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Bad information security advice

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  • phenomlabundefined

    It’s not often that I post anything on LinkedIn, but the post below caught my eye, and raised an eyebrow (to say the least) when I read it.

    Screenshot_2023-08-24-20-39-47-54_254de13a4bc8758c9908fff1f73e3725.jpg

    I typically remain impassive and neutral to most of these types of post as they are usually aimed at selling you something. However, the frankly absurd security advice here being offered was so bad, I found it hard to ignore and posted the below response

    Forgive me if I decide not to take any of your cyber security advice as all of the points you’ve raised are the entire point of phishing exercises. Do you really think a nefarious actor isn’t going to send emails that look just like this (mostly because they have succeeded elsewhere as others have highlighted)?

    Your profile states that you are the leader of a world class cyber security team, yet you offer really bad advice like this? This is exactly how all cyber security campaigns work and their effectiveness is blatantly obvious by the screenshot you posted.

    “Hurt feelings” are irrelevant when you are measuring the effectiveness of your cyber security program. As the primary defense in any organization, the security department needs to be in a position to detect and repel as many attacks as possible. The paradigm here being that an organization needs to stop thousands of these attacks getting through per day (probably way more) yet an attacker only needs one link to be clicked for their campaign to succeed.

    Employee security awareness should in fact be everything that the original poster claims it shouldn’t be. Just look at the success rate of previous campaigns which any decent training program is based on.

    The bottom line here is that I really don’t understand the reasoning for the original post. This guy claims to be the leader of a world class cyber security team, yet he decides to give poor advice like this?

    Speechless. And this is a so called professional?? We’re all doomed 😱

    Author of OGProxy, Swatch, Threaded, Card, and most of Sudonix's bugs…

    1

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    @mike-jones Hi Mike,

    There are multiple answers to this, so I’m going to provide some of the most important ones here

    JS is a client side library, so you shouldn’t rely on it solely for validation. Any values collected by JS will need to be passed back to the PHP backend for processing, and will need to be fully sanitised first to ensure that your database is not exposed to SQL injection. In order to pass back those values into PHP, you’ll need to use something like

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    i am pretty sure the user could just use the path to the php file and just type a web address into the search bar

    This is correct, although with no parameters, no data would be returned. You can actually prevent the PHP script from being called directly using something like

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    Would it be enough to just check if the number are a number 1-100 and if the drop down is one of the 5 specific words and then just not run the rest of the code if it doesn’t fit one of those perameters?

    In my view, no, as this will expose the PHP file to SQL injection attack without any server side checking.

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