This course takes you on a journey that starts with the basics and theory of security and then builds
upon it with practical exercises and on to more advanced topics in the later sections and other volumes.
You have to know the basics so that you can make your own informed choices about security.
I don't want to give you just a to do list.
I want you to understand both the why and the how.
So we start with the theory and basics of security and then build on that later with practical exercises
and onto more advanced topics.
But before we start in the theory basics I want to give you a super easy quick security win that you
can set up right now a small practical exercise.
Before we dig into the theory.
So you have an immediate security capability to detect malware and hackers that you can set up in about
10 minutes and you don't even have to install anything.
This way if you forget to do the rest of the course at least you have got some security capability out
of it.
So here goes.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could set up security trip wires to tell is if someone or something was poking
around in our files on a laptop on a phone tablet you know e-mail and or online accounts basically everywhere.
Will it be good if we could have some trip wires alerted is when somebody was doing things that we don't
want them to do.
Well we can set those things up.
So let me show you how to set the security tripwires using a service call canary tokens.
They are made available just for you guys on this course so you can have some quick and easy security
wins.
So if you get your way to w w w Don't Station X don't net slash canary tokens slash you can follow along
with what I'm doing and create your own tokens at the same time.
So here we have our little canary friendly token we see a rather obvious red boat in here and this is
what we need to click on to take us to the domain that will provide us with the tokens.
So here we are this is a domain here that will rotate.
So don't worry about what that is at the moment.
So here we are this is the main thing that you need to interact with.
And I'm going to show you five different ways of setting up traps these traps that are also called tokens
or canary tokens.
We're going to keep it simple.
The early stages of this course.
So first thing we do is really to put in an e-mail address.
Now this is the e-mail address which you want to get send alerts to.
So this needs to be an e-mail address that you monitor.
I like the e-mail address that you have on your phone or something so that you get notified immediately
when there's a security problem you don't want to set up a secondary e-mail address that you never look
at as pointless as be an e-mail address that you monitor.
Even if you set up a new e-mail address as long as it's one that you monitor.
So let me put one in here.
So that's the e-mail address I want to get sent alerts to and then I need to put in here some sort of
comment that lets me know which token which trap has been triggered.
So I'm going to put Word document in a password folder on the laptop.
That's going to make more sense in a second.
Ignore all this for now just have a DNS and hates it.
Yes and generate token.
And if we go down here the first one that I want you to look at is the M-S word token or trap.
So what this has done is this has generated a unique word document for you that we can download.
I'll give you a demo of it.
It will download that now.
And if you see this here this is the Word document that we've just downloaded.
Now if I click on that and that's just opened up there you see what little time is going on there in
the background.
And you see there we've been alerted.
Now any time anyone opens this document you're going to get alerted is a little trap and this little
trap should work on most operating systems.
Most versions of Word.
There's no 100 percent guarantee that it's going to work on every system and with every version of Word.
So if it doesn't work for you then try one of the other tokens that I'm going to show you in a second.
Let me close that and create another example here.
You can change the filename of this document by the way.
Anything that you like make in time step is on to click on.
I opened this one a second
just opened this fully now and this one I put valuable and juicy information in it.
The hacker or other type of threat would be interested in finding Pay-Pal usernames and passwords stock
trading information social media accounts etc. etc. those are the sort of things the threat is going
to be searching for.
If he's on your laptop your device your phone with your e-mail is going to be searching for key words.
And if you want an idea of the sort of things that you want to put in these traps and I put some examples
here we can say personal information financial information file hosting accounts.
And if we go further down here I provide an example file and we just copy this.
We can use it as just an example the sort of information you can see social security numbers credit
card details have put them in the right sorts of formats.
Bitcoin wallet IDs.
You get the idea.
So we can imagine now a hacker was snooping around in an area that we specifically put aside just for
the hackers to find and we've put in that word document.
And he has now clicked on it and this is the alert we get so we know he's snooping around and we know
he's sniffing around we know what he's doing because we set up that comment there and if we click here
we can look to see where he's come from.
We can track him down and it provides further information on how he triggered the alert.
But what is important is that you react to the alert.
And later during the course we're going to talk more about response and recovery strategies as you get
through to the more advanced sections.
And if you look at the second type of token that we can create or trap a PTF so we can download this
PTF version and it works pretty much exactly the same as the Word document.
We opened this PTF document and we will get alerted that someone has opened it and boom there we go.
I know there are PTF trap.
So I think you get any idea and so you want to sprinkle as many of these tokens these traps throughout
your laptop your phone or tablet in your e-mail on your online accounts.
So for example you could put it in your Dropbox and maybe the staff at Dropbox are looking through your
documents.
They open the Word document boom.
You know someone snooping in there.
And as I say they need to be interesting enticing and valuable and he can get that sort of information
from here.
Now let me show you another sneaky way of setting up a trap fake e-mail of passwords.
Number one oh by the way if you put it on that one you'll get more information in the alert about who
the hacker was.
With this type of traveling about set up now so choose that one.
So generate if you pop down here we're going to go to Web books and we're going to use two Web books
here.
Let's just grab that you are real.
So there is a clickable link.
If the hacker clicks on you're going to be alerted.
Let's open up our e-mail here.
Right.
Let's just pop that in there for now.
Then we're going to send this to our self.
We could send it from a different account but all that matters is that the two e-mail addresses the
account that you're wanting to be monitored you wanting to know if a hacker is in there we need to create
an enticing subject so
and then just as an example.
But this one I'm going to go here and I'm going to copy all of this stuff here into this e-mail
obviously you're going to put your own sort of information in here and things related to you know I've
just taken that link there.
Now putting that link here.
I can actually change this to anything I want.
After this here can change this to whatever I want so I can put log in if I want to him now and see
what I'm doing is I'm creating an enticement here by private files or back I put everything username
and password.
So if the person opens his email and then clicks on this link it will trigger the alert.
Will get you something even more tricky here.
We want to definitely catch this hacker within Thunderbird.
There is a feature by which you can insert a link to an image.
Now we don't want to attack an image we want to insert a link to an image.
So if you're going to insert an image and we own click this.
We don't want to attach.
We go on there and then we can put image gif and see we're already alerted.
That's our quick services and we do not want to use any alternative text out there and you'll see you
can't see the image because that is a one by one pixel invisible gif.
Now let me show you how this works so when can send that to ourselves.
So there we go.
That's our little trap there that we can choose to open it.
Leave it as an open e-mail or we can leave it as an open e-mail but no matter what if someone's in e-mail
and they're searching for whatever it is that they want to be searching for maybe they're interested
in PayPal accounts.
Well there we go.
That comes up searching for bank information credit card information that's going to come up and all
they need to do is just open it.
They want me to click on a link to them.
No they're poking around in there.
So let's say that doesn't work for whatever reason it should then there's still things like that to
entice them like on that boom caught him again.
Now in order for us to have inserted that image I went on this insert image.
Now you may not have this functionality available in the e-mail client that you use.
It may not even be available to do this but it doesn't matter.
You can still download Thunderbird if you like.
It's FREE.
And just send an e-mail or e-mails using Thunderbird just for this one task if you can't work out how
to embed that invisible web book into your email.
So as I said you want to sprinkle these tokens throughout your laptop on your laptop phone tablet in
your e-mail in your accounts make them enticing make them valuable.
And then when you get an alert respond to that and respond in the ways I recommend throughout this course.
Changing your password and all this sort of thing is disconnecting from the network.
So there you go that's your security quick win.
Go ahead and set those up right now.
You will have after you set this up.
Better security detection capabilities than most companies do.
You might not believe that if you're not in the security industry but that is a sad and true analysis
of the state of most organizations detection capabilities.
Just think of Edward Snowden.
He was poking around in the NSA for months as an insider threat and nothing like this.
Alerted the NSA.
Pretty crazy.
Later on in the course we will discuss canary tokens a more advanced level.
When you get there you'll understand more about how they work and will understand about the importance
of detection controls which these are versus preventative controls which are used to stop a hacker getting
in in the first place.
The preventative controls are very important.
We use a defense in depth approach.
All of which we're going to go into.
So that was form.
Now let's dig into the theory and the basics and start our journey into cybersecurity.