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How To Discover Exposed Digital Assets for Free Using Noxtara

If you have a website or public-facing digital assets, you might wonder whether they’re secure and what potential entry points could be at risk. A great first step is to list all the digital assets connected to your main domain. One free tool that can help with this is called Noxtara. It offers a variety of security tools in one integrated dashboard, including a feature for discovering public-facing assets. Creating a free account is simple—just head over to the registration page . If you’ve got a company email that matches the domain you want to scan, it’s best to use that since it makes adding the domain to the Noxtara platform much easier. No worries if you don’t have a company email, though; you can still sign up without a problem. Just keep in mind that when you want to add your company’s domain for scanning, you’ll need to go through a quick DNS record check. Registration Once you’ve registered, you can set up a team and add your domain in the team settings. If the domai...

Increase of Malicious Activities and Implementation of reCaptcha

In recent time, I've seen the increase of malicious activities such as login attempts or phishing emails to some accounts I manage. Let me list some of them and the actions taken. SSH Access Attempts This happened on a server that host a Gitlab server. Because of this case, I started to limit the incoming traffic to the server using internal and cloud firewall provided by the cloud provider. I limit the exposed ports, connected network interfaces, and allowed protocols. Phishing Attempts This typically happened through email and messaging platform such as Whatsapp and Facebook Page messaging. The malicious actors tried to share a suspicious link lured as invoice, support ticket, or something else. Malicious links shared Spammy Bot The actors leverage one of public endpoint on my website to send emails. Actually, the emails won't be forwarded anywhere except to my own email so this just full my inbox. This bot is quite active, but I'm still not sure what...

Why Hashicorp Vault Can Be Important

As I have been working on many software projects and teams, I see that sharing credentials among developers is a common thing. Sometimes, developers store credentials in a file where everyone in the team can access them just to streamline the development process. But, I was also wondering how to maintain the security of the software or data managed while the credentials are accessible to everyone. How can we monitor the usage, make sure that no one in the team uses the credentials differently than they're supposed to be, or renew the credentials with ease? Hashicorp Vault is one of the solutions in the market that can answer that question. There are three main problems that Vault solves. The first is called secret sprawl where the credentials are spread everywhere to many individuals. Then, it becomes difficult when someone leave the team and we have to renew the existing credentials to secure the access. Vault can provide a mechanism to centralize the credentials storage, p...

OWASP Top 10 Security Threats

The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the fields of IoT, system software and web application security (Wikipedia). In this post, I want to share the top 10 security threats published by OWASP. The list is regularly updated by OWASP, the following list is based on 2021 publication. Broken Access Control This security issue can be caused by many things such as violation of the least privilege principle, unprotected API endpoints, use of unique identifiers without permission checking, and so on. There are several threats related to broken access control. Insecure Direct Object Reference . It happens when an application provides direct access to objects based on user-supplied input. For example, after submitting a form, the endpoint returns an ID of the object being submitted while with that ID, a user can access the...

Threat Vectors in Cybersecurity

In cybersecurity, a threat is the potential occurrence of an undesirable event that can eventually damage or disrupt the operational and functional activities of a company or organization. Some examples are an attacker stealing sensitive data, infecting a system with malware, and data tampering. In order to realize their intentions, threats need vectors. A threat vector is a medium through which an attacker gains access to a system by exploiting identified vulnerabilities. Some most common threat vectors used by adversaries are as follows. Direct/physical access : By having direct access to our computing devices, the attacker can perform many malicious activities like installing malicious programs, copying a large amount of data, modifying device configuration, and so on. Protection : We should implement strict access control and restriction. Removable media : Devices like USB flash drives, smartphones, or IoT devices may contain malicious programs...