Monthly Archives: December 2016

You can’t buy threat intelligence, or yet another “article” on Data vs Information Vs Intelligence.

The background:
This is a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for a few months now. It’s based in part off a twitter conversation that carried over in to a phone call. It is also something I’ve personally observed, a trap I fell in to, and heard other Threat Intelligence people say they observed. And while reading Cyint’s favorite tweets of 2016, I finally decided to sit down and write.

In the tweet list was a tweet was from Alex Pinto asking ‘how many more #ThreatIntel articles do we need about the difference between “data”, “information” and “intelligence”?’

So my answer is, as many as it takes to break out of our own echo-chamber / choir and figure out how to talk to our Cybersecurity peers and the stakeholders. So everyone is able to understand what is being bought. So here is yet another article talking about Intelligence vs Data Feeds being sold as Intelligence.

The Problem:
Companies are selling data feeds while calling it intelligence.

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Script(s) to ping a computer

I re-wrote a script I use at work. It was a messy bit of Python 3 previously. While it’s still not the cleanest of python scripts, it scratches my itch. It was originally just a straight line of commands with lots of repeated code. I made some functions and made it a little more modular. I know I need to learn PEP8, and start following it. This was just to improve something that I wrote previously with things I learned from Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.

I’ve shared it via my GitHub repository for DFIR scripts. They’re clean (not tied to any company). There is only Computer Ping for right now. There are 3 scripts all based on the same idea.

Ping a computer, if it is down, keep trying every 10 minutes for 1 hour. Pop an “alert” if the target is up, or the script finished before it came up.

  • 1 version for Windows running python (wComputerPing.py)
  • 1 version for Windows running Cygwin (cwComputerPing.py)
  • 1 version for boxes running Linux. (lComputerPing.py).

I’ll write others and upload to the repository as I have time / re-write stuff I use. They might not all be Python, but my goal is to be more Python than not.