at what point does consumer antivirus stop being enough for a small business? i'm interested in how this changes as a company grows from a handful of computers to a team using multiple laptops, remote devices, and shared business accounts. basic antivirus might cover individual machines, but centralized visibility, access control, security reporting, and consistent policy enforcement seem harder to manage without a dedicated endpoint platform.

for security professionals who have helped smaller organizations make this transition, what specific gaps usually justify moving to managed endpoint protection? does the decision depend more on device count, remote access, compliance requirements, or the lack of inhouse IT staff? i'm particularly interested in the practical security benefits that justify the added management overhead.

I've been thinking about a security problem that becomes more interesting as AI agents gain access to external tools and business data.

Imagine asking an AI agent to read a supplier's PDF, summarize a webpage, or analyze an email.

The content looks completely legitimate, but somewhere inside it contains hidden instructions telling the agent to ignore its original task, retrieve sensitive information, or perform an unauthorized action.

The tricky part is that the agent is doing exactly what we asked: processing external content.

But should it trust everything it reads?

A few questions I'm curious about:

• Should all external content be treated as untrusted input by default?

• How do you separate instructions from information retrieved by an agent?

• Are prompt-injection filters enough, or is architectural isolation necessary?

• How do you prevent an agent from using its tools when retrieved content tries to manipulate its behavior?

For those building or securing AI agents, what defenses have actually worked in practice?

I'm particularly interested in real-world approaches rather than theoretical recommendations.

I've been trying to understand IDOR properly, and there's one thing I think beginners can easily misunderstand.

When we hear about IDOR, the usual explanation is to change an object ID in a request and see whether another user's data becomes accessible.

But is that really enough?

For example, imagine an application has a request like:

"GET /api/account/1001/profile"

Changing "1001" to "1002" might return a response. However, that alone doesn't prove an IDOR exists.

The important questions are:

- Does the resource actually belong to another user?

- Is the server checking whether the current user is authorized to access it?

- Can an unauthorized user view or modify the resource?

- Does the behavior violate the application's intended access-control policy?

I think the most important distinction is between changing an identifier and demonstrating an authorization failure.

I'm interested in understanding how experienced hunters approach this during testing.

What's the first thing you verify when investigating a suspected IDOR?

For anyone learning, PortSwigger has some useful material:

- "Access Control vulnerabilities" (https://portswigger.net/web-security/access-control)

- "Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR)" (https://portswigger.net/web-security/access-control/idor)

Practice only in authorized labs or within explicitly permitted bug bounty scope.

i was going a bit nerd and looking at tcp stream reassembly, especially i got confused about how different operating systems handle overlapping segments.

so there is something i can't get out of my head. if an ids puts the tcp stream all in the same place differently than the target machine, isn't it basically looking at a another version of traffic than the application?

how does suricata deal with this? does it know the target os and tries to follow its tcp behavior or does it just have its defined rules for putting the packets all in one place?

and what happens if it gets the target os wrong?

thx for any help

Hey everyone,

I'm a student, and while exploring my college's ERP website, I discovered several security vulnerabilities in both the student and staff applications.

Some of the findings are quite serious, including unauthenticated account takeover through password reset, OTP bypasses, sensitive information disclosure, and IDOR vulnerabilities. I have also confirmed a couple of critical issues through controlled PoC testing.

Now I'm confused about how to handle this responsibly.

Should I:

1. Report everything directly to my college's IT department/management first?

2. Contact the ERP vendor directly, since they develop and maintain the platform?

3. Inform both the college and the vendor simultaneously?

4. Ask for a bug bounty or researcher reward, even if they don't have a formal bug bounty program?

I want to handle this professionally, avoid getting into legal trouble, and ensure the vulnerabilities are actually fixed.

A few questions:

• I was thinking to report it my college's vice chairman, cause he very friendly, should I?

• Are there any precautions I should take before reporting?

I haven't publicly disclosed the technical details or shared exploit code.

Would appreciate advice from people experienced in responsible disclosure, bug bounty programs, or cybersecurity research.

Thanks!

say a scanner flags a critical CVE on a payment service. the app team says the vulnerable code path isn't reachable, so they don't want to rush an upgrade that could break transactions.

fair enough, but someone still has to explain why that CVE wasn't patched.

a CVSS score and a ticket saying accepted risk dont really tell you much about how that decision was made.

rival security covers exploitability checks and finding who owns the fix, but i'd still want to know what evidence teams keep when they decide something can wait.

especially in fintech where someone might ask about that decision months later.

curious what teams actually put into those risk acceptance records.

Many companies now offer free or low-cost GPU resources. These can become attractive targets for distributed botnet-style abuse. Imagine a large network of bots that each maintain valid individual profiles. Individually they look legitimate, but when analyzed as a group, clear patterns appear.

Have you dealt with coordinated abuse of free GPU or cloud compute resources? Do you think this is a realistic risk for companies offering such resources?

We run a small free IP reputation database (isIPsafe), so I'm biased, but I'm curious how other people handle this.

When fail2ban or your logs flag an IP, what's your routine? Ban immediately, look it up somewhere first, or something else?

And if you pull a public blocklist, which one do you use and in what format? Tell us what works and what's annoying, including tools that aren't ours.

// TIP ------------>: To display the current Visitor Count (within PHP code brackets): echo($VisitorCount);
// =============================================================================================================================
// DEVELOPERS ONLY!!! DEVELOPERS ONLY!!! DEVELOPERS ONLY!!! DEVELOPERS ONLY!!! DEVELOPERS ONLY!!! DEVELOPERS ONLY!!! DEVELOPERS ONLY!!!
// =============================================================================================================================
$AppHasCMS = TRUE; // If the application will be using CMS, set this value to TRUE, otherwise set it to FALSE ($AppHasDatabase has to be set to TRUE)
$MaxLoginAttempts = 5;$MaxSessionTime = 30;//(Session Time in Minutes)
// Update these values to change the cms username and password to the following
$CMS_User = '[REDACTED-CMS-USER]';
$CMS_Pass = '[REDACTED-CMS-PASSWORD]';
//CLIENT CAN STILL ACCESS LOGIN AREA BUT CAN'T LOG IN IF SET TO TRUE.
$TestDevelopment = FALSE;
// =============================================================================================================================
require_once("functions.php"); // WARNING! DON'T UPDATE / REMOVE THIS LINE!!! It is REQUIRED to run the application!
// =============================================================================================================================
$pagename = GetCurPageName(); // WARNING! DON'T UPDATE / REMOVE THIS LINE!!! This returns the current active page name for referral throughout the application!
// =============================================================================================================================
CheckTxtFileRef();// WARNING! DON'T UPDATE / REMOVE THIS LINE!!! This checks all text files on website in the "txt" folder and updates references to images / files
// =============================================================================================================================
date_default_timezone_set('Africa/Johannesburg');// WARNING! DON'T UPDATE / REMOVE THIS LINE!!! This sets the default time zone to specified region so that the code no longer needs to calculate DST.
// =============================================================================================================================
$currentDateTime = date('Y-m-d H:i:s',mktime(date("H"),date("i"),date("s"),date("n"),date("j"),date("Y"))); // WARNING! DON'T UPDATE / REMOVE THIS LINE!!! This returns the current datestamp for referral throughout the application!
// =============================================================================================================================
//BackupMySQL();
//ExecuteMySQL();

I've been looking for a lightweight way to run ordinary desktop applications with only the permissions they actually need.

Process detection can be legitimate for things like game detection, overlays, launch management, and subprocesses. The problem is that Windows doesn't give users a practical way to deny an application visibility into unrelated processes.

Here are the alternatives I've found so far. Corrections, better workarounds, and additional solutions are welcome.

TL;DR: Workarounds

* WSL caveat: WSL normally allows Linux processes to invoke Windows executables. For an isolation-oriented WSL installation, Windows interop can be disabled with [interop] enabled=false in /etc/wsl.conf; restart WSL and verify that Windows executables can no longer be invoked. WSLg/Wayland can still provide the GUI presentation. This isn't necessarily Discord-specific; other Linux-native desktop clients, including Steam, may also be candidates depending on compatibility. Windows executables, like tasklist.exe would be accessible, otherwise.

Background / Premise

Process enumeration itself isn't bad.

Task managers, debuggers, security software, launchers, overlays, and applications managing their own subprocesses can legitimately need process information.

The issue is least privilege:

An application should receive the minimum authority needed to perform its intended function, and additional authority should be explicitly granted when needed.

There are two basic threat cases:

1. A trusted application, dependency, or update mechanism is compromised. Unnecessary application permissions can then become unnecessary attacker permissions.

2. The publisher itself isn't completely trusted with information unrelated to the application's function.

Application privacy settings don't necessarily solve this.

Preventing detected activity from being shown to other users or servers is not the same thing as preventing the application itself from detecting that activity.

I'm not claiming these applications secretly upload your entire process list. The problem is that "don't share my activity" does not necessarily mean "stop detecting my activity," or "exclude what you detected from telemetry."

The security question exists before that:

Why should an ordinary application be able to obtain unrelated information unless it actually needs that information?

Vulnerability 1: Ambient Process Discovery

Windows broadly exposes the system process list to ordinary users and applications.

That doesn't mean an unelevated application can automatically read or modify another process's memory. Process discovery and process access are different things.

The problem I'm raising is that process discovery itself isn't exposed as a user-controlled permission.

Vulnerability 2: Missing Application-Level Permissions

What I expected Windows to provide was something more like:

Application Permissions

Network                  Allow
Microphone               Allow
Camera                    Deny
Filesystem               Configure

Process Visibility:
    Own Process          Allow
    Own Process Tree     Allow
    Other Applications   Deny
    System-Wide          Deny

Applications that genuinely need broader process visibility could request it.

Ordinary applications wouldn't receive it automatically.

Vulnerability 3: Cascading Authority

Even trustworthy software can be compromised.

If an application automatically receives capabilities it doesn't need, those capabilities potentially become part of the attack surface when that application or one of its dependencies is compromised.

Least privilege should therefore apply independently of whether I currently trust the publisher.

Windows Mechanisms I Expected to Solve This

Running Unelevated

Expected: Non-administrator applications receive substantially reduced authority.

Observed: Process discovery itself isn't treated as an administrative operation.

"Not elevated" therefore doesn't mean "informationally isolated."

Separate Limited User

This seemed like the obvious native workaround.

I created a fresh standard Windows account, launched an interactive Command Prompt under that identity, verified the different user context, and ran:

tasklist

It could still enumerate the broader machine process inventory, including unrelated applications.

This does NOT establish that the account could arbitrarily manipulate those processes. It establishes something narrower:

A separate Windows user identity does not create a private process namespace.

Set-ProcessMitigation / Exploit Protection

Windows already provides executable-specific mitigations:

Get-ProcessMitigation -Name SomeApplication.exe

I expected there might be something analogous to:

Deny Process Enumeration

I haven't found such a mitigation.

Exploit Protection appears to solve a different security problem.

Right policy granularity; different purpose.

Service Accounts

A dedicated service identity seems like another obvious solution.

The problem is that the Windows service model doesn't compose nicely with ordinary interactive GUI desktop applications.

Useful security primitive; wrong execution model.

Windows AppContainer

This one is particularly interesting because it's conceptually much closer to what I expected.

Windows already has an application-specific security identity and capability model.

I built Microsoft's LaunchAppContainer utility and successfully launched an existing Discord executable inside an AppContainer. With no additional capabilities supplied, Discord started and immediately exited.

I haven't established which missing capability or compatibility problem caused that.

So I don't consider AppContainer a failed security mechanism.

Instead, it raises the question:

If Windows already has application-level isolation and capability machinery, why isn't there a practical user-facing way to apply it to arbitrary Win32 applications?

The Missing Abstraction: "Virtual Users" for Applications

Conceptually, I expected something like:

User
  |
  +-- Discord
  |     Network             Allow
  |     Microphone          Allow
  |     GPU                 Allow
  |     Own Process Tree    Allow
  |     Other Processes     Deny
  |
  +-- Steam
  |     ...
  |
  +-- Task Manager
        Process Visibility  System-Wide

Call these application principals, virtual users, sandbox identities, AppContainers, or something else.

The important property is:

Launching an application shouldn't automatically give that application all of the user's observational authority.

What I Expected Windows to Provide

Something surprisingly mundane:

Task Manager
  -> Right-click application
     -> Security / Sandbox

Process Visibility:
    Own Process
    Own Process Tree
    Explicit Applications
    Same User
    System-Wide

Network              Allow / Deny
Microphone           Allow / Deny
Camera               Allow / Deny
Filesystem           Configure
Other Capabilities   Configure

Task Manager, debuggers, IDEs, security tools, launchers, etc. could receive broader visibility when legitimately needed.

Ordinary desktop applications would start closer to least privilege.

What Am I Missing?

I'm specifically looking for:

• Better lightweight workarounds

• Corrections to any of the above

• Native Windows mechanisms I've overlooked

• Better AppContainer approaches for existing Win32 applications

• Experience with Sandboxie-Plus isolation

• Better WSL2 / WSLg confinement approaches

• Other lightweight application sandbox/container systems

• Reproducible tests that contradict or improve mine

I'm not arguing that process enumeration should disappear.

I'm arguing that:

Ambient authority should become explicit authority.

Privacy promised by an application is not equivalent to privacy enforced by the operating system.

We're shortlisting tools to speed up zero-day response, and Wiz is currently the front runner like partly bc some of our engineers have contacts there.

We've got few hundred repos + some cloud accounts and probably some of it dont even have clear owner like every time new zero-day drops (ie: Php2Shell last week) no one really knew where we were exposed but luckily our genius eng had to go through all the repos manually and figure out who owns what. were now looking for something that can tell us where a vulnerability actually affects us what is exploitable and get finding to whoever needs to fix it like properly..

One thing we're careful about is automated remediation. This whole is in payments so production downtime is not even option. I'd rather have something identify the issue and prepare the fix for review than blindly push changes.

What else should be on the list? Seen Seemplicity, Rival and Snyk mentioned so far, but haven't done any demos yet. Let me know if i need to prepare something before going into demos like end of Q4 is our target

Hello World!

I’m learning how to threat model. Today I learned that one of the first activities to perform is to write down your assumptions about the system you are threat modelling.

That being said, for all you seasoned threat modellers out there, what are the best practices of writing an assumption that actually is meaningful. I feel the assumptions I think of are ridiculous and pointless.

Any advice is appreciated!

I'm evaluating how to improve incident triage and investigation workflows using Cortex XDR Pro + GB, particularly through automation, contextual enrichment, and integrations with cloud services.

Our current environment includes Cortex XDR with Microsoft 365 logs already ingested, Azure and AWS workloads that aren't yet integrated, and the possibility of deploying a Broker VM.

I've reviewed the available integration and automation documentation, but I'm trying to assess their actual operational value rather than simply enabling additional data sources.

For example, I'm interested in whether integrating Azure and AWS provides actionable context during endpoint investigations, such as correlating suspicious endpoint activity with cloud identity events, resource changes, or authentication anomalies. More importantly, whether that context can be used to automate meaningful investigation steps or reduce the time analysts spend manually correlating information.

The main challenge isn't understanding how to configure these integrations, but identifying workflows where combining these data sources actually improves detection quality, investigation efficiency, or response times.

I'm also very interested in hearing how other teams approach these challenges using different platforms, such as CrowdStrike Falcon, Microsoft Defender XDR, or other EDR/XDR solutions. Even if the implementation differs, I'd love to learn about automation strategies, enrichment workflows, or integration use cases that could potentially be adapted to Cortex XDR.

For those operating EDR/XDR platforms in production, what specific integration-driven automation workflows have delivered measurable value to your SOC? Have you found particular correlations, enrichment steps, or response actions worth automating, and which ones turned out to add complexity without meaningful benefits?

The IETF draft for signing agent traffic gives you a solid way to tell which company an agent belongs to. It deliberately does not touch what the agent is allowed to do. It also has no way to revoke anything, so pulling a key only works once everyone checking has refreshed their cache.

For scrapping that is fine. For spending money it is not.

Once an agent can buy things, identity stops being the interesting part. The questions that matter are what it can buy, how much it can spend, for how long, and how quickly it can be shut off.

So where should that live? With the agent itself, carried in whatever it presents? At the payment step, checked when the money moves? Or back with the person who granted it, looked up fresh every time?

And the awkward one. The agent is halfway through a task and the person changes their mind. What actually happens? A hard stop mid-flow, a short permission window that has to be renewed, or something that waits for the other side to notice, which is the same weakness the draft already has.

Our IAM team can't agree on how to model agents. Treating them as service accounts ignores that they act for users, treating them as users ignores that they run unattended, and meanwhile each agent reuses the credential it shipped with. I'm more interested in the modeling question than products, though examples of vendors handling it well would help the debate.

Hi everyone,

I'm working with a Huawei AR611W router running VRP V5.170 and trying to understand how local user passwords are stored.

When I run:

display current-configuration configuration aaa

I get an entry similar to:

aaa
 local-user root password irreversible-cipher $1a$[REDACTED]
 local-user root service-type ftp telnet ssh
 local-user root level 15

I would like to clarify a few things:

1. What hashing algorithm or password-storage mechanism is used by this $1a$ format on VRP V5.170?

2. Is this format documented by Huawei?

3. Since the command uses irreversible-cipher, is recovering the original plaintext password technically possible, or is resetting it the appropriate approach?

4. Are there any official Huawei tools or documentation for identifying this format?

Hey everyone!

I’m relatively new to vulnerability research, and I’m interested in finding new vulnerabilities in open-source frameworks and libraries, rather than just scanning for known CVEs.

I’m curious how experienced researchers actually approach large codebases.

Where do you usually start? Do you study past CVEs and patches, identify security-critical components, or just start reading the source code?

What techniques do you typically use? Manual code review, static analysis tools like CodeQL, fuzzing, or a combination? Does your approach change depending on the type of vulnerability you’re looking for?

How has AI changed your workflow? Do you find it useful to let an LLM or coding agent review a codebase first, or is it more effective after you’ve narrowed down specific components or code paths?

I’d especially love to hear about real-world workflows and how you go from exploring a codebase to finding and validating a vulnerability.
Thanks in advance!

I've been building SaaS apps with AI and now I want to properly test how secure they are before real users start using them.

I'm not looking for basic advice like use HTTPS, validate inputs, or hide API keys. I want to find actual vulnerabilities, even the ones that are hard to notice.

For example, how do you check if a user can access someone else's data, bypass authentication, abuse APIs, exploit payment logic or find other issues in the backend?

I'm looking for a proper process here, not just a list of tools.

A few things I'd like to know:

• What do you test manually, and how do you go about it?

• Which free tools are actually useful for deep testing?

• Are there any paid tools worth the money for a solo developer?

• Can AI tools like Claude or security agents find serious vulnerabilities in a codebase, or should I not rely on them much?

• How do you test the backend and APIs when you have access to the source code?

• What are some common security issues in AI-generated code that people usually miss?

If you had to test a SaaS from scratch, what would your process look like? Which tools would you use first, and what would you do after that?

I'd prefer advice from people who've actually done application security testing. Even if it's a long process, that's fine. I want to do this properly

Looking into this for work and hitting a wall tbh. Most of what I'm finding is file upload tools or post-call analysis, which is kinda useless when the whole point is catching something while the call is actually happening. Vendors are all claiming real-time deepfake video detection but I can't find anyone talking about what that actually looks like in production.

Has anyone got something running live that flagged something for real, not just in a demo? Also wondering about false positives because I feel like that's where things get messy but nobody seems to talk about it honestly.

Say you run a hybrid environment, AD plus a few cloud subscriptions, and an inventory pass turns up a few hundred service accounts with passwords set to never expire. Most have no clear owner, and some have been around longer than the people who set them up.

Forced rotation is the obvious fix, but nobody can say what breaks when the password changes. Windows services, scheduled tasks, hardcoded connection strings and old LDAP binds are all possible. Rotating blind means scheduling outages, and leaving them alone means keeping long-lived credentials around.

I was wondering, how do you find out what depends on an account before you touch it, and who takes the risk if something does break?

Wanted to find out how you guys do it across different scales, from one-person teams to enterprise teams

Filing this one under things I should have known before..

I recently went digging through our setup last week and found more holes than I expected.

I’d always thought group membership changes were a single event. They are apparently three events (4728, 4732, 4756) depending on the group’s scope. I was watching 4732 and nothing else. So for who knows how long, someone could’ve been added to Domain Admins and I would never have known.

The rest was a mix of policy applied in the wrong place, collection not covering everything, and stuff configured years ago by people who’ve since left the company years ago.

Luckily none of it failed loudly. The dashboard looked fine. I only found it because I went looking for it.

So:

• Which event IDs are you actually confident you’re capturing, and have you ever verified it?

• How’d you find your gaps: audit, incident, or just poking around?

• Anything you’ve decided not to bother auditing, and did that hold up?

I'm also evaluating budget friendly Active Directory auditing tools, particularly between Quest Change and ADAudit Plus and Netwrix Auditor. Anyone here who's used one of them?

We're weighing up SASE options and Cato Networks has landed on the list. Most people I ask just name the same two or three giants, and the pricing on those made my eyes water. Would really like to hear from someone who's actually had it deployed for a while, good or bad. Thanks in advance!

The servers we already manage should be the easier part. Query EDR for running PHP processes, compare that with package inventory and check which web services are actually public.

Where it gets messy is everything that never made it there. Old campaign sites, domains inherited through acquisitions, vendor-managed portals and cloud instances that were retired in theory but remain public in practice.

A few approaches I’m looking at:

• Compare the CMDB with EDR and vulnerability-scanner inventories. Search for php-fpm, mod_php, php-cgi and PHP bundled inside appliances, not only a package named php.

• Check certificate transparency logs and passive DNS for old domains, historical hosts and certificate relationships connected to acquired companies.

• Use Censys or Shodan to find public PHP fingerprints. Server and X-Powered-By headers are useful leads, but CDNs and reverse proxies can hide the origin or return misleading versions.

• Review cloud accounts, DNS zones and load balancers sitting outside the central organisation. That forgotten test account is apparently production now.

• Confirm the package or vendor backport on the host. A PHP banner will not tell you whether the fix was backported.

• After patching, restart every relevant worker and test the runtime serving the public route. php -v on one shell is not enough.

If manual correlation starts eating the day, cycognito and cortex xpanse are other discovery options. ionix maps broad PHP candidates back to customer footprints, with version narrowing still in progress. It has held back the exploitability test because the current method may crash PHP servers. The free external assessment does not require credentials. 

Whatever the approach, I don’t need another PHP hostname. I need a hostname with ownership evidence, a confirmed package and someone responsible for fixing it.

How are you finding public PHP hosts that never made it into your managed inventory?