Awareness

When working with cybersecurity in any development organization it is inevitable that management asks the difficult question. The question that puts us in a very difficult position of grasping the current status of the organizations security efforts. The question I am talking about is as follows, or a version of: How far have we come in our work with cybersecurity? It is an understandable question. We need to see that the time and money put into security are adding value to the business. However assessing the progress in a comparable way is not always easy. As luck would have it there are standards for measuring the maturity level of cybersecurity. One of these models are OWASP Software Assurance Maturity Model, SAMM for short. As it is provided by OWASP it is an open source model that can be used by anyone free of charge, and the results are comparable both over time and between organizations. There are other models that do similar things, but due to the open nature of SAMM it’s a good starting point for any organization getting started. ...

When looking at the communications of the major players in the operating system market (for both computers and smartphones) there are one company that repeatedly talks about privacy more than the others. The company I am thinking about is Apple. Their continuous talk about privacy got me curious, how do they handle their users privacy. And when curious it’s time to investigate, so I dug into their Privacy Policy (Updated June 1, 2021), and my thoughts resulted in this blogpost. ...

This investigation should not be taken as a full review of the browsers, but wishes to highlight the differences that different browsers have in how they handle user privacy. The test aims to give an overview, not describe in detail what each browser does or does not do. Methodology To perform this test I created a new virtual machine based on Windows MSEdge win10 VM. In this VM I installed the browsers intended to be tested, using the default configuration. After that I configured BurpSuite as a proxy for the VM, so that all traffic is routed through it. This way it will document all the traffic that the browser in the VM is sending. ...

Previously I’ve written a post about security for development teams, and now it’s time for the continuation. Just as for developer there are great benefits in performing security tests for administrators. However, the methodology when testing the infrastructure is not the same as when testing an application. In this post I’m going to introduce categories of testing for administrators in much the same way as I did for developers, allowing any team to begin thinking about security and performing basic security testing. The categories proposed can also be adapted to be used as requirements, more so than the ones used for developers. This is since they are easier to apply regardless of what solution is tested. ...

There are very few, if any, development teams that introduces vulnerabilities into their software out of malicious intent. Instead it is mistakes that are introduced due to lack of time, awareness, or something alike. There are lots of materials out there that are either super detailed for a specific technology stack, or on such a high level it is hard to apply in the real world. With this post I will try to do the impossible, to describe how you work with security in a practical manner, regardless of what technology you use. I will highlight three categories of vulnerabilities, and describe them in a technology independent way. My hope with this is to allow any development team to have a think about security, and apply them to their specific technologies. ...