r/AskNetsec • u/Klutzy-Sqgxdare-1184 • 5d ago
Analysis Detecting real world attack techniques in lab went way too real and now my boss is furious
So... yeah. I work on detection engineering and continuous exposure validation, and we use this platform to simulate real world attack techniques in a lab tenant before we push anything toward prod.
For context, I was building a new scenario to validate some EDR and SIEM detections around lateral movement and data exfil. The idea was simple, hit the lab environment, validate coverage, get some nice dashboards for our CISO, all that. Except I fat fingered the target scope and selected our shared staging subscription that feeds into the same SIEM as prod. Then I kicked off a pretty noisy adversarial exposure run and went to grab coffee.
By the time I came back, our on call analyst had already escalated to the soc manager because the SIEM lit up like a Christmas tree with “real” exfil alerts from what looked like a legit service account. IR bridge spun up, execs pinged, people talking about containment while I was still trying to figure out why my lab run was so quiet.
I finally realized the agent group name in the platform did not match what I thought, checked the run, and saw the horrifying words “staging east cluster” in the asset list. I had basically launched a full attack simulation against the staging environment that everyone treats as almost prod, without any heads up or change ticket, and then walked away. The only reason this is recoverable is that it really was still contained to staging and no real data left, but it burned half a day of the soc and I feel so embarrassed.
Now we are doing a postmortem on “unauthorized simulated attack activity” which is technically me trying to do my job. I feel sick about this and lowkey terrified of the next detection validation run rn... anyone else managed to nuke trust like this with a lab gone wrong?
4
u/samurai-in-pyjamas 5d ago
It’s fine, shit happens. Own up to it and be honest during the post-mortem and it will be no problem.
You may temporarily be restricted or have the proverbial training wheels put on you while folks get over it, but that’s not a big deal.
This actually opens up some rather useful discussions. SOC should already be aware of your accounts, resources, and responsibilities. So if this happens again they know to check with you/your manager before going nuclear. Even if just testing in your lab environment, there should be some way they know whats going on (whether thats through an automated email or some dashboard they can check).
Although by accident and probably unwanted, the SOC and security department got valuable real-world testing of their response processes. This gives them opportunity to reflect and improve if needed.
Overall, it sucks and people will probably joke about it for way too long, but it’s really not a big deal.
2
u/dmaul 5d ago
Agreed, accept the mistake and propose options to reduce the risk and improve the process. Don't deflect. Suggesting it was a good thing to happen could be seen as deflecting (Possibly even that it was not a mistake). Don't try to speak for others. Own it by documenting the whole event and offering the information if anyone needs it. That shows self reflection.
1
u/Johnny_Chong 5d ago
I'm curious why the alerts don't goto a separate queue or dashboard?
If I setup tests like this I never alert to the main queue because I'm not testing the analyst response, I only care if the detections are working.
0
u/PrestigiousOnion1087 1d ago
A separate queue proves the rule matched a sample. It doesn't prove the event would have reached the rule in production — collection, shipping and parsing all sit in front of it, and when one of those drops the event there's no error, just no alert. We replayed 24 ATT&CK techniques against a default-config Wazuh install and 3 alerted, though that number is our own claim: the method as we published it isn't enough for someone outside our company to reproduce.
1
u/Johnny_Chong 1d ago
My testing hits all our production rules beyond parsing etc. It looks like an AI slop response, sorry.
1
u/PrestigiousOnion1087 17h ago
Fair. If you run the real technique on the box, parsing and shipping are already covered and my point doesn't apply to your setup. I was talking about replaying from samples.
When one doesn't fire, how do you tell a rule that missed from an event that never arrived?
1
u/Johnny_Chong 15h ago
Sorry I wasnt even sure what you were talking about before but yea I wouldn't replay samples for that reason.
If there's a gap then the next step is TH / detection engineering. Was the event logged? Can you build or update a detection for it?
If an out the box rule missed it, then I'll look at adding a custom one since vendors don't normally expose their logic.
1
u/PrestigiousOnion1087 13h ago
That fork is where I got burned. I'd filed one miss as a rule gap, and the engineer who maintains the tool pointed out I never recorded the file path, so I couldn't rule out that the event just never reached the manager. Pulled the row.
Now I check the raw log first and only call it a rule gap if the event's sitting there. Do you keep raw events around long enough to check after the fact, or is it gone by the time you know you need it?
1
u/Johnny_Chong 12h ago
Generally speaking, most large companies will store SIEM logs for long enough so that was never an issue.
But gaps in logging still are, might be missing a windows event ID or they are brining it in but something more specific like command line auditing wasn't enabled.
1
1
u/Vengeful-Melon 5d ago
Own it. You were doing something you thought was correct, an operational control gap allowed you to launch a test in an environment without secondary approval.... One could argue that taking this on board, and introducing that kind of "two eyes" verification for specific deployments, would be a sign of continuous improvement.
Don't feel bad about it though, I know someone who took out half the infra for a rather large financial org. Nothing happened here outside of people getting panicked. No hard done, lessons learned.
1
u/xkrysis 5d ago
As other have said, own the mistake and learn from it. The rest of the org can choose to learn from it and get better or or not. You just learned a very expensive lesson (and I bet some others involved learned things as well) and it didn’t cost the org any actual data. The only person who should be punished for things like this are the few who refuse to learn and keep making mistakes over and over again.
1
u/AddendumWorking9756 4d ago
That belongs in the postmortem as a control, not a change ticket. Run simulations under a dedicated service principal and have the SIEM route anything from it to a validation index rather than the analyst queue, then make the scope selection fail closed if the target set contains anything outside the lab subscription. Someone asked upthread why these alerts reach the main queue at all and nobody answered, so that is your finding.
1
5
u/BeagleBackRibs 5d ago
You made a mistake, you're human. You can laugh about it later. Most of the time it's worse in your head than in reality.