7 Minute Security

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I'm sorry it took me forever and a day to get this episode up, but I'm thrilled to share part 4 (the final chapter - for now anyways) of my interview with the red team guys, Ryan and Dave!

In today's episode we talk about:

• Running into angry system admins (that are either too fired up or not fired up enough)
• Being wrong without being ashamed
• When is it necessary to make too much noice to get caught during an engagement?
• What are the top 5 tools you run on every engagement?
• How do you deal with monthly test reports indefinitely being a copy/paste of the previous month's report?
• How do you deal with clients who scope things in such as way that the test is almost impossible to conduct?
• How do you deal with colleagues who take findings as their own when they talk with management?
• How do you work with clients who don't know why they want a test - except to check some sort of compliance checkmark?
• What is a typical average time to complete a pentest on a vendor (as part of a third-party vendor assessment)?
• How could a fresh grad get into a red team job?
• What do recruiters look for candidates seeking red team positions?
• If a red team is able to dump a whole database of hashes or bundle of local machine hashes, should they crack them?
• What do you do when you're contracted for a pentest, but on day one your realize the org is not at all ready for one?
• What's your favorite red team horror story?

The patching solutions review concludes this week with Ivanti's patch solution, as well as PDQ Deploy/Inventory.

As a quick reminder, here's where our bake-off currently sits:

• Ninite (covered in 7MS #275)
• ManageEngine (covered in 7MS #277)

Quick reminder: none of these solutions are bribing me with fat wads of cash to plug their products. Some day I hope to have such problems, but today is not that day.

You might know Ivanti as Shavlik - that's the product name I'm more familiar with anyways. Back in February, Shavlik became Ivanti.

• Pretty easy to install and manage - even without a deep background in IT (in today's episode I tell a story that can back this claim based on my experience)
• Does a solid job of applying patching Windows OS and third party

• Pricing is a little steep - last figures I saw were ~$80 per server, per year and ~$40 per workstation, per year.
• ITScripts library (that allows for GPO-style policy enforcement) is a little slim when compared to similar functionality offered from other solutions

• Lets you crazy with building custom packages you can deploy to granular groups
• Awesome online help resources, including a YouTube video library that's got a video for just about everything
• Quick response to support tickets

• A bit more complicated to get comfortable with than the other solutions
• A little confusing on the Windows patching side - not quite as "point and patch" as some of the other solutions
• Agentless system - machines have to be able to "see" the PDQ

Show notes are here.

Show note here: https://7ms.us/7ms-193-news-and-links-roundup/

Today I'm launching an ongoing series called 7MOIST. It stands for:

• 7
• Minutes
• of
• IT
• and
• Security
• Tips

The wildest, craziest, nuttiest part of this series is that each episode will be 7 minutes long!

I know, I know! You're saying, "Wait a sec, bub, isn't that why this podcast is called 7 Minute Security in the first place?" And yes, you'd be right.

Basically, this is my way of going old school and getting back my podcast "roots" by delivering an episode before we had an intro jingle, interviews, sponsors, banter about hot cocoas or an outro song. Nothing but delicious content today friends, Enjoy!

Today's theme is:

Basically, you can do Windows Key + R then type cmd and Enter for quick access to command line.

But lets do some more fun stuff. Wanna open a command window from the desktop and launch a command in one swoop? Try this:

For example:

The cmd /k part opens a command window, and then ping 192.168.0.1 can be whatever command you also want to run on the fly.

And if you want to start programs and/or open files right from the command line, you can do that (in most cases) by just typing the program name, like:

Or, get really fancy and add a document name after the command. For example:

If meow.txt doesn't exist, Notepad will simply ask you to create it!

Call me crazy, but the Windows find/search feature sometimes doesn't find stuff that I know is there. So I still like using old school DOS commands for this. I might do something like:

The dir stands for directory, and the /s tells the system to search recursively.

See 7ms.us for the rest of today's show notes!