Cybersecurity Fairy Tale

Cybersecurity awareness and education should start with the primary school!!!

Some 10 years ago this was the typical “zero trust” story I told my daughter:

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Little Red Riding Hood. One day she wanted to visit her grandmother, ill and weak, that was living on the other end of the wood.

When Little Red Riding Hood entered the wood, a wolf met her, a typical Wolf-in-the-Middle attack (variation of MITM).

She revealed some confidential information: "I am going to my grandmother's house.”

Wolf executes some active reconnaissance scans to gather further information about where exactly the house of her grandmother is.

Finally, he said, "Little Red Riding Hood, look how pretty the flowers are about here. Why do you not look round for a while and pick up some flowers for your grandmother". She was not aware that he was abusing her task scheduling functionality, to facilitate execution of malicious plan, and decided to look for flowers.

Meanwhile the wolf ran straight to the grandmother's house and knocked at the door, with intention to abuse an existing family trust connection that was not protected by a strong password.

"Who is there?", asked grandmother.

"Little Red Riding Hood," replied the wolf with soft voice. He was good with phishing attacks.

When door opened, he devoured her. Then he put on her clothes and laid down in bed to wait for Little Red Riding Hood.

When she arrived, it was a surprise to find the door standing open, and carefully said “Good morning," but received no answer. So, she went to the bed and saw her grandmother looking very strange. She decided to use challenge-response tactic:

"Oh, grandmother," she said, "what big ears you have."

"The better to hear you, my child," was the reply. Wolf decided to modify the configuration settings to evade little girl defenses, to increase trust and escalate his privileges.

"But, grandmother, what big eyes you have," she said.

"The better to see you, my dear."

"Oh, but, grandmother, what a big mouth you have."

"The better to eat you." And when he said this, he made lateral movement, basically getting up from the bed, and swallowed her.? It was not just denial of service; it was a total loss.

With full stomach, wolf fell asleep. The huntsman, part of Security Operation Centre team, was just passing the house, and thought to himself, “let′s do some monitoring and detection”.

So he went into the room, and when he saw the wolf with big stomach, he correlated rapidly wolf′s location and status. He was about to raise an alarm, but he first evaluated risks and though about course of action.? It occurred to him that the wolf might have eaten the grandmother, and that she might still be saved, so he did not fire, but as a mitigation and recovery action opted for a pair of scissors. He began to cut open the stomach of the sleeping wolf.

When he finished, the little girl sprang out, crying, followed by the grandmother that came out alive as well. Little Red Riding Hood filled the wolf's belly with stones, so when he awoke, the stones were so heavy that he collapsed and fell dead.

Maybe a bit heavy for a 7 years old? I am joking of course, but let me know if you like the story.