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Black Hat Europe 2022 NOC: The SOC Inside the NOC

By Jessica Bair

Our core mission in the NOC is network resilience. We also provide integrated security, visibility and automation, a SOC inside the NOC.

In part one, we covered:

  • Designing the Black Hat Network, by Evan Basta
  • AP Placement Planning, by Sandro Fasser
  • Wi-Fi Air Marshal, by Jérémy Couture, Head of SOC, Paris 2024 Olympic Games
  • Meraki Dashboards, by Rossi Rosario Burgos
  • Meraki Systems Manager, by Paul Fidler
  • A Better Way to Design Training SSIDs/VLANs, by Paul Fidler

In part two, we are going deep with security:

  • Integrating Security
  • First Time at Black Hat, by Jérémy Couture, Head of SOC, Paris 2024 Olympic Games
  • Trojan on an Attendee Laptop, by Ryan MacLennan
  • Automated Account Provisioning, by Adi Sankar
  • Integrating Meraki Scanning Data with Umbrella Security Events, by Christian Clasen
  • Domain Name Service Statistics, by Adi Sankar

Integrating Security

As the needs of Black Hat evolved, so did the Cisco Secure Technologies in the NOC:

The SecureX dashboard made it easy to see the status of each of the connected Cisco Secure technologies.

Since joining the Black Hat NOC in 2016, my goal remains integration and automation. As a NOC team comprised of many technologies and companies, we are pleased that this Black Hat NOC was the most integrated to date, to provide an overall SOC cybersecurity architecture solution.

We have ideas for even more integrations for Black Hat Asia and Black Hat USA 2023. Thank you, Piotr Jarzynka, for designing the integration diagram.

Below are the SecureX threat response integrations for Black Hat Europe, empowering analysts to investigate Indicators of Compromise very quickly, with one search.

The original Black Hat NOC integration for Cisco was NetWitness sending suspicious files to Threat Grid (know Secure Malware Analytics). We expanded that in 2022 with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and used it in London, for investigation of malicious payload attack.

NetWitness observed a targeted attack against the Black Hat network. The attack was intended to compromise the network.

NetWitness extracted the payload and sent it to Secure Malware Analytics for detonation.

Reviewing the analysis report, we were able to quickly determine it was the MyDoom worm, which would have been very damaging.

The attack was blocked at the perimeter and the analysts were able to track and enrich the incident in XSOAR.

First Time at Black Hat, by Jérémy Couture, Head of SOC, Paris 2024 Olympic Games

My first time at Black Hat turned out to be an incredible journey!

Thanks to the cybersecurity partnership between Paris 2024 and Cisco, I was able to integrate into the Cisco Crew, to operate the NOC/SOC as a Threat Hunter on the most dangerous network in the world for this European Edition of Black Hat.

My first day, I helped with deploying the network by installing the wireless Meraki APs on the venue, understanding how they were configured and how they could help analysts to identify and locate any client connected to the network that could have a bad behavior during the event, the idea being to protect the attendees if an attack was to spray on the network.

Following this “physical” deployment, I’ve been able to access the whole Cisco Secure environment including Meraki, Secure Malware Analytics, Umbrella, SecureX and the other Black Hat NOC partners software tools.

SecureX was definitely the product on which I wanted to step up. By having so fantastic professionals around me, we were able to dig in the product, identifying potential use cases to deploy in the orchestration module and expected integrations for Paris 2024.

Time was flying and so were the attendees to the conference, a network without user is fun but can be quite boring as nothing happens, having so many cybersecurity professional at the same place testing different security malwares, attacks and so on led us to very interesting investigations. A paradox at the Black Hat, we do not want to block malicious content as it could be part of exercises or training classes, quite a different mindset as what we, security defenders, are used to! Using the different components, we were able to find some observables/IOCs that we investigate through SecureX, SecureX being connected to all the other components helped us to enrich the observables (IPs, urls, domains…), understanding the criticality of what we identified (such as malware payloads) and even led us to poke the folks in the training classes to let them know that something really wrong was happening on their devices.

Being part of the Black Hat NOC was an incredible experience, I was able to meet fantastic professionals, fully committed on making the event a success for all attendees and exhibitors. It also helped me to better understand how products, that we use or will use within Paris 2024, could be leveraged to our needs and which indicators could be added to our various Dashboards, helping us to identify, instantaneously, that something is happening. 

Trojan on an Attendee Laptop, by Ryan MacLennan

During the last day of Black Hat Europe, our NOC partner, NetWitness saw some files being downloaded on the network. The integration again automatically carved out the file and submitted the Cisco Secure Malware Analytics (SMA) platform. One of those files came back as a trojan, after SMA detonated the file in a sandbox environment. The specific hash is the below SHA-256:

938635a0ceed453dc8ff60eab20c5d168a882bdd41792e5c5056cc960ebef575

The screenshot below shows some of the behaviors that influenced the decision:

The result of seeing these behaviors caused SMA to give it the highest judgement score available to a detonated file:

After this judgement was made, we connected with the Palo Alto Networks team, and they found the IP address associated with the file download.

Once we had this information, we went to the Meraki dashboard and did a search for the IP address. The search returned only one client that has been associated with the address for the entire Black Hat conference.

Knowing that there has only been one client associated with the address made finding the attendee easier. We then needed to know where they were and Meraki had this figured out. After opening the client’s profile, we saw what SSID and access point (AP) they were connected to using the Meraki location map.

We then found the attendee and let them know to have their IT inspect their laptop to make sure it is clean.

Apart from the technical challenges of running a temporary network for N thousand people, the Black Hat event reminded us that success doesn’t happen without teamwork; that leadership isn’t just about keeping the project on track. It is also about looking after the team and that small details in planning, build up and tear down can be just as important, as having all the right tools and fantastically skilled Individuals using them during the event itself.

Automated Account Provisioning, by Adi Sankar

In the Cisco Secure technology stack, within the Black Hat NOC, we use SecureX Single Sign-on. This reduces the confusion of managing multiple accounts and passwords. It also streamlines the integrations between the Cisco products and our fellow NOC partners. We have an open ecosystem approach to integrations and access in the NOC, so we will provision Cisco Secure accounts for any staff member of the NOC. Logging into each individual console and creating an account is time consuming and can often lead to confusion on which tools to provision and which permission levels are needed.

To automate this process, I developed two workflows: one to create non-admin users for NOC partners and one to create administrator accounts in all the tools for Cisco staff. The workflows create accounts in SecureX, Secure Malware Analytics (Threat Grid), Umbrella DNS and Meraki dashboard, all using SecureX Single Sign-On.

Here is what the workflow looks like for creating non-admin users.

The workflow requires three inputs: first name, last name, and email. Click Run.

The sequence of API calls is as follows:

  • Generate a SecureX token to access the SecureX API including the “admin/invite:write, invite:write” scopes.
  • Invite the User to SecureX using the invite API (https://visibility.amp.cisco.com/iroh/invite/index.html#/). In the body of this POST the role is set to “user”. In the Administrator workflow this would be set to “admin” allowing full access to SecureX.
  • If the invite fails due to a duplicate invite, print an error message in Webex teams.
  • Invite the user to the Meraki dashboard using the “admins” API (https://api.meraki.com/api/v1/organizations/{organizationId}/admins). In the body of this call, the organization access is set to none, and access to two networks (Wireless network and Systems Manager) are set to “read-only” to ensure the user cannot make any changes to affect the network. In the Administrator version org access is still set to none but “full” permissions are provided to the two networks, something we do not want all users to have.
  • Generate a token to the new Umbrella API using https://api.umbrella.com/auth/v2/token with the following scopes (read admin users, write admin users, read admin roles). This single endpoint for generating a token based on scopes has made using the Umbrella API significantly easier.
  • Then invite the user to Umbrella using the “admins” API at (https://api.umbrella.com/admin/v2/users) and in the body of this POST the “role ID” is set to 2 to ensure read-only permissions are provisioned for Umbrella.
  • Create a user in Secure Malware analytics using the API at (https://panacea.threatgrid.com/api/v3/organizations/<ORG_ID>/users). The body of this request simply creates a Malware Analytics login using the users last name and appending “_blackhat”
  • The last call is to send a password reset email for the Malware Analytics user. (https://panacea.threatgrid.com/api/v3/users/<LOGIN>/password-email) They can set their password via the email, login to the Malware Analytics console and then link their SecureX sign-on account, which means they will no longer need to use their Malware Analytics credentials.

Once the workflow has completed successfully, the user will receive four emails to create a SecureX Sign-On account and accept the invitations to the various products. These workflows really improved our responsiveness to account provisioning requests and makes it much easier to collaborate with other NOC partners.

Integrating Meraki Scanning Data with Umbrella Security Events, by Christian Clasen

Over the previous Black Hat events, we have been utilizing Meraki scanning data to get location data for individual clients, as they roamed conference. In the initial blog post (Black Hat Asia 2022), we created a Docker container to accept the data from the Meraki Scanning API and save it for future analysis. At Black Hat USA 2022, we wrote about how to use Python Folium to use the flat text files to generate chronological heatmaps that illustrated the density of clients throughout the conference.

This time around, we’ve stepped it up again by integrating Umbrella DNS Security events and adding the ability to track clients across the heatmap using their local IP address.

To improve the portability of our data and the efficiency of our code, we began by moving from flat JSON files to a proper database. We chose SQLite this time around, though going forward we will likely use Mongo.

Both can be queried directly into Python Pandas dataframes which is what will give us the optimal performance we are looking for. We have a dedicated Docker container (Meraki-Receiver) that will validate the incoming data stream from the Meraki dashboard and insert the values into the database.

The database is stored on a Docker volume that can be mounted by our second container, the Meraki-Mapper. Though this container’s primary purpose is building the heatmaps, it also performs the task of retrieving and correlating Umbrella DNS security events. That is, any DNS query from the Black Hat network that matches one of several predefined security categories. Umbrella’s APIs were recently improved to add OAuth and simplify the URI scheme for each endpoint. After retrieving a token, we can get all security events in the time frame of the current heatmap with one call.

What we want to do with these events is to create Folium Markers. These are static “pins” that will sit on the map to indicate where the DNS query originated from. Clicking on a marker will popup more information about the query and the client who sent it.

Thanks to the Umbrella Virtual Appliances in the Black Hat network, we have the internal IP address of the client who sent the DNS query. We also have the internal IP address in the Meraki scanning data, along with the latitude and longitude. After converting the database query into a Pandas dataframe, our logic takes the IP address from the DNS query and finds all instances in the database of location data for that IP within a 5-minute window (the resolution of our heatmap).

What we end up with is a list of dictionaries representing the markers we want to add to the map. Using Bootstrap, we can format the popup for each event to make it look a bit more polished. Folium’s Popup plugin allows for an iFrame for each marker popup.

The result is a moving heatmap covering an entire day on a given conference floor, complete with markers indicating security events (the red pushpin icon).

Clicking on the pushpin shows the details of the query, allowing us in the NOC to see the exact location of the client when they sent it.

To further improve this service during the next conference, we plan to implement a web page where NOC staff can submit an IP address and immediately get map tracking that client through the conference floor. This should give us an even more efficient way to find and notify folks who are either behaving maliciously or appear to be infected.

Domain Name Service Statistics, by Adi Sankar

For years we have been tracking the DNS stats at the Blackhat conferences. The post-pandemic 2022 numbers look like we never skipped a beat after the dip in DNS queries from 2021, seen in the bar graph below. This year’s attendance saw well over 11 million total DNS queries.

The Activity volume view from Umbrella gives a top-level level glance of activity by category, which we can drill into for deeper threat hunting. On trend with the previous Black Hat Europe events, the top Security categories were Dynamic DNS and Newly Seen Domains. However, it’s worth noting a proportionally larger increase in the cryptomining and phishing categories from 9 to 17 and 28 to 73, respectively, compared to last year.

These years, Black Hat saw over 4,100 apps connect to the network, which is nearly double of what was seen last year. However, still not topping over 6,100 apps seen at Black Hat USA early this year.

Should the need arise, we can block any application, such as Mail.ru above.

Black Hat Europe 2022 was the best planned and executed NOC in my experience, with the most integrations and visibility. This allowed us the time to deal with problems, which will always arise.

We are very proud of the collaboration of the team and the NOC partners.

Black Hat Asia will be in May 2023, at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore…hope to see you there!

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Cisco NOC team:

  • Cisco Secure: Ian Redden, Christian Clasen, Aditya Sankar, Ryan MacLennan, Guillaume Buisson, Jerome Schneider, Robert Taylor, Piotr Jarzynka, Tim Wadhwa-Brown and Matthieu Sprunck
  • Threat Hunter / Paris 2024 Olympics SOC: Jérémy Couture
  • Meraki Network: Evan Basta, Sandro Fasser, Rossi Rosario Burgos, Otis Ioannou, Asmae Boutkhil, Jeffry Handal and Aleksandar Dimitrov Vladimirov
  • Meraki Systems Manager: Paul Fidler

Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover, Iain Davidson, Alessandro Contini and Alessandro Zatti), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland, Matt Ford, Matt Smith and Mathew Chase), Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).

About Black Hat

For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.


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Black Hat Europe 2022 NOC: When planning meets execution

By Jessica Bair

In this blog about the design, deployment and automation of the Black Hat network, we have the following sections:

  • Designing the Black Hat Network, by Evan Basta
  • AP Placement Planning, by Sandro Fasser
  • Wi-Fi Air Marshal, by Jérémy Couture, Head of SOC, Paris 2024 Olympic Games
  • Meraki Dashboards, by Rossi Rosario Burgos
  • Meraki Systems Manager, by Paul Fidler
  • A Better Way to Design Training SSIDs/VLANs, by Paul Fidler

Cisco is honored to be a Premium Partner of the Black Hat NOC, and is the Official Network Platform, Mobile Device Management, Malware Analysis and DNS (Domain Name Service) Provider of Black Hat.

2022 was Cisco’s sixth year as a NOC partner for Black Hat Europe. However, it was our first time building the network for Black Hat Europe. We used experiences of Black Hat Asia 2022 and Black Hat USA 2022 to refine the planning for network topology design and equipment. Below are our fellow NOC partners providing hardware, to build and secure the network, for our joint customer: Black Hat.

Designing the Black Hat Network, by Evan Basta

We are grateful to share that Black Hat Europe 2022 was the smoothest experience we’ve had in the years at Black Hat. This is thanks to the 15 Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure engineers on site (plus virtually supporting engineers) to build, operate and secure the network; and great NOC leadership and collaborative partners.

To plan, configure, deploy (in two days), maintain resilience, and recover (in four hours) an enterprise class network, took a lot of coordination. We appreciate the Black Hat NOC leadership, Informa and the NOC partners; meeting each week to discuss the best design, staffing, gear selection and deployment, to meet the unique needs of the conference. Check out the “Meraki Unboxed” podcast – Episode 94: Learnings from the Black Hat Europe 2022 Cybersecurity Event

We must allow real malware on the Black Hat network: for training, demonstrations, and briefing sessions; while protecting the attendees from attack within the network from their fellow attendees, and prevent bad actors from using the network to attack the Internet. It is a critical balance to ensure everyone has a safe experience, while still being able to learn from real world malware, vulnerabilities, and malicious websites.

In addition to the weekly meetings with Black Hat and the other partners, the Cisco Meraki engineering team of Sandro Fasser, Rossi Rosario Burgos, Otis Ioannou, Asmae Boutkhil, Jeffry Handal and I met every Friday for two months. We also discussed the challenges in a Webex space with other engineers who worked on past Black Hat events.

The mission:

Division of labor is essential to reduce mistakes and stay laser focused on security scope. Otis took the lead working on network topology design with Partners. Asmae handled the port assignments for the switches. Rossi ensured every AP and Switch was tracked, and the MAC addresses were provided to Palo Alto Networks for DCHP assignments. Otis and Rossi spent two days in the server room with the NOC partners, ensuring every switch was operating and configured correctly. Rossi also deployed and configured a remote Registration switch for Black Hat.

AP Placement Planning, by Sandro Fasser

In the weeks before deployment, our virtual Meraki team member, Aleksandar Dimitrov Vladimirov, and I focused on planning and creating a virtual Wi-Fi site survey. Multiple requirements and restrictions had to be taken into consideration. The report was based on the ExCel centre floor plans, the space allocation requirements from Black Hat and the number of APs we had available to us. Although challenging to create, with some uncertainties and often changing requirements due to the number of stakeholders involved, the surveys AP placement for best coverage ended up being pivotal at the event.

Below is the Signal Strength plan for the Expo Hall Floor on the 5 GHz band. The original plan to go with a dual-Band deployment was adjusted onsite and the 2.4 GHz band was disabled to enhance performance and throughput. This was a decision made during the network setup, in coordination with the NOC Leadership and based on experience from past conferences.

Upon arrival at the ExCel Centre, we conducted a walkthrough of the space that most of us had only seen as a floor plan and on some photos. Thanks to good planning, we could start deploying the 100+ APs immediately, with only a small number of changes to optimize the deployment on-site. As the APs had been pre-staged and added to the Meraki dashboard, including their location on the floor maps, the main work was placing and cabling them physically. During operation, the floor plans in the Meraki Dashboard were a visual help to easily spot a problem and navigate the team on the ground to the right spot, if something had to be adjusted.

As the sponsors and attendees filled each space, in the Meraki dashboard, we were able to see in real-time the number of clients connected to each AP, currently and over the time of the conference. This enabled quick reaction if challenges were identified, or APs could be redeployed to other zones. Below is the ExCel Centre Capital Hall and London Suites, Level 0. We could switch between the four levels with a single click on the Floor Plans, and drill into any AP, as needed.

The Location heatmaps also provided essential visibility into conference traffic, both on the network and footfalls of attendees. Physical security is also an important aspect of cybersecurity; we need to know how devices move in space, know where valuable assets are located and monitor their safety.

Below is the Business Hall at lunchtime, on the opening day of the conference. You can see no live APs in the bottom right corner of the Location heatmap. This is an example of adapting the plan to reality onsite. In past Black Hat Europe conferences, the Lobby in that area was the main entrance. Construction in 2022 closed this entrance. So, those APs were reallocated to the Level 1 Lobby, where attendees would naturally flow from Registration.

The floor plans and heatmaps also helped with the Training, Briefings and Keynote network resilience. Capacity was easy to add temporarily, and we were able to remove it and relocate it after a space emptied.

Meraki API Integration for automatic device blocking

During our time in the NOC, we had the chance to work with other vendor engineers and some use cases that came up led to interesting collaborations. One specific use case was that we wanted to block wireless clients, that show some malicious or bad behavior, automatically after they have been identified by one of the SOC analysts on the different security platforms, in addition we wanted to show them a friendly warning page that guides them to the SOC for a friendly conversation.

The solution was a script that can be triggered thru the interfaces of the other security products and attaches a group policy thru the Meraki Dashboard, including a quarantine VLAN and a splash page, via the Meraki APIs. This integration was just one of the many collaboration bits that we worked on.

Wi-Fi Air Marshal, by Jérémy Couture, Head of SOC, Paris 2024 Olympic Games

During the first day of training, in the Meraki dashboard Air Marshal, I observed packet flood attacks, against we were able to adapt and remain resilient.

I also observed an AP spoofing and broadcast de-authentication attack. I was able to quickly identify the location of the attack, which was at the Lobby outside the Business Hall.  Should the attacks continue, physical security had the information to intervene. We also had the ability to track the MAC address throughout the venue, as discussed in Christian Clasen’s section in part two.

From our experiences at Black Hat USA 2022, we had encrypted frames enabled, blunting the attack.

Meraki Dashboards, by Rossi Rosario Burgos

The Meraki dashboards made it very easy to monitor the health of the network APs and Switches, with the ability to aggregate data, and quickly pivot into any switch, AP or clients.

Through the phases of the conference, from two days of pre-conference setup, to focused and intense training the first two days, and transition to the briefings and Business Hall, we were able to visualize the network traffic.

In addition, we could see the number of attendees who passed through the covered area of the conference, with or without connecting to the network. Christian Clasen takes this available data to a new level in Part 2 of the blog.

As the person with core responsibilities for the switch configuration and uptime, the Meraki dashboard made it very simple to quickly change the network topology, according to the needs of the Black Hat customer.

Meraki Systems Manager, by Paul Fidler

If you refer back to Black Hat USA 2022, you’d have seen that we had over 1,000 iOS devices to deploy, with which we had several difficulties. For context, the company that leases the devices to Black Hat doesn’t use a Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform for any of their other shows…Black Hat is the only one that does. So, instead of using a mass deployment technology, like Apple’s Automated Device Enrollment, the iOS devices are “prepared” using Apple Configurator. This includes uploading a Wi-Fi profile to the devices as part of that process. In Las Vegas, this Wi-Fi profile wasn’t set to auto join the Wi-Fi, resulting in the need to manually change this on 1,000 devices. Furthermore, 200 devices weren’t reset or prepared, so we had those to reimage as well.

Black Hat Europe 2022 was different. We took the lessons from US and coordinated with the contractor to prepare the devices. Now, if you’ve ever used Apple Configurator, there’s several steps needed to prepare a device. However, all of these can be actions can be combined into a Blueprint:

Instead of there being several steps to prepare a device, there is now just one! Applying the Blueprint!

For Black Hat Europe, this included:

  • Wi-Fi profile
  • Enrollment, including supervision
  • Whether to allow USB pairing
  • Setup Assistant pane skipping

There’s lots of other things that can be achieved as well, but this results in the time taken to enroll and set up a device to around 30 seconds. Since devices can be set up in parallel (you’re only limited by the number of USB cables / ports you have), this really streamlines the enrollment and set up process.

Now, for the future, whilst you can’t Export these blueprints, they are transportable. If you open Terminal on a Mac and type:
cd /Users/<YOUR USER NAME>/Library/Group Containers/K36BKF7T3D.group.com.apple.configurator/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator/Blueprints

You’ll see a file / package called something.blueprint This can be zipped up and emailed to some else so, they can then use the exact same Blueprint! You may need to reboot your computer for the Blueprint to appear in Apple Configurator.

Device Naming / Lock Screen Messages

As mentioned, the registration / lead capture / session scanning devices are provided by the contractor. Obviously, these are all catalogued and have a unique device code / QR code on the back of them. However, during setup, any device name provisioned on the device gets lost.

So, there’s three things we do to know, without having to resort to using the unwieldy serial number, what devices is what.

  • The first thing that we do is to use the Meraki API to rename Systems Manager Devices. The script created has some other functionality too, such as error handling, but it is possible to do this without a script. You can find it here. This ensures that the device has a name: iOS devices default to being called iPhone or iPad in Systems Manager when they first enroll, so, already, this is incredibly helpful.
  • The second thing we do is to use a simple Restrictions profile for iOS, which keeps the physical device’s name in sync with that in the dashboard
  • Lastly, we then use a Lock Screen payload to format the message on the device when it’s locked:

In the footnote, you’ll see Device Name and Device Serial in blue. This denotes that the values are actually dynamic and change per device. They include:

  • Organization name
  • Network name
  • Device name
  • Device serial
  • Device model
  • Device OS version
  • Device notes
  • Owner name
  • Owner email
  • Owner username
  • SM device ID

On the Lock Screen, it’s now possible to see the device’s name and serial number, without having to flip the device over (A problem for the registration devices which are locked in a secure case) or open systems preferences.

We also had integration with SecureX device insights, to see the security status of each iOS device.

With the ability to quickly check on device health from the SecureX dashboard.

 

Data Security

This goes without saying, but the iOS devices (Registration, Lead Capture and Session Scanning) do have access to personal information. To ensure the security of the data, devices are wiped at the end of the conference. This is incredibly satisfying, hitting the Erase Devices button in Meraki Systems Manager, and watching the 100+ devices reset!

A Better Way to Design Training SSIDs/VLANs, by Paul Fidler

Deploying a network like Black Hat takes a lot of work, and repetitive configuration. Much of this has been covered in previous blogs. However, to make things easier for this event, instead of the 60 training SSIDs we had in Black Hat US 2022, the Meraki team discussed the benefits of moving to iPSKs with Black Hat NOC Leadership, which accepted the plan.

For context, instead of having a single pre shared key for an SSID, iPSK functionality allows you to have 1000+. Each of these iPSKs can be assigned its own group policy / VLAN. So, we created a script:

  • That consumed networkID, SSID, Training name, iPSK and VLAN from a CSV
  • Created a group policy for that VLAN with the name of the training
  • Created an iPSK for the given SSID that referred to the training name

This only involves five API calls:

  • For a given network name, get the network ID
  • Get Group Policies
  • If the group policy exists, use that, else create a group policy, retaining the group policy ID
  • Get the SSIDs (to get the ID of the SSID)
  • Create an iPSK for the given SSID ID

The bulk of the script is error handling (The SSID or network doesn’t exist, for example) and logic!

The result was one SSID for all of training: BHTraining, and each classroom had their own password. This reduced the training SSIDs from over a dozen and helped clear the airwaves.

Check out part two – Black Hat Europe 2022 NOC: The SOC Inside the NOC 

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Cisco NOC team:

  • Meraki Network: Evan Basta, Sandro Fasser, Rossi Rosario Burgos, Otis Ioannou, Asmae Boutkhil, Jeffry Handal and Aleksandar Dimitrov Vladimirov
  • Meraki Systems Manager: Paul Fidler
  • Cisco Secure: Ian Redden, Christian Clasen, Aditya Sankar, Ryan MacLennan, Guillaume Buisson, Jerome Schneider, Robert Taylor, Piotr Jarzynka, Tim Wadhwa-Brown and Matthieu Sprunck
  • Threat Hunter / Paris 2024 Olympics SOC: Jérémy Couture

Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover, Iain Davidson, Alessandro Contini and Alessandro Zatti), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland, Matt Ford, Matt Smith and Mathew Chase), Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).

About Black Hat

For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.


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RSA Conference® 2022 Security Operations Center Findings Report

By Jessica Bair

NetWitness and Cisco released the third annual Findings Report from the RSA Conference® 2022 Security Operations Center (SOC).

The RSA Conference® SOC analyzes the Moscone Center wireless traffic, which is an open network during the week of the Conference.

The role of the SOC at RSA Conference is an educational exhibit sponsored by NetWitness and Cisco. It has elements of a SOC like you would create to protect an organization. The RSAC SOC coordinated with the Moscone Center Network Operation Center for a SPAN of the network traffic from the Moscone Center wireless network. In the SOC, NetWitness had real time visibility of the traffic traversing the wireless network. Cisco provided automated malware analysis, threat intelligence, DNS visibility and Intrusion Detection; brought together with SecureX.

The goal of the RSAC SOC is to use technology to educate conference attendees about what happens on a typical wireless network. The education comes in the form of daily SOC tours and an RSA Conference® session. You can watch the replay of the ‘EXPOSURE: The 3rd Annual RSAC SOC Report’ session here.

The findings report addresses several security topics, including:

  • Encrypted vs. Unencrypted network traffic
  • Cleartext Usernames and Passwords
  • Voice over IP
  • Threat Hunting
  • Malware Analysis, through the NetWitness® integration
  • Malicious Behavior
  • Domain Name Server (DNS)
  • Automate, Automate
  • Intrusion Detection
  • Firepower Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE)
  • Firepower and NetWitness® Integration

Look forward to seeing you in 2023!

Download the RSA Conference® 2022 Security Operations Center Findings Report here.

Acknowledgements: Our appreciation to those who made the RSAC SOC possible.

NetWitness Staff

Percy Tucker

Steve Fink

Bart Stump

Dave Glover

Cisco Staff

Jessica Bair Oppenheimer – Cisco SOC Manager

Ian Redden – Team Lead & Integrations

Aditya Sankar / Ben Greenbaum – SecureX & Malware Analytics

Alejo Calaoagan / Christian Clasen – Cisco Umbrella

Dinkar Sharma / Seyed Khadem-Djahaghi – Cisco Secure Firewall

Matt Vander Horst – SecureX Orchestration

Doug Hurd – Partnerships

Hardware Support

Eric Kostlan

Navin Sinha

Zohreh Khezri

Eric Goodwin

Gabe Gilligan and the amazing staff at XPO Digital!


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Secure Your Hybrid Workforce Using These SOC Best Practices

By Pat Correia

Hybrid Workforce is here to stay

Just a few years ago when the topic of supporting offsite workers arose, some of the key conversation topics were related to purchase, logistics, deployment, maintenance and similar issues. The discussions back then were more like “special cases” vs. today’s environment where supporting workers offsite (now known as the hybrid workforce) has become a critical mainstream topic.

Figure 1: Security challenges in supporting the hybrid workforce

Now with the bulk of many organization’s workers off-premise, the topic of security and the ability of a security vendor to help support an organization’s hybrid workers has risen to the top of the selection criteria.  In a soon to be released Cisco endpoint survey, it’s not surprising that the ability of a security vendor to make supporting the hybrid workforce easier and more efficient was the key motivating factor when organizations choose security solutions.

Figure 2: Results from recent Cisco Survey

Best Practices complement your security tools

Today, when prospects and existing customers look at Cisco’s ability to support hybrid workers with our advanced security solution set and open platform, it’s quite clear that we can deliver on that promise. But, yes, good tools make it easier and more efficient, but the reality is that running a SOC or any security group, large or small, still takes a lot of work. Most organizations not only rely on advanced security tools but utilize a set of best practices to provide clarity of roles, efficiency of operation, and for the more prepared, have tested these best practices to prove to themselves that they are prepared for what’s next.

Give this a listen!

Knowing that not all organizations have this degree of security maturity and preparedness, we gathered a couple of subject matter experts together to discuss 5 areas of time-tested best practices that, besides the advanced tools offered by Cisco and others, can help your SOC (or small security team) yield actionable insights and guide you faster, and with more confidence, toward the outcomes you want.

In this webinar you will hear practical advice from Cisco technical marketing and a representative from our award winning Talos Threat Intelligence group, the same group who have created and are maintaining breach defense in partnership with Fortune 500 Security Operating Centers (SOC) around the globe.

Figure 3: Webinar Speakers

You can expect to hear our 5 Best Practices recommendations on the following topics;

  1. Establishing Consistency – know your roles and responsibilities without hesitation.
  2. Incident Response Plan – document it, share it and test it with your stakeholders.
  3. Threat Hunting – find out what you don’t know and minimize the threat.
  4. Retro Learning – learn from the past and be better prepared.
  5. Unifying stakeholders – don’t go it alone.

Access this On-Demand Webinar now!

Check out our webinar to find out how you can become more security resilient and be better prepared for what’s next.


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