Wow, 2016 was quite a year, which provided the AlienVault team and our guest bloggers with plenty of topics to blog on from InfoSec best practices to OceanLotus to Reverse Engineering to building a home malware lab! We are looking forward to providing more educational and useful blogs in 2017. As in 2016, we welcome and support guest bloggers who have contributions to make to the Infosec community. If you are interested in being a guest blogger, please contact me at kbrew@alienvault.com. Lastly, please subscribe to our blog to ensure you get all the new goodies either daily or a weekly summary in your inbox.
With our further ado, following are the top 12 AlienVault blogs of 2016:
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Building a Home Lab to Become a Malware Hunter – A Beginner’s Guide – The top blog of 2016 was written by @sudosev and explains how he set up his own home malware lab.
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How Penetration Testers Use Google Hacking – Jayme Hancock describes how to do Google hacking / dorking cleverly as a pen tester. It even includes a helpful “cheat sheet”.
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Security Issues of WiFi – How it Works – Everyone loves WiFi, but Joe Gray explains how WiFi works and describes the many security issues and nuances associated with WiFi.
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Reverse Engineering Malware – In this blog, I interview some members of our AlienVault Labs team to learn how they reverse engineer malware when they’re doing security research. The team describes several approaches and tools to use in analyzing malware samples.
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The Mirai Botnet, Tip of the IoT Iceberg – Javvad Malik talks about IoT security challenges in general, and focuses on the Mirai botnet which focused on XiongMai Technologies IoT equipment in a recent attack.
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Web Application Security: Methods and Best Practices – The OWASP top 10 and web application security testing are covered in this educational blog by Garrett Gross.
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Common Types of Malware, 2016 Update – Lauren Barraco outlines the different categories of malware and highlights What’s New in 2016.
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PowerWare or PoshCoder? Comparison and Decryption – Peter Ewane of the Labs team talks about his research into PowerShell vulnerabilities and exploits. He focuses on PowerWare, whick seems to be heavily based on PoshCoder.
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Can You Explain Encryption to Me? – In this blog by Javvad Malik, he describes encryption to his boss in a hilarious exchange of notes. Javvad then outlines the basics of encryption in a very understandable way.
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OceanLotus for OS X – an Application Bundle Pretending to be an Adobe Flash Update – Eddie Lee of the Labs team talks about his research and analysis of OceanLotus malware for OS X.
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Operation BlockBuster unveils the actors behind the Sony attacks – Jaime Blasco describes the coordinated coalition effort called “Operation Blockbuste”r involving AlienVault and several other security companies led by Novetta. This industry initiative was created to share information and potentially disrupt the infrastructure and tools from an actor named the Lazarus Group.
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Intrusion Detection Techniques: Methods & Best Practices – another educational blog with best practices with IDS/IPS from Garrett Gross.
