CND News and Blog

Lets start with what is CAPTCHA? CAPTCHA is an acronym that stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" and is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human, and in doing so deter bot attacks and spam. Everybody that uses the internet regularly would have ...

Introduction In a significant development for social media users in the EU, the Appeals Centre Europe (ACE) has been launched to handle complaints against major platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. This new independent body aims to streamline dispute resolutions under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), providing users with a centralised me...

Overview This blog post introduces the concept of emergency access accounts—what they are, why they're essential, and how to manage them securely, including recent recommendations for authentication. The post will focus on M365 controls but the general concepts can be taken away. What are Emergency Access Accounts? An emergency account, sometimes c...

Introduction In a landmark decision, the European Union's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), has ruled against Meta's data retention practices. This ruling has significant implications for how Meta, and other Ad-funded social networks, operate within the EU. The decision enforces the data minimisation principles of the Ge...

Scams have been around for as long as people have been trading, but the rise of the internet has opened the floodgates for increasingly sophisticated cons. One of the latest and most devastating types is known as the "pig butchering" scam. Despite its unusual name, it doesn't have anything to do with farm animals. It's a financial fraud that preys ...

A couple of weeks ago a new version of Splunk was released: 9.2.2, this included various CVE resolutions (URL) and many of our clients have already rapidly responded and upgraded their version of Splunk. Upgrading is a quick and fairly low effort, low risk exercise so long as you haven't allowed tech-debt to creep into your infra. However once your...

 CND sent two senior members of the team to Splunk Conf.24 in Las Vegas. The following is their account. 'We started the conference by attending talks by Splunk CEO Gary Steele who delivered the opening keynotes along side Cisco Present Chuck Robbins. With Splunk's recent merging with Cisco everyone was intrigued to see whether there would be ...

Scamming is sadly a daily risk whilst navigating cyberspace. I wrote almost exactly 3 years ago in different post about a similar postal scam, masquerading as the Post Office asking for a small missed delivery fee (URL). Well this week it happened again to a family member who started to fall for it, fortunately they stopped but ...

In today's modern world, the risk of cyber threats have increased significantly. With 5.16 billion people globally using the internet, you can understand how the use of hacktivism has increased The question we are asking today, is hacktivism a threat and what is it's impact on everyday society? In today's blog, we will explore this question further...

There is no doubt you have heard the word 'hacker' in recent years, but are you familiar with the word hacktivist and what this means? Today we are going to explore what is a hacktivist, what is their purpose, why they perform some of their acts and what the difference is between hackers and hacktivists.  What is a simple definition of hacktiv...

A collection of 21 security flaws have been discovered in Sierra Wireless AirLink cellular routers and open-source software components like TinyXML and OpenNDS. Collectively tracked as Sierra:21, the issues expose over 86,000 devices across critical sectors like energy, healthcare, waste management, retail, emergency services, and vehicle tracking to cyber threats, according

 Last week I was able to attend the CyberThreat 23 (CT23) conference in London, held by SANs and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) The conference has been running for a few years now and from SANs marketing material the event is: Designed for security practitioners and spanning the full spectrum of offensive and defensive discipline, t...

TLDR: Building a Splunk Test instance is really useful, helps protect against prod outages and very performant hardware is now available for a fraction of the price it used to be; if you're willing to deal with some tech challenges! Splunk Test instance Many of our clients rely on Splunk as their production SIEM tool to monitor, detect and respond ...

As my PA-220 firewall heads towards EoL I swapped it out for a PA-410 and OS 11.x I've worked professionally with firewall platforms for nearly 20 years, during that time I've configured Netscreen, Juniper, Palo Alto and Cisco to name a few of the dominant vendors. The most admin friendly and enjoyable platform to work with in m...

I was listening to an InfoSec podcast on the drive back from a client recently (Privacy, Security & OSINT Show) it's a really good listen and I really appreciate Michael Bazzells work. One of the items in the podcast was NextDNS, a product which I've not come across before. NextDNS operates by you registering an account for a very mod...

This simulated phishing email had two possible failure actions – clicking on the link or opening the PDF attachment. It was a particularly difficult scenario as it appeared to come from a real member of the CND team, however, there were a few indicators (red and amber flags) which could have been spotted. The reason we have labelled some of these a...

There is no doubt you have heard the word 'hacker' in recent years, but are you familiar with the word hacktivist and what this means? Today we are going to explore what is a hacktivist, what is their purpose, why they perform some of their acts and what the difference is between hackers and hacktivists. What is a simple definition of hacktivist? A...

TLDR: Excellent technical conference with great opportunities for meeting other Splunkers, sound in-depth technical workshops with a good deal of content to follow up on and study. Splunk as a tech company manages an effortlessly relaxed corporate culture that is very enjoyable to be a part of. Intro: This was to be my first global scale tech confe...

For several months we have been seeing a huge interest in the capabilities of ChatGPT and with a high school teacher in the family, we have looked a little deeper in detecting it's use. At Computer Network Defence Ltd (CND) we will often test the resourcefulness of our new cyber security candidates by asking them to research a topic and d...