Active Directory Security Cheat Sheet

Ok you need to do some AD Security Auditing or Security Testing/Exploitation, great. Let’s look at some of the common misconfigurations and some tools to help you, a list of things will obviously not be the answer, you will need a method and process to go through from recon/enumeration through to exploitation and impact (effects), but that’s what google is for (and CTFs/Labs)! This post is just me jotting down some notes, hopefully they help defenders think about improving their posture.

Education

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.

Threat Intel

Pro Russian Hacktivist Groups

Cyberwarfare in Ukraine was hyped as a MASSIVE thing, yet largely it’s been more bark and bite, but perhaps people need to understand that you can’t just “CYBER” a remote network, and even if you could, let’s say you get RCE on 30 networks in a country, so what? There needs to be value, purpose and something that will support other objectives, this isn’t a CTF.

Espionage (Collection/CNE)
Information Warfare (PsyOps)
Computer Network Attacks/Operations (CNA/CNO)

Education

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:

Education

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:

Threat Intel

ESXiargs Summary 09-02-2023 10:03

What do we know?

Adversary: Unknown, likely Criminal Actor/s

Initial Access Vector: Unknown/Unproven

Impact: ~3K+ Hosts have had Remote Code Execute and their ESXi logon pages changed (plus had encryption routines run to encrypt virtual machines, with varying success). A Second encryption routine has been deployed to some hosts; the threat actor is expanding/changing capabilities.

Risk: Further impact, Additional Threat Actors Exploit the vulnerability

Getting into Cyber

How to get into Cyber? It’s EASY!

Quick, I’ll tell you a little secret… to get into CYBER you must first follow this guide:

Now if you are going to GET INTO CYBER you need to have a range of things:

Computer Hacking Skills
Num-chuk Skills

Right ok, so let’s get some Hacking Skills!

Head over to KALI LINUX and download KALI

Threat Intel

ESXiARGS Ransomware – Global Incident

Thousands of ESXi hosts around (some of the) globe have been encrypted by cyber criminals. This post is a fast publish showing some of what has occurred, it’s impact and now includes limited remedial advice.

If you have been affected by this ransomware event there is an attempted recovery script by CISA

https://github.com/cisagov/ESXiArgs-Recover/blob/main/recover.sh

Leadership

Technology in the Wild

Whilst every marketing person will talk about the latest and greatest tech innovation and product, how much does that reflect the reality of technology deployed in the world? Everyone is running Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 right?! They also don’t use computers, because everything is cloud and mobile first right! and security, well everyone has that down as well! Great… let’s just go and check those statements out… oh wait…. no maybe err.. let’s take a look with our friends at shodan.io

Hacking

CrackMapExec (CME) on Windows

Ok this is going to be really short post, but expect more later! Did you ever want to run CME but you were stuck on a Windows machine? Well don’t worry you can! How do we do this?

First we download CME

https://github.com/Porchetta-Industries/CrackMapExec/releases/download/v5.4.0/cme-windows-latest-3.10.1.zip

Extract the zip file

Make sure you have python3 installed!