Peter Dowley

36 Followers
75 Following
17 Posts
@CBR - infosec and tech, by interest and accident. Defensive side of cyber - mgmt, ops, strategy, architecture, risk, governance, etc. - while keeping a close eye on the offensive side. Also at https://twitter.com/PeterDowley
@tomatospy Have you come across the recent Scam Inc. podcast from the Economist about the pig butchering industry? Paid subscription required, 8 episodes and they did some very good investigative journalism.

@thegrugq and @tomatospy - I enjoyed your chat on Between Two Nerds about potential applications of AI for scams.

When you talked about possible market size limits for scammers I thought of the sales term for that (total addressable market, or TAM) which is when it clicked that this is the most adjacent job type in legitimate (?) work.

One obvious implication is that the scammers will need a good CRM for tracking prospects and when they identify real opportunities. So I assume they're all using Salesforce to manage their deals and to keep management aware of how close the deals are to completion. Will they close the scam in this quarter?!

I was also struck that the people working in the scam call centres are doing Inside Sales. For large or huge customers, vendors assign account managers (sales reps), or teams of them if the customer is large enough. For mid-market customers each account rep is assigned many customers and works remotely - it's all done using email, phone and conf calls.

Good discussion by @riskybusiness and @metlstorm about Crowdstrike's report on VMware ESXi risks.
In my view the key risks with classic VMware data centre environments are similar to the risks with classic Active Directory, and backup systems - these are all core IT infrastructure for a lot of places, and there's as much legacy in the access control to these services as in the services themselves.

The Crowdstrike post (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/hypervisor-jackpotting-lack-of-antivirus-support-opens-the-door-to-adversaries/) was quite good in their recommendations on what to do for vSphere environments - yes it needs to be patched, but start with tightening access to the control plane.

Hypervisor Jackpotting, Part 3: Lack of Antivirus Support Opens the Door to Adversaries

Learn how the lack of support for third-party agents or antivirus software continues to make ESXi a highly attractive target for modern adversaries.

crowdstrike.com
Just finished listening to the last Risky Business podcast for the year. Have been consistently impressed by the output quality (and volume) of @riskybusiness and team. If you work in #infosec and aren't already a regular consumer then you are missing out.
tbh I assumed it would be boring to write a one year later thing on Log4Shell, but it ended up being really fascinating to hear people’s memories of that particularly hellish weekend and their thoughts on Where We Are Now https://www.wired.com/story/log4j-log4shell-one-year-later/
Log4j’s Log4Shell Vulnerability: One Year Later, It’s Still Lurking

Despite mitigation, one of the worst bugs in internet history is still prevalent—and being exploited.

WIRED