Black Hat USA 2024: SOC within the NOC

Date:


The Black Hat Community Operations Middle (NOC) gives a high-security, high-availability community in one of the vital demanding environments on this planet: the Black Hat occasion.

The NOC companions are chosen by Black Hat, with Arista, Cisco, Corelight, Lumen, NetWitness and Palo Alto Networks delivering from Las Vegas this 12 months. Cisco is the official Area Title Service, Malware Evaluation and Cell System Administration supplier. The Meraki group is writing a weblog in regards to the experiences in defending and managing the Black Hat cellular gadgets.

The companions additionally present built-in safety, visibility and automation: a Safety Operations Middle (SOC) contained in the NOC, with Grifter ‘Niel Wyler’ and Bart Stump because the leaders.

Black Hat USA 2024: SOC within the NOC

Integration is essential to success within the SOC of the NOC. At every convention, now we have a hack-a-thon to create, show, check, enhance and at last put into manufacturing new or improved integrations. To be a NOC companion, you should be prepared to collaborate, share Automated Programming Interface (API) keys and documentation, and are available collectively (whilst market rivals) to safe the convention for the great of the attendees.

Promotional banner for the Black Hat Network Operations Center, showing a map of all of the Black Hat USA 2024 SOC Integrations

XDR integrations

Cisco joined the Black Hat NOC in 2016, when requested to supply automated malware evaluation with Menace Grid. The Cisco contributions to the community and safety operations advanced, with the wants of the shopper, to incorporate extra parts of the Cisco Safety Cloud:

The NOC leaders allowed Cisco (and the opposite NOC companions) to herald extra software program to make our inside work extra environment friendly and have larger visibility. Nevertheless, Cisco is just not the official supplier for Prolonged Detection & Response (XDR), Community Detection & Response or Collaboration.

  • Cisco XDR: Community Site visitors Visibility and Menace Detection/Menace Searching/Menace Intelligence Enrichment/Govt Dashboards/Automation
  • Cisco Webex: Incident notification and group collaboration

The Cisco XDR command heart dashboard tiles made it straightforward to see the standing of every of the related Cisco Safety applied sciences, the general menace panorama and the standing of community availability as monitored by ThousandEyes brokers.

Beneath are the Cisco XDR integrations for Black Hat USA, empowering analysts to research Indicators of Compromise (IOC) in a short time, with one search. We admire alphaMountain.ai, Pulsedive and Recorded Future donating full licenses to the Black Hat USA 2024 NOC. Additionally, take a look at the weblog on XDR turning one 12 months previous and the affect of Black Hat occasions.

One of many new integrations this 12 months was with a utility written by one among our SOC group members. Each safety skilled — particularly SOC analysts and responders — have a collection of “fast lookup” model instruments that they use to reply numerous questions on artifacts in an investigation. Shodan is a good instance; “given an IP tackle, what companies is that IP offering, and what software program are they utilizing to supply it?”. Paste the IP into Shodan, and you’ll doubtless get your reply. With the Shodan integration in XDR, you don’t even have to repeat and paste — simply click on the IP after which within the drop down menu, click on the Shodan hyperlink. However there are a whole lot of such instruments…

Screenshot of the integration server template

Ben took one of many integration server templates that Cisco Safety printed on Github and modified it to our wants. He then hosted it on his cloud supplier of alternative, added it to our XDR configuration and will add these easy pivots to XDR on the fly. A easy edit of a textual content file on the server and we may soar from any observable to any new related reference website that anybody had recommended.

Cisco XDR is constructed on the beliefs of an open integration framework, with printed knowledge fashions, API specs and pattern code accessible to be modified or used as examples/tutorials (together with precise tutorials at DevNet). This dedication to extensibility permits for modifications such because the above with out requiring any motion from the XDR improvement or product groups, permitting prospects to tailor XDR to their distinctive wants.

For instance, an IP tried Scanning Site visitors in opposition to the Registration Server, blocked by the Palo Alto Networks firewall.

Investigation of the IP confirmed: It was recognized malicious.

Screenshot of the IP that was identified as malicious

Additionally, the geo location is in RU and recognized affiliated domains. With this info, the NOC management authorized the shunning of the IP.

Screenshot of the Cisco Umbrella page showing the geolocation of the IP address to be originating from RU

XDR: Asset visibility

By: Ben Greenbaum

Screenshot of insights from the Meraki Systems Manager

Because the Black Hat community evolves, totally different distributors are given alternatives to convey their merchandise into the toolbox. On account of this ongoing biking, we didn’t have entry to the depth of intelligence beforehand supplied by deployment of a Meraki wi-fi infrastructure. Nevertheless, because of the functionality constructed into XDR Asset Insights to add a customized CSV file of belongings, we had been capable of simply operationalize recognized community topography into investigative and response operations.

One of many distinctive challenges of the Black Hat setting is how totally different it’s from a “regular” buyer’s manufacturing community. We have now just a few hundred gadgets whose safety is our major objective, however tens of hundreds of unmanaged (and infrequently hostile) gadgets within the native community which we wish to defend from one another and defend the skin world from. This distinctive association very a lot drives dwelling the worth that an EDR brings to an XDR answer. With out good endpoint visibility, the problem is much larger. The advantage of an open XDR strategy that’s not an evolution of an present EDR providing is that it may be one among a number of EDRs, however “one” is preferable to none.

Malware Analytics

By: Ben Greenbaum

Cisco Malware Analytics (previously Menace Grid) was once more used because the backend file evaluation and malware detection engine. We supported our companions from CoreLight and Netwitness, with evaluation of recordsdata pulled from clear textual content (convention attendee) and choose encrypted classes (crucial infrastructure).

Screenshot of the Secure Malware Analytics dashboard

As normal, the recordsdata present in clear textual content communications had been a very good indicator of what sorts of knowledge will be anticipated to be leaked by a crowd of safety professionals, and this 12 months the result rated a strong “much less terrible.” Probably spicy content material included numerous PII (names, employers, positions, e-mail addresses, and so on.) from Black Hat receipts and some company e-mail attachments. 

And whereas Umbrella did alert us to some wandering infections phoning dwelling, we are able to say that no less than no malware was transferred…within the clear.

By: Aditya Sankar

Cisco XDR features a built-in automation functionality referred to as XDR automation. You probably have heard of Safety Orchestration Automation Response (SOAR), Cisco XDR has the total suite of SOAR options. That features the flexibility to drag-and-drop prebuilt code blocks in a specific sequence to create a customized workflow, executing arbitrary API calls to function one-click response actions and creating guidelines to set off workflows based mostly off a schedule or another standards.

We have now been utilizing XDR Automate at Black Hat for 3 years to enhance the Cisco companies to our joint buyer, Black Hat, and have applied a wide range of use instances. Nevertheless, this has sometimes required fairly a little bit of time to be taught APIs and create a very customized workflow. With the newest XDR Automation Alternate, the Alternate web page is used to seek out, view, set up and uninstall pre-written workflows which were launched or authorized by Cisco engineers and content material suppliers. Workflows authored by the group have handed a primary high quality examine and are supported by the Cisco DevNet Neighborhood on a best-effort foundation. The Exchanges helps allow collaboration between workflow creators and moreover reduces the time it takes for a person to expertise worth from XDR automation.

Shout out to Ivan Berlinson, who wrote a workflow to tug menace logs from the Palo Alto Networks API and create Incidents in Cisco XDR. Since Ivan was type sufficient to publish the workflow to the Alternate, it was extraordinarily straightforward to import the workflow and get it operational. Putting in a workflow from the trade is basically like strolling by a configuration wizard. It features a description of what the workflow does, the required targets and variables, in addition to a contact individual for assist. Here’s what the workflow seems to be like within the Alternate simply earlier than set up.

Screenshot of the Palo Alto Networks Firewall incident displayed in Cisco XDR.

This workflow requires Automation distant, on-premises digital machine deployed over ESXi to make sure correct connectivity to the Palo Alto Panorama equipment. Shoutout to Matt Vander Horst who helped with the vCenter required to deploy the Automation distant equipment. The Alternate prompts the person to supply values for the required variables and choose the suitable on-premises goal.

Screenshot of the workflow installation screen

Then the workflow is put in and scheduled to run each quarter-hour by way of an automation rule.

Screenshot of the Palo Alto Networks Firewall incident in Cisco XDR

This workflow makes use of the PAN-OS XML API to question for menace logs at this path . This kicks off a search job. As soon as the search job is finished, the workflow retrieves the outcomes and begins parsing the menace logs. A Cisco Menace Intelligence Mannequin (CTIM) sighting is created for every particular person menace log and grouped collectively by inside host IP. Subsequent, a CTIM indicator with the outline of the menace log and a relationship to the corresponding sighting are each created. Lastly, an incident bundle is created with the sighting, relationship and indicator entities and posted to the XDR API. The workflow has logic in-built to examine for duplicate incidents and present indicators.

Screenshot of the Palo Alto Firewall search query

Here’s what one of many incidents that was created from this automation workflow seems to be like in Cisco XDR. This gave us as analysts within the SOC an important start line for an investigation.

Screenshot of the HTTP Director Traversal Vulnerability in Cisco XDR

These Palo Alto Community menace logs point out a listing traversal assault that goals to entry recordsdata and directories which are saved exterior the net root folder. PAN Firewall alerts on listing traversal and accessing from supply IP 192.168.130.86 on basic attendee Wi-Fi to vacation spot IP <104[.]198.XXX.2XX>, which resolves to < yXXXXis[.]get together>. This area is marked as suspicious by a number of menace intelligence sources and has a medium danger rating of 72 in Cisco Umbrella. The host then proceeded to obtain recordsdata from host with primary authentication within the HTTP POST header. This exercise was then correlated to related classroom exercise, however the host MAC tackle was not seen in any school rooms.

Screenshot of the location data and host MAC address in Cisco Umbrella
Screenshot of the risk score

The vacation spot IP reveals unknown with XDR menace intelligence, however the area it resolves to appears to be suspicious and it’s hosted within the Russian Federation, as seen within the Umbrella console. Listed here are extra particulars supplied by the Corelight group in our lively Menace Searching Slack chanel: HTTP POST exercise to the vacation spot in query reveals a primary authentication token that decodes to which does appear like it’s getting used for Black Hat coaching because it says BHUSA within the password. Nevertheless, this supply host’s MAC tackle was not seen in any school rooms, solely on the overall Wi-Fi.

Screenshot of the MAC information
Screenshot of the results served

We did discover the host making related queries like , which had been seen within the Superior Infrastructure Hacking class, however it’s not sufficient to attribute this exercise to a category. Anyhow, this habits sometimes shouldn’t be seen on the overall Wi-Fi. On this state of affairs, we didn’t take any motion of blocking the vacation spot IP or forcing a captive portal for host IP for the reason that Black Hat community goals to observe for assault and abuse, however not block malicious site visitors.

Ivan Berlison additionally supplied one other workflow to supply an XDR Incident when a file is convicted in Cisco Safe Malware analytics. Corelight, in addition to NetWitness, carve recordsdata off the community and submit them to be detonated in Safe Malware Analytics. Here’s what the XDR incident seems to be like when a file with a menace rating above 90 is seen:

Screenshot of Secure Malware Analytics: Malicious Detection as displayed in Cisco XDR

We had an exquisite time innovating and investigating at Black Hat USA 2024! The XDR automation trade was an enormous assist in including extra automation capabilities with very minimal customized work. Take a look at AJ Shipley’s weblog on how utilizing Cisco XDR at Black Hat has accelerated our open ecosystem. We’ll be again once more subsequent 12 months, so lengthy Black Hat!

Splunk Assault Analyzer (SAA)

By: Ryan MacLennan

Splunk Assault Analyzer (SAA) is a brand new addition to our deployment. As you might know, Cisco acquired Splunk this 12 months. Due to this new acquisition we labored with our counterparts in Splunk to get their SAA product provisioned for our use at Black Hat. SAA is a file and URL evaluation platform just like Safe Malware Analytics. SAA makes use of a complicated set of standards to find out which engine can be greatest fitted to evaluation — like internet analyzer, static file evaluation, e-mail analyzer, signature engines and/or the sandbox. Whereas the product is able to dynamic and static evaluation, we selected to do solely static evaluation for our use at Black Hat.

What is actually highly effective in regards to the evaluation of SAA is its assault chain following functionality: The power to intelligently decide how a human would click on on gadgets in a webpage. It’s going to observe hyperlinks, obtain recordsdata and analyze extra indicators from community connections, recognized malicious recordsdata, an unknown malicious file that’s analyzed on the fly, phishing domains and extra. It’s going to observe a logical stream like a human to find out the trail to compromise. This was attention-grabbing to see in our surroundings because it confirmed the trail from a file, the hyperlinks present in it, to totally different web sites, and every step of the trail had a screenshot for us to observe alongside.

For instance, now we have a PDF that was submitted to SAA. It discovered hyperlinks within the file and adopted them to see if they’d result in one thing malicious. I’ve blocked out many of the URLs, however we are able to see the way it went by the PDF knowledge and clicked on the hyperlinks to seek out out the place it might go.

Screenshot from the SAA Attack Analyzer

After SAA did its factor, we may have a look at the file in query and the screenshots that it took. We discovered that this file was the information utilized in a coaching room and every hyperlink was a reference to an article, a coaching useful resource (self-hosted and official), or different informational sources a scholar may have.

We had been in a position so as to add this integration with the assistance of our companion Corelight. We talked to them on day one and so they had been excited to get a brand new integration developed with SAA. Just a few hours later, we had an integration with them. This was a tremendous instance of how all of us come collectively to make the NOC higher at Black Hat yearly.

Umbrella DNS

By: Christian Clasen and Justin Murphy

You probably have learn the earlier Black Hat NOC/SOC experiences, that in 2023, we made a change to the DNS design. In prior conferences, we assigned inside forwarders to shoppers by way of DHCP, however didn’t drive their use. Basically, attendees may use any DNS resolvers they selected, and we didn’t intervene. The change we applied was to start forcibly redirecting DNS site visitors to the on-premises DNS forwarders. You may see within the statistics above that this alteration precipitated a major soar in queries processed by Cisco Umbrella — from 54.4 million to 79.3 million.

The steep enhance in question depend was not surprising. What was surprising, nevertheless, was a lower in question depend between 2023 and 2024. Whereas we don’t know the exact reason for this drop, we do have some theories and methods we are able to check them going ahead.

One potential clarification is the prevalence of encrypted DNS protocols. Lately, the business has turned its consideration to the privateness, integrity and authenticity issues inherent within the plain-text DNS protocol. To resolve a few of these points, “last-mile” encryption has grow to be a favourite of OS and browser distributors. DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) are solely a few the most well-liked methods to encrypt DNS between the consumer and the recursive resolver.

Detecting all encrypted DNS will be tough and counting the queries unattainable. It is because TCP is the chosen transport for DoH and DoT, and this permits the consumer to pipeline a number of queries over one long-lived TCP and TLS session. However what we are able to usually discover are the “bootstrap” plain-text DNS queries that allow to consumer to seek out the encrypted DNS server. By operating a report in Umbrella for the class “DoH and DoT”, we are able to get a deal with on the most well-liked of those companies:

Screenshot of the most popular DoH and DoT services

The entry for is most probably indicative of Android cellular gadgets who use this DoT resolver by default. The depend of queries for that exact service is more likely to be increased as a result of the classes on these gadgets are recognized to be short-lived if queries usually are not frequent sufficient.

On this report, we additionally see “canary” domains resembling and . The latter area is utilized by Firefox to detect when it ought to fall again to unencrypted DNS on the community. Extra particulars on how Umbrella interacts with these is written up within the Umbrella assist article for internet browsers and DoH default.

Going ahead, we are going to monitor the statistics of those protocols on the convention networks and see what different info we are able to collect utilizing the total packet seize capabilities of our companions and the menace looking capabilities of Cisco XDR. You may count on this matter to be expanded on within the subsequent convention report.

One of many major causes to no less than monitor DNS is to know tendencies and the way the community at Black Hat is getting used from a excessive stage. There are numerous insights that may be gained from forcing DNS by a centralized service with intelligence. DNS queries exist for locations that host all the things from Malware, Crypto Mining and Phishing to content material classes like Social Media, Finance and Unlawful Actions. Moreover, these domains will be categorized into particular purposes as properly. With the App Discovery report in Umbrella, these domains are grouped by software, figuring out the potential use of hundreds of purposes. This might be internet apps or different desktop/cellular apps.

As all the time, we proceed to see an increase in app utilization at Black Hat:

  • BHUSA 2019: ~3,600
  • BHUSA 2021: ~2,600
  • BHUSA 2022: ~6,300
  • BHUSA 2023: ~7,500
  • BHUSA 2024: ~9,300
Screenshot of a graph showing app category and risk at Black Hat USA
General Most Common App Classes

This 12 months there was one stand out Utility Class that has been rising in reputation: Generative AI. It’s going to doubtless be no shock that there are extra attendees and their instruments utilizing Generative AI. We have now gone from seeing it as a footnote in logs to reporting it at RSAC 2024, as we noticed 80 totally different Generative AI instruments getting used.

Examine this to Black Hat 2024, just some months later, the place the overall quantity has jumped to 194.

Black Hat USA 2024

This doesn’t look like only a distinction in conferences, however somewhat a rising pattern and acceptance of those instruments.

Community Assurance

By: Adam Kilgore, Shimei Cridlig, Shannon Wellington and Justin Murphy

The ThousandEyes deployment launched at Black Hat USA 2023 one 12 months in the past. At that convention, we spent many lengthy shifts creating the configurations, design, and procedures that shaped the idea for our convention protection. The deployment was additional improved and streamlined at Black Hat London and Black Hat Asia. At this 12 months’s Black Hat USA 2024, we had been able to broaden our protection considerably whereas persevering with to refine our procedures.

New {hardware}

We added 20 Orange Pi gadgets at Black Hat 2024, along with the 8 Raspberry Pi gadgets we deployed in 2023. We’re nonetheless properly in need of the proverbial thousand eyes, however 28 is much more than 8. We deployed our new fleet of Orange Pi gadgets to observe the wi-fi community, whereas the previous Raspberry Pi gadgets had been used for wired monitoring of Registration, the NOC and core community gadgets.

Orange Pi configuration

Man working at a table in a conference room; the table is completely covered in cords and power strips.
Our setup desk for preliminary deployment

Mike Spicer put in quite a lot of time to develop new configuration and deployment procedures for the Orange Pi gadgets earlier than the convention. We had been in a position to make use of a script and a small native community to configure every Orange Pi with a particular SSID and PSK. As soon as the Pi gadgets had been configured and the goal entry factors had been deployed, every Pi was walked to its goal coaching room the place it might mechanically hook up with the entry level (AP) on bootup and start operating its scheduled monitoring assessments.

Even with the scripting and automation, the configuration stage nonetheless resulted in a mass of wires (pictured above). Deploying the Pi gadgets resulted in additional strolling than the common attendee would expertise in a convention (not pictured).

Expanded wi-fi protection

Screenshot of the dashboard showing monitored agents during briefings
A dashboard of monitored brokers throughout briefings

With the extra brokers, we had been capable of deploy to extra Black Hat coaching rooms. The expanded visibility allowed us to catch extra issues earlier than the coaching rooms went stay, together with a misconfigured PSK, an SSID that wasn’t broadcasting and an SSID that broadcast however didn’t have web connectivity. We’d like to have an agent for every coaching room for full visibility and validation heading into the convention, however we’re pleased with what we caught and the extra confidence the brokers supplied heading into the coaching days.

Because the convention shifted from trainings to the briefing days, we shifted our protection from the biggest coaching classes to massive briefing rooms and heavy-traffic areas like the doorway and Enterprise Corridor. Whereas we nonetheless needed to make powerful strategic choices about what to cowl and what to not cowl, we had been nonetheless capable of unfold brokers throughout every flooring for basic visibility.

Troubleshooting

Our experiences over the previous three conferences had produced well-established troubleshooting procedures and paperwork for the Raspberry Pi gadgets, however the Orange Pi devicess introduced contemporary challenges. We had round 25% of our deployed Orange Pi gadgets require troubleshooting through the first 24 hours after deployment, a regarding fee. Log evaluation revealed the wi-fi NIC turning into disconnected and the USB coming into a disconnect loop (the wi-fi NIC is related by way of USB on the Orange Pi gadgets). The issues with the wi-fi NIC and USB result in a recurring ThousandEyes agent core recordsdata — a tough set of issues.

Nevertheless, these points turned out to be remoted somewhat than widespread, and by the tip of the convention we had a full wi-fi deployment that was staying up all day and in a single day as properly. For what turned out to be remoted wi-fi issues, we developed troubleshooting procedures and documentation.

Automated ticketing

A brand new ticketing system was rolled out at this convention that may create tickets in Slack based mostly on ThousandEyes knowledge or reported points. Beneath is a ticket created based mostly on TE alerts for a particular convention room through the first morning of briefings.

Screenshot of a ticket generated from latency reporting
A ticket generated from ThousandEyes latency reporting

The dashboards in ThousandEyes allowed us to supply fast visible info that confirmed which convention rooms had been experiencing the worst latency, alongside a comparability of latency throughout reporting rooms.

Screenshot from the ticket showing high latency
A screenshot uploaded to the ticket, displaying latency within the reported room

The automated experiences behind every dashboard entry supplied extra granular info, together with site visitors path and the latency alongside every leg within the site visitors path.

Screenshot showing latency in the default gateway
A screenshot uploaded to the ticket that reveals thelatency to the default gateway

The brand new ticketing system allowed screenshots like those above to be aggregated within the ticket for group communication and document maintaining.

Troubleshooting WorkflowOn 08/06/2024 at 15:00, we noticed excessive latency to our Inner Umbrella DNS check from the South Seas D Hallway and Enterprise Corridor Brokers. Word that the hyperlinks to the investigation views are supplied as hyperlinks.

Screenshot of the ThousandEyes Latency Dashboard

To slim down the view, we used a dashboard filter to concentrate on the 2 Brokers.

Screenshot of the cloud and enterprise agents

This confirmed the excessive latency noticed by the 2 Brokers prolonged throughout a number of assessments.

Screenshot of the different agents suffering latency

From right here, we drilled down on every check to examine the person check outcomes.

Inside this view, we chosen a number of assessments operating on each Brokers and in contrast the outcomes.

Screenshot of selecting multiple test running on both agents

We noticed that there was a latency spike reported by each Brokers.

Screenshot of the latency spikes reported by both agents

To know the reason for the excessive latency, we drilled all the way down to Path Visualization.

Screenshot of the path visualization

We observed the excessive hyperlink delay between the Agent to its gateway. This means a difficulty both between the consumer and AP or between the AP and the server room with the router.

Screenshot of the link delay between the agent and its gateway

To verify the reason for the latency, we visited South Seas D. We ran extra assessments to substantiate that the connection expertise match with the outcomes reported by the Agent. Reviewing the room and topology diagrams additional, we discovered that the AP overlaying South Seas D was positioned in an adjoining room, and was broadcasting two SSIDs — one for the room it was positioned in, and the opposite for South Seas D. The mixture of the AP placement, the AP servicing two rooms, and the attendee quantity in South Seas D mixed to supply the latency noticed by the Agent. These findings had been shared with the wi-fi group.

Cell gadget administration at Black Hat: The position of Meraki Techniques Supervisor

By: Dalton Ross

The Black Hat cybersecurity occasion in Las Vegas is famend for its cutting-edge know-how and seamless attendee expertise. A crucial part of this success lies in efficient cellular gadget administration (MDM). Since Black Hat USA 2021, we leveraged Cisco Meraki Techniques Supervisor (SM) to deal with a wide range of duties essential to the occasion’s operations. Beneath is an in depth have a look at how the Meraki SM was deployed and the challenges confronted alongside the best way.

Important roles of cellular gadgets at Black Hat

Cell gadgets had been pivotal in a number of key areas:

  1. Registration Kiosk iPad Gadgets (~50 Gadgets): Used at registration kiosks to streamline the attendee check-in course of, the place attendees scan a QR code for fast badge printing
  2. Session Scanning iPad Gadgets (~75 Gadgets): Deployed throughout Black Hat classes to scan registered attendees into every session
  3. Lead Retrieval Gadgets (~800 Gadgets): A considerable variety of gadgets had been utilized on the present flooring cubicles to swiftly gather sales space customer contact knowledge
Man working on a collection of iPhones at a table

Deliberate deployment for Meraki Techniques Supervisor

To make sure a clean deployment, our technique included a number of key steps:

  1. Pre-State with Apple Automated System Enrollment (ADE): Earlier than cargo to the occasion location, all gadgets had been pre-staged utilizing ADE. This allowed gadgets to be configured with a recognized SSID for sooner deployment on website.
  2. Segregated Transport: Gadgets had been to be shipped in three distinct groupings, every comparable to one of many roles. This aimed to facilitate swift deployment upon arrival.
  3. Dashboard Script for Function Affiliation: A customized dashboard script was ready to leverage the Meraki Dashboard API and simply affiliate enrolled gadgets with their respective roles.
  4. Automated Configuration Obtain: As soon as powered up, gadgets had been anticipated to mechanically obtain any vital configurations or apps associated to their position, making them prepared for rapid deployment.
  5. Well being Monitoring with Cisco ThousandEyes: ThousandEyes brokers had been to be deployed all through the venue to log SM well being at totally different occasion places.
  6. Publish-Occasion Manufacturing unit Reset: After the occasion, all gadgets had been to be manufacturing unit erased earlier than being returned.
Screenshot of a group of people in a conference room configuring devices

Challenges and workarounds

As in life, challenges arose that required fast considering and adaptation:

  • Utility Listing Modifications: A final-minute change to the appliance checklist for session scanning gadgets was required. Though we initially deliberate to have all configurations prepared beforehand, this surprising change was effectively managed utilizing the Techniques Supervisor with just some clicks.
  • ThousandEyes Agent Limitations: Since ThousandEyes brokers had been beta SM shoppers, they couldn’t precisely collect connectivity knowledge. This was an anticipated habits, however it posed a problem for efficient monitoring. To beat this, NOC members from Cisco ThousandEyes and Cisco Meraki collaborated to hack collectively a proof of idea. By onerous work and several other iterations, we configured the ThousandEyes brokers to simulate gadget check-in site visitors, mimicking legitimate SM shoppers.
Black Hat checkin stations

Deploying Meraki Techniques Supervisor at Black Hat was an intricate however rewarding endeavor. Regardless of going through challenges, our group demonstrated agility and innovation, guaranteeing the occasion’s operations ran easily. The expertise underscored the significance of flexibility and fast drawback fixing in managing large-scale occasions.

By leveraging superior MDM options like Meraki Techniques Supervisor, we had been capable of present a seamless expertise for attendees and exhibitors alike, showcasing the ability of know-how in occasion administration.


We’re happy with the collaboration of the Cisco group and the NOC companions. Black Hat Europe shall be December 9-12, 2024 on the London eXcel Centre.

The Black Hat team poses together in the conference center lobby

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Cisco NOC group:

  • Cisco Safe: Christian Clasen, Matt Vander Horst, Aditya Sankar, Ben Greenbaum, Ryan Maclennan, Adam Kilgore, Shimei Cridlig, Shannon Wellington and Justin Murphy, with distant assist by Jessica (Bair) Oppenheimer
  • Meraki Techniques Supervisor: Dalton Ross, with distant assist by Paul Fidler and Connor Laughlin. Search for their report on The Meraki Weblog.

Additionally, to our NOC companions:

  • NetWitness (particularly Alessandro Zatti)
  • Palo Alto Networks (particularly Jason Reverri and James Holland)
  • Corelight (particularly Dustin Lee)
  • Arista (particularly Jonathan Smith)
  • Lumen and all the Black Hat/Informa Tech workers (particularly Grifter ‘Neil Wyler,’ Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Mike Spicer, Sandy Wenzel, Heather Williams, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg)

About Black Hat

Black Hat is the cybersecurity business’s most established and in-depth safety occasion collection. Based in 1997, these annual, multi-day occasions present attendees with the newest in cybersecurity analysis, improvement, and tendencies. Pushed by the wants of the group, Black Hat occasions showcase content material straight from the group by Briefings shows, Trainings programs, Summits, and extra. Because the occasion collection the place all profession ranges and educational disciplines convene to collaborate, community, and focus on the cybersecurity subjects that matter most to them, attendees can discover Black Hat occasions in america, Canada, Europe, Center East and Africa and Asia.

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