Security Awareness Training Example

Introduction

There are tons of “products” for security awarenss training, however you might find that sitting and watching canned CBT videos isn’t your organisations thing or perhaps you want to see what other options there are available. Well for starts the UK NCSC has some free online security awarenss training (see further down the post), or you may want to actually spend time with your staff to make the learning a collaboarive experiance that drives engagement and communication. If the last one if your desired approach there are lots of ways to do this. One of which can be supported by a question based assessment, other ways include tabletop scenarios and incident simulations (i honestly would go with a blended appraoch if it was me!).

So to help people get thinking about this I’ve put together some example questions to drive the message about incident reporting, collaboration and education vs blame. So here we go, here’s some ideas for communication and some questions to get staff thinking about cyber security, sure they aren’t rocket science, but then it doesn’t need to be!

Education

Common Windows Services

Exploitation of common windows services is an important area of knowledge for both offense and defence.

Server Message Block (SMB)
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
Windows Remote Management (WinRM)
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Other common technology platforms in the Windows Stack Include

Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)
Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS)
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

For now I’m just going to look at a few of the common protocols and vectors.

Leadership

Board Level Security Metrics

Everyone always asks what are the best security metrics to have? The answer is simple to me, use metrics that are valuable to your business governance and decision-making processes! Easy right.

Not so easy in real life right!

Guides

SMB (Server Message Block) Protocol Basics

SMB in a CLI world

If you are new or like me forget the bazzilion command syntaxes in the world, the use of the man command will be super helpful as well as google foo! To help people on their way here are some example of basic SMB tools, these come with kali.

SMB Ports

SMB typically operated on TCP 445

Nmap Example

Education

Nmap & CrackMapExec (CME)

The swiss army knife of the cyber world, it can port scan, fingerprint, produce reports and run scripts using the nmap scripting engine (NSE).

Why do we care about NMAP, surely everyone knows how to NMAP?

Well, that’s simply not true, it’s always important to tech new people, to revise and hone existing skills and the world of nmap scripting is constantly evolving.

Port scanning and fingerprinting let alone leaking sensitive data and conducting “attacks” is all possible. You can do a basic vulnerability scan with nmap alone!

Leadership

Pew Pew Maps – Cool graphics bro

Ever want to be MORE cyber? Need to impress the board? Want to look 1337 AF? Worry not we have your back! Here is a collection of CYBER MAPS to project on your wall mounted displays!

Guides

I AM BRUTE

How long should you test brute force password attempts for?

Well, a recent Microsoft report showed the average RDP brute force attack over the internet lasted about 3 days. Now let’s take a look at what a single attacker machine (IP) can send to a single target server over a well-connected network (1GBE low latency):

CTF

Using CTFs for offensive and defensive training – Purple…

Pwning a legacy server on Hack the Box is good for a training exercise however what about if we want to think about how to use resrouces for red and blue. Looking at both sides of the coin when thinking about offense really should help people undesrand how to defend better. In the end of the day outside of a tiny tiny fraction of deployment types, you are going to need to be able to explain how to defend regardless of engagement type (vulnerability assessment, penetration test, purple team, red team etc.)

Getting access

I’m not going to talk through every step but here’s the commands you would need to run:

Hacking

Hash Cracking for Modern OS X (10.8+)

How do we crack OS X password hashes?

I haven’t had tea but I was thinking about the MAC i was remoting into and I suddenly thought.. I wonder how to crack the hashes from a MAC. Surely it’s just cat /etc/passwd and cat /etc/shadow and then unshadow and run hashcat right?

WRONG!

The hashes for local users are stored here:

Hacking

Linux Privilege Escalation

When you gain access to a target node you will want to explore, the exact method you use to do this will depend upon operational security considerations, time constraints and style. You will be looking for a range of elements to support progressing an objective.

It should be noted that the objective may NOT require elevation. You may be trying to obtain data and access might already be possible using the context you have assumed.

You also may need to move from a www-data user to a named user account or get to root level of access. If so there’s a range of questions we should be asking ourselves: