What I personally learned at CyberRAID

One last post from me on the inaugural CyberRAID event here in Kansas City.

Leadership

I'm not sure why I was chosen as team captain. Maybe it was because I knew more people on my team than everyone else, because I seemed more confident or because I was one of the first ones present. I wasn't nervous. I felt like I was as prepared as I was going to be. I had my plan, tools and more than half my life behind me that I've spent doing security work in some capacity or another. I thought I was ready to orchestrate a defense team, too, so I happily accepted the position of Captain at the start of the game when people told me "Go up to Dwight! Get our info!" It's not that I can't orchestrate a defense team, but I wasn't as ready as I had thought I'd be, and my plan fell apart pretty quickly.

My plan was to get people organized by what they're good at, and set them on a task. I kind of succeeded at that, but I did plenty of things wrong from the beginning. First, I was stressed but I haven't completely forgotten my manners. My requests probably sounded like a bossy demand followed by "please." Next, I didn't enforce these roles nor did I evaluate how it was going. Some roles changed without much communication. More than once, someone stepped on the toes of someone else who was already working on something. I'm thankful that there wasn't any apparent infighting on my team. Everyone remained rational.

I've lead teams on many projects in my career, but I have no formal management experience or training. I've been an IT worker in a crisis situation more times than I can count. I've never had to lead a crisis response, though. To manage people and work on technical things at the same time is a truly herculean task -- one that I feel I only barely stumbled through.

I learned a lot about myself and hardships faced by leaders in a crisis situation. I also gained a new perspective on IT workers. Among my team, I had some of the most brilliant and capable security minds I know of in the region. On the first day, we had grand ideas and the right mindset, but our implementation of them was slipshod at best. Our good communication skills were the only thing standing between what we had (which was still a good effort) and unabashed anarchy.

Things I learned about leadership and IT teams (and thus, what I need to work on myself):

#1: Technical leaders must lead first and foremost, and help second.

#2: Groups of geeks require a little bit of guidance to avoid replicating (or undoing) work.

#3: Good communication is vital, and its prerequisite is good rapport.

#4: Change management is an extension of good communication. Yeah, I went there.

On the technical side, there were so many things that I'd do different right from the start.

#5: Get visibility to the DMZ network and I'd immediately scan it from the outside while the firewall and system admins work to start locking down obvious things.

#6: Additional Virtual Machines on the DMZ. It would have been great to have a decent (and familiar) IDS on a Span Port. It might have also been fun to have a few honey pots sitting on the DMZ. Had I thought about this ahead of time, I could have totally made it happen. These are tools any one of us could have brought along for the ride in VMs.

#7: Egress filters from the start. There's no good reason not to. They make sense in the enterprise, and they make sense in the game.

Things I'm taking back to the office:

#7: Egress filters! I'm mentioning it twice. Blind SQL injection and RCE exploits are very popular, so crafty hackers and pen-testers often try to leverage these vulnerabilities to launch some process that can notify them that their exploit has worked. This might be popping an xp_cmdshell to launch ping with a special payload they can look for in return, or it may be something much more quotidian, such as a reverse_tcp or meterpreter call-back from metasploit. Again, egress filters make sense in the real world. To further this point, watch out for obscure tunneling through ICMP and DNS. Ideally the DNS server your DMZ uses should not allow recursion.

#8: We all know that despite our best efforts, a dedicated adversary will find a way in. For some reason, this exercise made it sink in a little better. It's been a while since I've worked somewhere that was breached on my watch. This further boosts my desire to learn more about modern post-breach activities both defensive (forensics, containment) and offensive (post-exploitation, pivoting). I have some serious reading and research to do!

Who else was at CyberRAID, CCDC, SANS ICE II or any other recent exercise like this? What did you get out of it?

Crimping Twisted-Pair Ethernet (and Crossover)

In the Geek 100, I said that every geek should be able to Terminate category 5 cable with RJ-45 plugs and make a crossover cable. While home networking isn't nearly as daunting as it used to be with ubiquitous WiFi routers, I stand by my assertion that no geek has a valid excuse for being unable to crimp some cables. It's a useful skill to have and it's quite easy to learn.

All you need (aside from some Twisted-Pair ethernet cable that has bad ends or no ends) are some crimp-on RJ-45 plugs, a knife and a crimping tool. The plugs are less than $1 each at Radio Shack and cents each in bulk, knives are commodity and crimping tools like the one shown (I've had it for probably 15 years) are available for $20 or less. If your crimping tool doesn't come with a wire cutter, a pair of diagonal pliers might be useful as well. There are some much nicer crimping tools available that get really expensive, but the entry-level ones are probably just fine for the geek who only needs to run wires occasionally.


Take your knife and cut the sheath off about 3/4" of the end of the cable. Inside, there are four pairs: Blue, Orange, Green and Brown. Due to carryover from ye-olde telecom days, the pairs are divided into "Tip" (color striped with white) and "Ring" (solid color). Many cable manufacturers put a nylon strand, string, or tuft inside the sheath as well. This makes stripping a long length of sheath easy, but you can safely cut away whatever of it is exposed without harm.

Arrange the wires in either of the two configurations shown below. We'll get to putting the RJ-45 plugs on in a moment. For the time being, focus on the order of the wires.


These days, 568-A is kind of "the standard" but when I was learning, the industry was hell-bent on using 568-B. Honestly, as long as you use the same 568 scheme on both ends of the cable and you crimp the RJ-45 plug properly, it really doesn't make a bit of difference at all. The wires are ordered this way to reduce crosstalk and interference, so I advise you stick with one of the two diagrams above.

I have the wires ordered 568-B below. The tips (white-striped wires) are hard to determine in the photo, and sometimes they'll be tricky to identify in real life. You may wish to do this under an eye loop or a workbench magnifying lens if your eyesight is sub-par.


Use a wire cutter or a diagonal plier to cut the wires to the same length. It's important to keep the wires held flat and in the right order as shown above.


Slide the RJ-45 plug onto the cable end. Make sure the wires are still even and in the right order, and make sure that the sheath goes deep into the plug while still allowing the wires to "bottom out" in the plug. The sheath should be positioned so that the plastic tab that's crimped to hold the wires in place also holds the sheath. The wires should not be exposed out the bottom of the plug. (Thanks for the reminder, Ryan)


I stole this crimping "action shot" from the Loopback tester tutorial. Crimping the plug should be pretty straightforward. Make sure to give it a few good squeezes to ensure a good connection.


Make sure you wire both ends the same, and make sure the plugs are both installed facing the proper direction (with the metal pins pointed toward you and up). Here's another diagram I found on Wikipedia:


To make a crossover cable that can be used to connect two hubs/switches or two computers together (Without a hub or switch), simply wire one end as 568A and the other as 568B.