The loadout was featured in the The Loadout Room
A lot of people asked about the kit after reading the loadout post. I’m going to try to explain it better.
The Sneak and Peek kit is based on a kit we used in my old unit during reconnaissance missions or while setting a sniper urban hide. That kit also included demo cord and some other things that can’t be used by civilians, but the basic tools are all covered in this current kit.
Like I mentioned, I carry all inside a GORUCK Radio Ruck Field Pocket. The kit includes tools that would allow me to sneak into places by opening doors, cutting fences, twisting wire, etc. It also serves and an impromptu (albeit not fully stocked) SERE kit. The basic items include:
The Go Tubes contain the small gear I carry, including gear from the SERE Kit and it includes:
Here’s the mini pry bar and the SerePick entry tools
And some of the little pieces on the SERE Kit: A handcuff key, a shim, the compass and the folding razor saw
Overall, all these tools work together very nicely. I might add stuff from time to time based on what I need but this is the base.
My loadout changes according to the needs of a project or operation, however I have a base loadout that is quite fixed. The gear listed below is my current base, it might change in the future but for the most part this is what I carry to work most of the time.
I carry everything inside my GORUCK Echo. The Echo is a tough little ruck that can handle most everything you throw at it and I’ve put it through some hard stuff in the past few months. It is still as good as new. Great quality, like all GORUCK products.
Inside the main compartment I carry a GORUCK Radio Ruck Field Pocket with all my basic gear (described below) and a Tactical Tailor pouch with my mini trauma / medical kit. Tactical Tailor gear is also top of the line and built to last.
On the top inside pocket of the Echo I carry a Field Notes notebook, a SureFire Pen II, a Saddleback Leather Classic Business Wallet with my calling cards, a bluetooth piece, a Photon Freedom Micro LED keychain flashlight and a bunch of USB thumbdrives with the tools I need for the red team operations. The Field Notes book is a simple and resilient notebook and it’s always useful to have around. The same going to the SureFire pen. It can be used as a glass breaker too.
On the slant pocket of the Echo I carry my earphones (the standard Apple iPhone ones) and a Hideaway Knife. That little knife is a tough mother. It can cut through anything and it’s an excellent last resource defensive tool.
Here’s all the gear out the Echo.
On the Radio Ruck Field Pocket I carry a SureFire 6PX Pro, a Leatherman Fuse, a custom Zero Tolerance 0350 knife with the Green Beret Foundation and GORUCK logos (part of the proceedings went to a donation to the Green Beret Foundation) and a couple of Go Tubes with gear (check this post to know what’s inside). I usually use the little LED photon as my light, but sometimes you need a powerful, full fledged light to do the job, that’s when the SureFire light come in handy. The knife and the Leatherman multitool get used A LOT, those are the first items out of the ruck. And the SERE picks inside the Go Tubes are very useful tools too.
The mini trauma / medical kit has the bare minimum needed to stop bleeding and other traumatic injuries. It’s by no means a full blowout kit (check the fantastic ITS Tactical ETA Kit for that), but it has me covered for the essentials. As a side note, I used this kit once a couple of years ago to save the life of a biker that crashed into a car. I managed to stop the bleeding until the ambulance came.
The contents are here.
And finally what I carry with me all the time. My Trusty GORUCK GR Tac, a Metolius mini biner with keys (as a plus side this is a full loading biner so I can use to also to rappel, climb, etc), a gen 1 RESCO Patriot watch, a Saddleback Leather Simple Wallet, a Benchmade Mini Barrage and a pair of Oakley Bottle Rocket Sunglasses.
That’s it. That’s what I carry.
Read my story and help me help those that gave all if you can.
Nice!
Using the in-memory executable technique has a few major advantages. First, the name of the file doesn’t show up in a process list so things like Task Manager will display it as whatever normal system executable you picked for the -d option. That’s pretty important for staying undetected in the presence of a watchful eye. Second, the executable never touches disk. Avoiding writing executables to disk also means forensics is a bit harder — there’s no suspicious prefetch entry for a new executable, there’s no new files or altered modification times.
In the past few years we’ve seen how knowledgeable a determined attacker can be. We know targeted attacks are hard to detect: a focused adversary can roam the network and systems, undetected, well over a year and then vanished. It is hard to pick up the trail of these attacks and really understand what they did and how they did it.
There are different vulnerabilities the bad guys are exploiting. Not all technical as you might think. In a lot of cases they exploit the human factor: the willingness to help and the lack of understanding of social engineering.
A well crafted email accompanied by a phone call can provide access to a lot of places, a weaponized Word document or PDF, poorly written code that can be exploited by talking the person into browsing to a specific website. These are just some of the tricks the attackers are utilizing.
There’s also the technical side, the lack of updates on critical organization’s servers, the use of old programs (such as the horrendous IE6 or WinXP), lack of hardening, just to name a few.
It all comes down to the first foothold. Once the attackers are inside then can move freely. Mostly.
There’s a lot that can be done to make the attacker’s life harder, however can we prevent the initial break-in?
Sometimes we can. Most of the time we cannot.
Then, is it possible to mount a defense against this?
Yes.
Stay tuned for the answer.
He comments about this essay. On that essay (bold letters by me):
First, predictive software of this kind is undermined by a simple statistical problem known as the false-positive paradox. Any system designed to spot terrorists before they commit an act of terrorism is, necessarily, looking for a needle in a haystack. As the adage would suggest, it turns out that this is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Here is why: let’s assume for a moment that 1 in 1,000,000 people is a terrorist about to commit a crime. Terrorists are actually probably much much more rare, or we would have a whole lot more acts of terrorism, given the daily throughput of the global transportation system. Now lets imagine the FAST algorithm correctly classifies 99.99 percent of observations — an incredibly high rate of accuracy for any big data-based predictive model. Even with this unbelievable level of accuracy, the system would still falsely accuse 99 people of being terrorists for every one terrorist it finds. Given that none of these people would have actually committed a terrorist act yet distinguishing the innocent false positives from the guilty might be a non-trivial, and invasive task.
Of course FAST has nowhere near a 99.99 percent accuracy rate. I imagine much of the work being done here is classified, but a writeup in Nature reported that the first round of field tests had a 70 percent accuracy rate. From the available material it is difficult to determine exactly what this number means. There are a couple of ways to interpret this, since both the write-up and the DHS documentation (all pdfs) are unclear. This might mean that the current iteration of FAST correctly classifies 70 percent of people it observes — which would produce false positives at an abysmal rate, given the rarity of terrorists in the population. The other way of interpreting this reported result is that FAST will call a terrorist a terrorist 70 percent of the time. This second option tells us nothing about the rate of false positives, but it would likely be quite high. In either case, it is likely that the false-positive paradox would be in full force for FAST, ensuring that any real terrorists identified are lost in a sea of falsely accused innocents.
Bruce Schneier writes:
It’s that final sentence in the first quoted paragraph that really points to how bad this idea is. If FAST determines you are guilty of a crime you have not yet committed, how do you exonerate yourself?
Good question. I wrote about something similar to this on an upcoming article in SOFREP. These kind of algorithms cause more problems than they solve. You can’t just predict based on numbers who is going to be a terrorist or not; you have to get people involved. you have to observe the person, gather info, analyse the patters.
Patters, remember that word.
Me.
(Uri)
RSA’s Getting Ahead of Advanced Threats: Achieving Intelligence-driven Information Security (PDF)
Lockheed Martin Corporation’s Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains (PDF)
There are two ways go about bruteforcing passwords: randomly trying each variation or using a dictionary.
Any knowledge you can get about the passwords will make your life easier since you can fine tune your attack. If you don’t know anything about the length, the charset used or even if it needs to be a combination between a password and a token then you’ll be forced to try every combination or word in your dictionary, short or long. On the other hand if you know the length it will reduce the amount of tries, if you know the charset (only letters and numbers allowed for example) will make your odds better.
There is not in between state, it’s not like in the movies where you have a password “breaker” with running numbers and you can see them appear one by one. Having said that, there are very sophisticated bruteforce attacks out there.
I do believe that a good passphrase (i.e. “my name is Inigo Montoya”) is better than a complex short password (i.e. “y5j#6%*>hdjd”).
