Detecting ‘Dark Tunnels’ with Microsoft Defender using KQL

Detecting ‘Dark Tunnels’ is an important element to corporate security, much like detecting unauthorised RMM usage. But what is a dark tunnel?

according to GROK:

A dark tunnel (sometimes called a “dark pool tunnel” or simply a secure reverse tunnel in networking contexts) refers to a type of secure, outbound-only tunneling technology that allows private access to internal services, devices, or networks without exposing them to the public internet. The “dark” aspect emphasizes that the tunnel is hidden or invisible from external scanners—there’s no inbound port forwarding, firewall holes, or public IP exposure required. Instead, it relies on encrypted outbound connections from the internal resource to a cloud-based relay or peer-to-peer mesh, enabling zero-trust access (e.g., via authentication tokens or keys).
This approach is popular in DevOps, IoT, remote work, and cybersecurity for bridging on-premises or edge devices to the cloud securely, often bypassing NAT traversal issues or legacy VPN complexities.

Education

Windows Defender at my tunnel

I was doing some testing with Cloudflare tunnels this weekend and I woke up this morning to see if funny honeypot messages I had, I quickly checked if the site was online and found a cloudflare error message. This is a just an IIS instance running on a windows 11 PC (with no WIFI or Bluetooth) plugged into a test network (so if it gets pwn3d, it’s not going to impact anything important).

Education

Kerberoasting History

Kerberoasting, a technique for offline cracking of Kerberos service account passwords in Active Directory environments, was publicly introduced and detailed by Tim Medin in his research paper and Black Hat USA 2014 presentation titled “Attacking Microsoft Kerberos: Kicking the Guard Dog of Hades.”

Breach

Ransomware kill chains are boring.. will we ever learn?

Are we stuck in a cyber world that never learns? are we doomed to suffer the same fate over and over again? Well, not if you take action, you can totally prevent events like this!

This is a fast post using an LLM to analyse the Capita redacted ICO report. Hopefully it will help people think about things and take the lessons and apply them in their own organisations.

Education

A threat to sanity – Cyber Myth: Juice Jacking

“Juice jacking” has become a modern cybersecurity myth — a catchy scare story built on a long-patched Android debugging issue and fueled by viral fear rather than facts. Despite years of warnings, there are no confirmed cases of real-world juice jacking attacks; the cost, effort, and low reward make it an impractical method for criminals. Yet the myth persists because it’s vivid, simple, and scary — everything our brains latch onto. The real danger is not the USB port at the airport, but the distraction such myths create. When people focus on imaginary threats, they waste precious attention that should go toward genuine risks like weak passwords, missing MFA, unpatched systems, and poor backups. So let’s take a bit of a deeper dive into this subject, because by it’s important to understand what to, and what not to focus on in my experience!

News

‘Secure’ Firewall backups, until they are not!

Firewalls are often both a defended gate but also the front door to access corporate network. That is all lovely until it’s not! You see so many corporate network intrusion incidents occur from threat actors simply logging into the VPN (due to lack of VPN), and then we have the software vulnerabilities where they shell their way in, but did you think that another way could be from stealing all the backups from a ‘security’ provider? Well now you might! There’s been bit of an incident (one that started as it’s only 5% of customers but actually it was 100% of customers who used the backup feature! YIKES), but before that let’s look at the typical landscape!

Threat Intel

Shiny Hunters / Scattered Spider Alleged Victims

Shiny Hunters/Scattered spider have published a leaked download site (DLS)/extortion site etc.
This is a fast publish with content mainly generated using an LLM (GROK). This appears to relate to victims who have been victims of social engineering, it does not appear to be related to the Salesforce, SalesLoft Drift breach: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=005134951&type=1

Education

Dark Duckie Hotel Demo

Update Adobe Reader

Your Adobe Reader Needs Updating

Your version of Adobe Reader is outdated. To ensure the best experience and security, please update to the latest version.

Update Adobe Reader Now

Guides

Breaching WPA2 PSK Wireless Networks

This weekend I was running a workshop with my awesome friend James, where we were discussing the realities of wireless network security, man in the middle attacks and what we have found in the field, both from an offensive perspective and as corporate network defenders. As with all things in life, sometime reality doesn’t work quite as well as a demo! So I’ve done a quick thread on twitter showing the kill chain an adversary can deploy when attacking WPA2 PSK (without PMF enforced) networks. This is written as a twitter thread so bear with the style!

Education

Won’t someone think of the children!

Recently the Online Safety Act (OSA) has come into force, now regardless of your opinion on this, I wanted to look at some things that exist today when considering children’s mobile phone access.

When you setup an iPhone or Android phone for use by a child, you have to complete KYC with Apple and Google using an adult account which is verified by credit card/debit card.

So to get an account as a child you need the parent to set this up, link the account to the parents account and pass an element of KYC/verification including a 0 fee payment check.

What we found during recent testing is that Safe Search is enforced by default on children’s <13yo accounts. However we found that a some things that were a bit surprising.