Privacy the Engima
- External Remote Services We often require remote services to do most of the work or to enhance the capabilities of our pre-existing security measures/applications, what they simply do is, providing the said services without having any need for manual hardware setup or installation. We can use the services completely remote and without any need of hardware setup, It saves a lot of time for security architects and engineers. Remote services are widely used in organizations with a huge infrastructure, the capacity is huge. So huge that they need these remote services to keep the security up, all day and everyday. Assigning engineers on field security is a hard thing, they can’t just make them do these things. Because these tasks feels as if they are some sort of unending repetitions. This is the part where some automation and remote services come to play, It’s easier to deploy automated scripts which work by integrating the capabilities and features of the external remote services into the domain easily. 2. Power Settings You might be wondering why the hell this topic is in the article, this is supposed to be in YouTube showcasing how to power off windows-11 for grandpas/grandmas right? No, power settings are crucial when compromising a system. Why? when a system is compromised Its first and foremost goal is to stop the system from shutting down/restarting, doing so will kill the the session on the attacker’s side, regaining the session is a hard part. Ever wondered why, when you restart your PC, It simply performs well removing any lag or disruptions that had happened before? I’m referring to the windows ecosystem here. When we press the restart button, windows will initiate a complete reboot sequence, stopping background processes, killing applications that had been broken, It will clear the temporary files and the system’s process memory. Anything that has been replaced or modified by you, gets back to Its place making everything work as it supposed to do. That’s why we can see a bit of improvement after we restart our system. The attacker will modify the system settings to never go to sleep or restart, because of obvious reasons. Some malware are different they have the capabilities to work and fetch information discretely but no malware can work if the system itself has shut down right? That’s why each and every part in compromising a system counts and has an important part. This will completely be different if the malware’s aim is to destroy the PC, why bother with this when you can just wipe the disk clean by formatting it. 3. Account Discovery A PC has multiple accounts with multiple users, we all are aware of the privilege hierarchy, It’s simple, imagine the following as a food-chain, we first have administrator as the first one with all the privileges, and the second one is the standard account type with normal privileges where we can do most of the stuff without modifying the system settings, and in the last we have a guest account, Guest account only has a set of functionalities which restricts almost all of other things we can do, because It’s a temporary resort for guests. Now, there are other two kinds, local and domain accounts. Coming to the local accounts, they are made without any linkage to Microsoft, they are made with a username and a password and that’s it. Domain accounts are the ones where we have our own storage space, the catch is that we can only access them through the said respective infra’s network. 4. Application Window Security It simply is the practice of following secure protocols while having application access and sending information through transit, as we know, a weak window security can create a lot of problems such as service disruption, cross-application failure and bad user interface. Applications have became an important part in our lives, we complete almost many of our tasks with the help of applications, therefore securing them is essential. These windows can be robust and effective on the context of their usage, performance can also be another factor, they can define the performance too. After all It’s Security isn’t in our hands, they are in the hands of their developers, while we can hope that they do their job well, we can’t be sure of it always. As they say “Ignorance is a bliss.” 5. Browser Information Discovery Browser is a treasure source, It shows a complete history of your searches, your frequently visited websites and most importantly your cookies and session IDs(they contain the data of those webs you had logged in), It’s a great target for attackers to focus on browser exploitation, be it by using external 3rd party scripts or by using extensions like we discussed yesterday. These days securing information has became trivial, we can see people using social media without any limits, like why are they posting about themselves and furnishing factual and accurate information of themselves, I don’t know if they are unaware of that content being used against their will/knowledge unknowingly. I believe that, people shouldn’t know too much about our-self, They should only know what we tell them, other than those, leave it their imagination and assumptions. It is like a real peer pressure when your friends are compelling you to join, in those times, go with an alias. Whatever happens in the internet, stays in the internet. That’s the essence of the browser information. Using a secure browser is also a good practice. Be it any browser, you are the one in control, because you’re the one sharing the information to it, by surfing the web or using It’s services. That’s for today, I wanted to create that index for the topics, but guess it turns out I never have the time, maybe I’ll try to finish it tomorrow. I’ll see you again tomorrow then!