March 14, 2024
Leadership vs. Management, what exactly are the differences? And what is needed in both areas to meet the current challenges?
The Handelsblatt reported in this Article in the context of pro-Russian hacker attacks on Western authorities and companies via a scanner developed by ProSec. The "Live attack parser“ scans hackers’ forums and provides information about planned attacks so that companies can better protect themselves against them.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, IT security experts have been warning of drastic cyber attacks. These warnings have been manifesting themselves for several weeks in the form of “Killnet”. Killnet is a loose organization of “hacktivists” (political activists who use hacking as a weapon) who attack companies and authorities in the NATO area. They use so-called DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service). This attack overloads the corresponding service to such an extent that requests from regular users can no longer be processed. (Further information here.) At the beginning of May, the portals of several German authorities and ministries were affected.
The article in the Handelsblatt emphasizes that DDoS attacks are basically “harmless” attacks from which you can protect yourself well (for example through the service provider Akamai Cloudflare). We would be happy to advise you on implementing appropriate protective measures. Because “it should be in the interest of the economy to think about early detection,” as our co-managing director Immanuel puts it in the article.
ProSec became aware of Killnet a few months ago through a request from a government agency. We found that we could read the organization's communications in the forums and chat groups. We therefore decided to automate the analysis of chat histories using a scanner.
The result is the “Live Attack Parser,” which examines Killnet’s communication channels for planned attacks. From this, “[the scanner] automatically extracts potential attack targets – including message text, web address and time stamp,” as the article in Handelsblatt summarizes. Through the Live Attack Parser portal on our website, any company can access this information and check whether it is listed in planned attacks.
Our managing director Tim emphasizes in the article that we are not pursuing commercial goals by developing the scanner as a tool: “Our goal is that companies can protect themselves - even if it won't work 100 percent.” ProSec produces the results of the scanner also accessible to the public in order to make it more difficult for Killnet to communicate and to force the hacktivists to reorganize in a time-consuming manner.
The Live Attack Parser currently offers a few optimization options: The connection to monitoring systems (SIEM - Security and Event Management, for more information see here) and an alarm function would, for example, make it easier to warn affected companies.
However, in order for the further optimization of the Live Attack Parser to pay off in terms of content, there must first be enough concrete inquiries, Tim continues: “We do it for free, and then it has to be worth it.” After all, our core business lies in pentesting and IT security consulting , as our founders Tim and Immanuel make clear in the article. With 70 employees and 2,5 million in sales in 2021, the resources for parallel further development of the tool are definitely available.
Leadership vs. Management, what exactly are the differences? And what is needed in both areas to meet the current challenges?
Should standard users in your tenant be allowed to complete an Azure App Registration? The answer is clearly “no” and this article
The bad news first: In Germany there is no central nationwide emergency number for hacked companies or authorities. That's why it is