by Dan “Haircutfish” Rearden | haircutfish.com | Guest Author Working in the SOC can be a grind. Whether triaging alerts, escalating to clients, or just trying to understand why users […]

The post Report As You Go: Maintaining Good Documentation for SOC Analysts appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) serve as a critical line of defense against today's constantly evolving cybersecurity threats. At the heart of these teams are SOC analysts, who monitor, detect, and respond around the clock to potential attacks.

The post The Life of a SOC Analyst: Responsibilities, Challenges, and Strategies for Success appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Spend time performing forensic analysis on the Windows Operating System and you'll see a host of artifacts that can be used to identify adversary activity. From changes to the registry to the System Resource Utilization Monitor, Windows artifacts run deep. The challenge is locating, extracting, and parsing these artifacts in an efficient manner.

The post KAPE 101: A Kroll Artifact Parser and Extractor Cheatsheet appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

We're all petrified about missing a critical event or misclassifying an alert, but when we're talking about incident response (IR), there are often hundreds if not thousands of alerts to parse through. It's easy to get caught up with one alert because it feels "too hot" or maybe not spend enough time looking into something that initially seems "too cold."

The post Finding the “Goldilocks” Zone: A Practical Approach to Alert Triage appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Insufficient egress filtering is a commonly identified vulnerability found during BHIS penetration tests. The insufficient egress filtering finding indicates that network traffic leaving the organization’s environment is not properly restricted.

The post Insufficient Egress Filtering: How Weak Outbound Controls Enable Attacks appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

There is a certain kind of conversation that doesn’t get written up in a post-mortem, doesn’t generate a ticket, and never makes it into an end-of-quarter report. It happens on the margins—at a conference, in a hallway, or, in this case, at 30,000 feet above sea level. It’s the conversation where two people who are solving the same problem from opposite ends of the table finally sit down next to each other.

The post Same Problem, Different Angles: When Red Team and Blue Team Actually Talk to Each Other appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

This blog will not dive too deeply into BloodHound itself; instead, we will focus on various methods to collect AD data to provide BloodHound as input.

The post A Practical Guide to BloodHound Data Collection appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

This overview of the basics of Cloud Security includes some tips and resources for getting started in defending the cloud.

The post Cloud Security: Tips and Resources for Securing the Cloud appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Hear a tale about the time the BHIS SOC team conducted a 14-hour overnight incident response... from the Wild West Hackin' Fest conference in Deadwood, South Dakota.

The post When the SOC Goes to Deadwood: A Night to Remember  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

What happens when you ditch the tiered ticket queues and replace them with collaboration, agility, and real-time response? In this interview, Hayden Covington takes us behind the scenes of the BHIS Security Operations Center, which is where analysts don’t escalate tickets, they solve them.

The post Inside the BHIS SOC: A Conversation with Hayden Covington  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Imagine this: You’re an attacker ready to get their hands on valuable data that you can sell to afford going on a sweet vacation. You do your research, your recon, everything, ensuring that there’s no way this can go wrong. The day of the attack, you brew some coffee, crack your knuckles, and get started. A few hours into the service scan, you come to realize that all the network ports are open, but in use.

The post GoSpoof – Turning Attacks into Intel  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In part 1 of this post, we’ll discuss how Hayabusa and “Security Operations and Forensics ELK” (SOF-ELK) can help us wrangle EVTX files (Windows Event Log files) for maximum effect during a Windows endpoint investigation!

The post Wrangling Windows Event Logs with Hayabusa & SOF-ELK (Part 1) appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

The Microsoft Store provides a convenient mechanism to install software without needing administrator permissions. The feature is convenient for non-corporate and home users but is unlikely to be acceptable in corporate environments. This is because attackers and malicious employees can use the Microsoft Store to install software that might violate organizational policy. 

The post Microsoft Store and WinGet: Security Risks for Corporate Environments appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) is used to manage certificates for systems, users, applications, and more in an enterprise environment. Misconfigurations in ADCS can introduce critical vulnerabilities into an enterprise Active Directory environment.

The post Detecting ADCS Privilege Escalation appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Engaging with the C-suite is not just about addressing security concerns or defending budget requests. It's about establishing and maintaining an ongoing discussion that aims to align security objectives with the interests of the business.  

The post Communicating Security to the C-Suite: A Strategic Approach  appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Go-Spoof brings an old tool to a new language. The Golang rewrite [of Portspoof] provides similar efficiency and all the same features of the previous tool but with easier setup and useability.

The post Go-Spoof: A Tool for Cyber Deception appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

I’ve been a web application pentester for a while now and over the years must have found hundreds of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.1 Cross-site scripting is a notoriously difficult problem […]

The post Canary in the Code: Alert()-ing on XSS Exploits appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

In this video, John Strand discusses the complexities and challenges of penetration testing, emphasizing that it goes beyond just finding and exploiting vulnerabilities.

The post 5 Things We Are Going to Continue to Ignore in 2025 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Here we go again, discussing Active Directory, hacking, and detection engineering. tl;dr: One AD account can provide you with three detections that if implemented properly will catch common adversarial activities […]

The post One Active Directory Account Can Be Your Best Early Warning appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

A lot of emphasis and focus is put on the investigative part of SOC work, with the documentation and less glamorous side of things brushed under the rug. One such […]

The post Clear, Concise, and Comprehensive: The Formula for Great SOC Tickets appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..