Newsletter #186: What I Read This Week
Newsletter #186
Within the security news of the week were updates on some more DPRK stuff, an AI orchestrated espionage campaign, and going over different Security Engineer archetypes.
Meme of the week goes to
There’s a certain beauty to the craft that sometimes doesn’t quite feel the same with AI tools. IYKYK
Now, let’s get into it.
What I Read This Week
Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign
Anthropic reports detecting and responding to an AI ran espionage campaign, first of its kind
Ended up being kind of a nothing burger when it comes to actionable takeaways. Won’t spend too much time on this one, as its been beaten to death over the past week
For the full report, check it out here
D@S #69 - FanDuel’s All-Engineer SOC: From Phishing to IR with Custom Agents
Always cool to hear how other teams are approaching some of the same problems we all are
Another post on signal for tracking DPRK fraudulent workers
It goes over data points such as monitor display configs, refresh rates, and more
Now, I wouldn’t count on KVM’s as a malicious indicator in isolation when looking for this fraudulent activity, but as overall signal
I Studied How Top 0.1% Engineering Teams Do Code Reviews
Neo Kim goes over 42 ways teams can have better code reviews
#1 and #5 are big ones and points that I like to stick to, makes for a cleaner review process
The 5 Cybersecurity Engineer Archetypes
Day goes over 5 archetypes for a Security Engineer and how they approach and work through problems
Translating how these can look like when it comes to domains in the field
Breach Related News
Five Plead Guilty in U.S. for Helping North Korean IT Workers Infiltrate 136 Companies
Their crimes included allowing IT workers located in NK to use their U.S. identities and hosting the company laptops
Good news when more of these are locked up
DoorDash hit by new data breach in October exposing user information
This impacts a mix of customers, Dashers, and Merchants
The wording is kinda sus here
Are “first and last name, phone number, email address and physical address” not sensitive information anymore?
Wrapping Up
This week, we caught up on the top stories in Cybersecurity.
P.S. I previously worked on a Cybersecurity Interview Guide to help in the uphill battle that is interviews.
It’s a collection of interview questions and scenarios that you could face, that I’ve annotated over the years and put together in one place.
This is available here
I will announce some updates to this project next week!
See you in the next one.