Tag Archive for: What’s

Kali Linux: What’s next for the popular pentesting distro?

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If you’re interested in penetration testing and digital forensics, you know that Kali Linux is worth a try. And if you’re already doing it, chances are good you are already using it.

We talked to Jim O’Gorman, Chief Content and Strategy Officer at Offensive Security (OffSec), about the direction in which the development of the open-source distro is headed.

Kali Linux future

[The answers have been edited for clarity.]

Kali Linux keeps growing and improving. How much does user feedback influence where you want to go next? What do users want the most?

Two questions drive Kali’s development:

1. What needs to be done to ensure that Kali Linux is the best possible platform for professional and hobbyist information security work?
2. What needs to be done to ensure that Kali is the best possible platform for information security training?

There is a lot of overlap between those two questions, but realistically they are separate and distinct items. However, by getting them both right on a single platform, we create an environment where people can train, study, and learn, but also use the same platform for real-world efforts. In essence, it means that you train like you fight.

The answer to the first question is driven by input from the Kali and OffSec teams. As infosec professionals ourselves, what are the things we run into on a day-to-day basis and how do we make our life easier by ensuring the toolset is of the highest quality possible? We also work closely with OffSec’s pentesting team.

We also listen to input from other Kali users. Kali is a totally open-source project and anyone and everyone can pitch in and contribute. And they do! If you wish a tool to be included in Kali, package it and submit it! If you wish a configuration worked a certain way out of the box, modify the package and submit the change. It’s very direct and easy to do, and it is in our documentation. Anyone – regardless of their background – can play a part.

The second way users influence development is through bug reports, feature requests, and conversations on OffSec’s Discord and other social media. The Kali team is out there as part of the infosec community – talk to us and let us know what you are…

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Federated Authentication vs. SSO: What’s the Difference?

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If you’ve ever deployed a new application for your organization, you know first-hand the grumbling and security headaches that can come with it. It’s one more sign-on and password for your users to remember (or – more likely – write on a post-it and leave in their desk drawer for anyone to stumble across).

Did you know that over 40% of employees have admitted to using the same two to four passwords for all of their accounts? Even if you try to combat this with 90-day password requirements, it usually ends with numbered variations of the same password, which is a security nightmare.

So how can you combat password fatigue and poor security practices without putting the onus on your users? That’s where tools like federated authentication and single sign-on (SSO) come in. These authentication methods streamline the sign-in process and make it easier for your users to access the necessary applications and sites.

Which one is right for your organization? Read on to learn more about federated authentication vs. SSO and what implications the nuances between them have for your organization.

What Is Federated Authentication?

Federated authentication, or federated identity management (FIM), is a model of authentication developed to address an early problem of the internet where users on one domain could not access information from other domains. This was especially difficult for organizations whose operations were spread across multiple domains. It created a very disjointed and frustrating user experience.

FIM was developed as a solution to this problem. It started as a list of agreements and standards that allowed organizations to share user identities. This is the type of agreement that allows you to sign-in to Paramount Plus with your Amazon account or into Spotify with your Google account information.

But no matter where you’re signing in or with which credentials, it’s not the applications themselves that are reviewing or authenticating user credentials. Instead, an identity provider (IdP) reviews them and validates (or doesn’t). This often requires the use of open-sourced Security Assertion Markup Language like OAuth or OpenID Connect. These are open standards that…

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What’s polluting your data lake?

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A data lake is a large system of files and unstructured data collected from many, untrusted sources, stored and dispensed for business services, and is susceptible to malware pollution. As enterprises continue to produce, collect, and store more data, there is greater potential for costly cyber risks.

data lake pollution

Every time you send an email or text you are producing data. Every business service your organization has deployed is generating and exchanging data from third-party partners and supply chain providers. Every new merger and acquisition (M&A) results in large volume of data being transferred across two companies. Every IoT device or subscription is generating data that’s collected and stored in data lakes. You get the point: Mass data production and collection are unavoidable. And, as a result, our data lakes are becoming an overwhelmingly large and a ripe target for cybercriminals.

With digital transformations—a.k.a cloud adoptions and data migrations—having occurred over the past couple of years, cloud data storage has significantly increased. As enterprise data lakes and cloud storage environments expand, cybersecurity will become a greater challenge.

The impacts of malware pollution

Understanding the impact of malware pollution on a data lake can best be understood by looking at how real-life pollution affects our on-land lakes.

Water is fed into lakes from groundwater, streams and various types of precipitation run-off. Similarly, a data lake collects data from a multitude of sources such as internal applications, third party/supply chain partners, IoT devices, etc. All this data constantly flows in and out of the data lake. It can move into a data warehouse or other cloud storage environments or be extracted for further business insights or reference. The same process can be witnessed with freshwater lakes, extracting water for irrigation and churning water into other streams.

External “pollution” that feeds into a lake (both physical and digital) can harm the existing ecosystem. When unknown malware enters a data lake, bad actors can gain access to the data stored in the lake, manipulate it or mine it to sell on the dark web. This data can include…

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Why Japan has ‘declared war’ on floppy disks (What’s that?)

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Japan’s government has “declared a war on floppy disks”. Decades after the unwieldy magnetic storage disks became obsolete and were phased out globally, Japan’s digital ministry has announced that it will finally do away with floppy disks and other outdated technology in a bid to modernise its bureaucracy.

In a press conference this week, Japan’s digital minister Taro Kono said he was working towards moving administrative procedures online. “Digital Minister declares a war on floppy discs,” he tweeted in English earlier this week. “Digital Agency is to change those regulations so you can use online.”

Japan may be home to some of the world’s leading tech giants, but the Japanese have always had an affinity for older technology. According to a BBC report, cassettes were still widely used in 2015. Meanwhile, in 2019, the country’s cyber security minister publicly admitted that he had never used a computer in his life.

But first, what are floppy disks?

Popularly used between the 1970s and 1990s, a floppy disk is a removable disk storage device used to save computer data and programmes. If you haven’t used one, you most certainly have seen one on the top left corner of an MS Word document, where a small animated floppy disk acts as the save button.

The disk, first developed by IBM, is only able to store about 800 KB of data, which is about 0.0008 GB. To put that in perspective, today you can find hard drives with storage up to 20 TB (20,000 GB).

Since 2021, when Kono was administrative reform minister, he has been vocal about his disdain for the old-fashioned fax machine, a fixture in many Japanese government offices, and the hanko seal — an official seal that is used to sign contracts and documents. He directed government ministries to discontinue hanko requirements for several documents, including year-end tax adjustments and tax…

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