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GCHQ has finally released the solution to their head spinning Xmas Puzzle , after all, the participants failed to reach the final answer. GCHQ had released a crypto puzzle, dubbed Xmas Puzzle , on 9th December in the form of a Christmas Card that went viral online soon after its release. Nearly 600,000 people shot a "Go" for the challenge since early December, but only 30,000 had made it reach the final stage. The puzzle got popped up with a grid-shading Nonogram that resulted in the formation of a QR Code containing a hint to unlock the next level challenges. Xmas Puzzle prolonged to various topics like Web Link Maze, Word & Numeric Puzzle, Graph Theory and other Cipher Dilemmas. Some of the questions also intrigued on entertaining topics like Lord of the Rings, Ducks, Chess, French, and Semaphores. Who Created Crypto 'Xmas Puzzle'? This brainstorming puzzle was created by a small team of GCHQ Cryptographers under the GCHQ director Robert Han...

UK's Secretive Spy Agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has open-sourced one of its tools on code-sharing website GitHub for free... A graph database called ' Gaffer .' Gaffer , written in Java, is a kind of database that makes it "easy to store large-scale graphs in which the nodes and edges have statistics such as counts, histograms and sketches." Github is a popular coding website that allows software developers to build their project on a single platform equipped with all the requirements that are gone in the making of a software. Gaffer and its Functionalities In short, Gaffer is a framework for creating mass-scale databases, to store and represent data, and is said to be useful for tasks including: Allow the creation of graphs with summarised properties within Accumulo with a very less amount of coding. Allow flexibility of stats that describe the entities and edges. Allow easy addition of nodes and edges. Allo...

As a relatively new security category, many security operators and executives I've met have asked us "What are these Automated Security Validation (ASV) tools?" We've covered that pretty extensively in the past, so today, instead of covering the " What is ASV?" I wanted to address the " Why ASV?" question. In this article, we'll cover some common use cases and misconceptions of how people misuse and misunderstand ASV tools daily (because that's a lot more fun). To kick things off, there's no place to start like the beginning. Automated security validation tools are designed to provide continuous, real-time assessment of an organization's cybersecurity defenses. These tools are continuous and use exploitation to validate defenses like EDR, NDR, and WAFs. They're more in-depth than vulnerability scanners because they use tactics and techniques that you'll see in manual penetration tests. Vulnerability scanners won't relay hashes or combine vulnerabilities to further attacks, whic