7MS #472: Interview with Christopher Fielder

7 Minute Security

Today our good pal Christopher Fielder from Arctic Wolf is back for an interview three-peat! He joins Joe "The Machine" Skeen (a.k.a. Gh0sthax) and I to talk about all things ransomware, including:

• How the Colonial Pipeline incident may have started from a weak VPN cred with no MFA. Silver lining (?) - they got some of the $ back.

• Was the federal government's response good enough? What should the government be doing to better handle and manage ransomware?

• • Common ways ransomware gets in our environments, and some ways to NOT get ransomware'd:
    • Use 2FA (make sure that all accounts are using it!)
    • Consider having (if possible) your AD user scheme be something like chi-user4920394 instead of Joe.President
    • Have users that haven't logged in for X days get automatically locked out
    • Train your users - consider Arctic Wolf's managed security awareness offering
    • Detect early signs of compromise like Kerberoasting
    • Lock down your DNS egress to only specific servers so that it doesn't run "wide open"
    • Leverage good threat intel