Misconfigurations Management

This course is designed for aspiring Red & Blue Teamers, Security leaders, Network defenders and those thinking of transitioning into cybersecurity, or even those already into cybersecurity that needs that holistic view of how both red and blue teams can work together efficiently in keeping people, processes and technology infrastructures secure by understanding the most common misconfigurations that leads to cyber attacks and most importantly how to prevent these attacks from occurring. The learner will gain knowledge and practical skills where applicable in regards to the following:

• The Top 10 most common cybersecurity misconfigurations found in both mid to large size organizations that leads to cyber attacks.

• Establishing security baselines in Windows Cloud Environments (Azure) to mitigate misconfigurations leading to cyber attacks.

• How to practically address the following top 10 misconfigurations that leads to network\cyber attacks:

    1-Default configurations of software and applications

    2-Improper separation of user/administrator privilege

    3-Insufficient internal network monitoring

    4-Lack of network segmentation

    5-Poor patch management

    6-Bypass of system access controls

    7-Weak or misconfigured multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods

    8-Insufficient access control lists (ACLs) on network shares and services

    9-Poor credential hygiene

    10-Unrestricted code execution

• Cyber risks associated with these misconfiguration and how they are exploited by attackers.

• Best Practice recommendations for mitigating these cyber risks associated with these misconfigurations

• Use of MITRE ATT&CK Technical recommendations for Mitigating these attacks resulting from these misconfiguration

• Introduction to root cause analysis and its benefits to a cybersecurity mindset

• Intro to Open-Source Tools for Configurations Management to mitigate cyber attacks

• Ways to Improve Monitoring and Hardening of Networks for Blue & Network Admin Teams against cyber attacks

• Use of AI to generate defense checklist that can be used as guides by network defenders to prevent these misconfigurations.

• Securing your cloud (Azure) environment from misconfigurations via Red Team-Azure Penetration Testing

The misconfigurations to be explored in this course are based on NSA and CISA teams conducting comprehensive security assessments of numerous network enclaves within various organizations and during these assessments, they identified the 10 most common network misconfigurations, which are systemic weaknesses across many networks leading to system compromises.