Cyber Security for PC Gamers

Introduction

The other day there was a lot of focus on “ATLASOS” a rather oddly branded project, just to be clear:

ATLASOS is NOT AN Operating System (OS) (despite it’s name!)

ATLASOS (at the time of writing) disables basically the majority of Windows Security features including:

Defender
Smart Screen
Windows Update
Spectre/Meltdown Mitigations

Basically, if you can think of “nightmare” in the cyber world, ATLASOS’s security posture is basically that (in my opinion)! That said, it’s cool from a nerd Windows customization/build pov, however based on my initial investigations I would strong recommend NOT using it on a “PRODUCTION” system (or anything that’s connected to the internet!).

Active Directory Attacks – “It’s cold out here”

Scenario

In this scenario it is assumed you do not have credentials, but you do have either adjacent or routable access to an Active Directory Domain Controller and can access common ports/services such as: LDAP, LDAPS, SMB, NETBIOS, KERBEROS, DNS

Port Forwarding with WSL2

have you ever wanted to port forward from a Windows Host to a WSl2 KALI VM when you are using a NAT’d virtual switch configuraiton with WSL2?

The Long Game: Persistent Hash Theft

CVE-2023-23397 enables a threat actor to send a calendar invite whereby the properties of the msg file can include a path for the reminder sound file. This is achieved by setting:

Active Directory Enumeration with ChatGPT

I’ve not slept well for the last week and my brain is hurting, so I thought I would see if I can take our lovely new SKYNET overload AI “CHATGPT” and make it do all my work for me!

A common vulnerability in systems like Active Directory is where a system administrator writes a password in the description field. So the easy answer to this is DO NOT DO THIS. However during penetration testing we want to check. There’s tons of ways to do this but I thought I’d ask our AI roboto to help, so let’s see!

Some TOX Clients Leak Egress IP addresses

Some friends and I did some testing this evening with TOX clients. We wanted to take a look at PERSEC/OPSEC considerations for using TOX. I also had a sneaky suspicion that it might out of the box leak more than people would appreciate (just a hunch and you don’t know until you test right!).

So, we setup a test. In the test we had:

Am I a criminal or am I a cybersecurity…

Whilst the common person will largely link the words “hacker/hackers” to criminal the reality is hackers are scientists/artists/creators/ComputerOperators and the choice of being a criminal or not is down to actions and consequences. So the debate about if you identify as “hacker” does that make you a criminal, well it’s nonsense isn’t it. I could call myself a pony but it won’t make me one, much like I could call myself a criminal and I could be entirely law abiding.

Is my house spying on me?

Do you ever get the feeing you are being watched? What about listening to it? Do you ever talk about a subject and then see it appear in adverts despite never using a computer to search for it?

Well don’t worry there’s lots of reasons as to why this can occur, and whilst you might want to think someone is spying on you, the truth is they probably aren’t looking for you, but they might be harvesting your data.

How would I apply to the role of “Head…

I was pottering about (not like a wizard, more like a cold infected zombie!) and an email hit my mailbox with the “Head of Cyber Architecture” at BA. I have no intention of applying but I thought.. I wonder if this is a good exercise to show people how I would go about the exercise? Well to even begin this I need to write down some notes. So I guess here we go… how far I get into this “fantast football” style scenario who knows, but hopefully it will show some people how I might do things! First up let’s look at the raw requirement:

Lockbit 3.0 and Royal Mail – Chats Published

The loss of availability Ransomware causes is enough to make your day/week/s bad, the loss of data, bad month/quarter or longer.

Lockbit posted “Royal Mail need new negotiator.” Followed by “ALL AVAILABLE DATA PUBLISHED !”

What we actually found is that they published the chat history: