Featuring demos and practical tips, this webinar, "Securing Mobile Payments: Protecting Digital Wallets and SoftPOS from Attacks," will help security professionals collaborate more effectively with development teams to build stronger protection strategies and better defend digital wallet and SoftPOS mobile apps against today’s most common threats.

Welcome to Attack & Defend!

Here we are again, investigating both red and blue team solutions to the dangers of the cybersecurity world. You'll find tutorials, best practices, tools, and a few other pointers to get you started on taking your next step. Make sure to check out the Humble Bundle deal listed below as well!

Check out the ongoing Top Ten MITRE ATT&CK threats of 2024 breakdown that has launched through our sister newsletter, the _secpro. But anyway, here's some of the biggest problems facing people inyour position today!

Cheers!
Austin Miller
Editor-in-Chief

Product Walkthrough: Securing Microsoft Copilot with Reco - Find out how Reco keeps Microsoft 365 Copilot safe by spotting risky prompts, protecting data, managing user access, and identifying threats - all while keeping productivity high.

Security Advisory from Commvault - "We are providing an update to the security advisory issued onMarch 7, 2025. Based on new threat intelligence, we continue to investigate recent activity by a nation-state threat actor contained within our Azure environment. This activity has affected a small number of customers we have in common with Microsoft, and we are working with those customers to provide assistance."

Inside the Latest Espionage Campaign of Nebulous Mantis - Nebulous Mantis (a.k.a. Cuba, STORM-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UNC2596) is a Russian-speaking cyber espionage group that has actively deployed the RomCom remote access trojan (RAT) and Hancitorloader in targeted campaigns since mid-2019. Operating with geopolitical motives, the group primarily focuses on critical infrastructure, government agencies, political leaders, and NATO related defense organizations. They use spear-phishing emails with weaponized document links to deliver RomCom for espionage, lateral movement, and data theft. Nebulous Mantis has been using the sophisticated RomCom since around mid-2022. This RAT is primarily employed for espionage and ransomware activities.

Building Private Processing for AI tools on WhatsApp - AI has revolutionized the way people interact with technology and information, making it possible for people to automate complex tasks and gain valuable insights from vast amounts of data. However, the current state of AI processing — which relies on large language models often running on servers, rather than mobile hardware — requires that users’ requests are visible to the provider. Although that works for many use cases, it presents challenges in enabling people to use AI to process private messages while preserving the level of privacy afforded by end-to-end encryption.

What It Takes to Defend a Cybersecurity Company from Today’s Adversaries - "Talking about being targeted is uncomfortable for any organization. For cybersecurity vendors, it’s practically taboo. But the truth is security vendors sit at an interesting cross-section of access, responsibility, and attacker ire that makes us prime targets for a variety of threat actors, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. When adversaries compromise a security company, they don’t just breach a single environment—they potentially gain insight into how thousands of environments and millions of endpoints are protected."

Vechus/ODC-challenges - A collection of offensive and defensive training resources, perfect for keeping you and your team sharp!

shr3ddersec/Shr3dKit - This tool kit that is very much influenced by infosecn1nja's kit. Use this script to grab majority of the repos.

lengjibo/FourEye - An AV Evasion tool for Red Team Ops.

Mathuiss/cyber_wolf - A tool for building offensive skills with firewalls.

jorge-333/Virtual-Machine-Home-Lab - …built for the purpose of studying, Installing, and configuring Switches, Routers, Firewalls, SIEMs, IPS's, and Offensive Security Tools.

Vechus/ODC-challenges - A collection of offensive and defensive training resources, perfect for keeping you and your team sharp!

awais922609/Defensive-Learning - This repo covers firewall configurations, SIEM deployment, and various other important defensive topics, giving you the tools to build up your defensive skills.

0xInfection/Awesome-WAF - A collection of the best resources for improving your firewall skills; potentially the best collection online!

Ekultek/WhatWaf - …and once you’ve mastered that, here’s a way to get around WAFs

racecloud/NetBlocker - A specific implementation of a firewall script that reads logs from various servers, validates against public databases with offensive hosts and adjusts a MikroTik firewall.

Exploiting DeepSeek-R1: Breaking Down Chain of Thought Security: "The growing usage of chain of thought (CoT) reasoning marks a new era for large language models. CoT reasoning encourages the model to think through its answer before the final response. A distinctive feature of DeepSeek-R1 is its direct sharing of the CoT reasoning. We conducted a series of prompt attacks against the 671-billion-parameter DeepSeek-R1 and found that this information can be exploited to significantly increase attack success rates."

Addressing the public sector’s penetration testing problems: The public sector is struggling to break free of an outdated model of penetration testing (pentesting) that requires federal civilian agencies and state, local and higher education institutions alike to contend with approaches that don’t scale and can introduce their own security challenges. But these antiquated methods of security testing can’t be addressed until organizations understand what causes these problems: bandwidth, efficiency and security.

How purple teaming enhances inter-team collaboration and effectiveness in cybersecurity: "It’s no longer about team red vs. team blue. It’s time to think about team purple. This security force blends offensive and defensive minds, blurring lines and boosting defenses. No more adversarial silos, just collaborative cycles and shared intel."