stignography, or even hiding commands and seemingly innocent
Speaker 2: text files using whitespace or special control characters. The tool
Speaker 2: packet whisper was mentioned using DNS combined with a cipher
Speaker 2: to hide stuff in subdomain lookups.
Speaker 1: So many layers of hiding. Okay, Finally, the source talks
Speaker 1: about what happens after an incident is over the aftermath,
Speaker 1: right the post mortem.
Speaker 2: This is absolutely crucial, and the source stress is it's
Speaker 2: not about blaming people. It's a structured review of what happens.
Speaker 1: That's the goal.
Speaker 2: To map out the timeline, confirm the root cause analysis
Speaker 2: super important again, to prevent it from happening again, and
Speaker 2: identify areas where processes or tools could be improved. It
Speaker 2: should be a brainstorming session learning from the experience, and.
Speaker 1: The source also highlighted publishing results sharing the intel.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is huge for the whole community. It connects
Speaker 2: to that military concept the F three eight cycle. Find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze,
Speaker 2: and crucially disseminate. Share what you learned, like.
Speaker 1: The FireEye example after Solar.
Speaker 2: Winds perfect example. When FireEye shared the technical details, the
Speaker 2: indicators of compromise IOCs, and the attacker techniques they discovered,
Speaker 2: it allowed thousands of other organizations worldwide to check their
Speaker 2: own systems. It created a kind of herd immunity, uncovering
Speaker 2: related compromises and massively boosting collective defense. Sharing makes everyone stronger.
Speaker 1: That makes total sense. Wow. Okay, that really was a
Speaker 1: deep dive into this world of adversarial tradecraft. Pulling directly
Speaker 1: from this source material, we've seen the core principles, the
Speaker 1: offense trying to get in and hide, the defense trying
Speaker 1: to detect and respond, and this constant intelligence battle driving innovation.
Speaker 2: It really hammers home just how dynamic cybersecurity is, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It's not static. Both sides are constantly learning, adapting, pushing
Speaker 2: the boundaries. You really have to understand your opponent's likely
Speaker 2: moves their playbook, whether you're trying to build defenses or
Speaker 2: well test them, and.
Speaker 1: Hopefully getting this clearer picture of the strategies, the specific techniques,
Speaker 1: and those underlying principles gives you, our listener a better framework,
Speaker 1: maybe helps you cut through some of the jargon, understand
Speaker 1: the news reports about breaches a bit better, and just
Speaker 1: appreciate the complexity behind the headlines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and thinking about that relentless cycle, the innovation, the adaptation,
Speaker 2: and you know, just the raw human creativity involved in
Speaker 2: both breaking systems and defending them, it kind of leaves
Speaker 2: you with a big question, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: What's that? Well?
Speaker 2: How do organizations, how do we make sure our defenses
Speaker 2: can actually keep pace, not just with the threats we
Speaker 2: already know about, but with the completely unpredictable innovative stuff
Speaker 2: that attackers will inevitably come up with next. What does
Speaker 2: that constant pressure to adapt really mean for how we
Speaker 2: allocate resources, how we build our defensive strategies in the
Speaker 2: real world. It's a tough one.