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!

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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:

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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:

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Guides

Measuring Cyber Essentials: Windows Security Configuration

Measuring Compliance with standards is easy right?

Checking an environment configuration is one of those things where it’s easy to say and harder to do. If we take the cyber essentials standard and look at the requirements, they are quite different from say the CIS baselines. This alone makes for some fun, let’s investigate this further:

CIS baselines are based on a specific component e.g., Windows Server or Windows client and is contextually aware of roles: e.g., Domain Controller vs Member Server.

Is this registry key set?

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Defence

Offensive KEV Updates! CISA releases 38 more CVEs to…

Life in the vulnerability and exploit space is never dull

Spotted on twitter (thanks Danny!):

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cisa-warning-hackers-are-exploiting-these-36-significant-cybersecurity-vulnerabilities-so-patch-now/

CISA updates the known exploited vulnerabilities list (KEV) yesterday with another 38 updates!

That means an update is required for OFFESNIVE KEV!

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Hacking

Priviledge Escalation Hunting – Scheduled Tasks and Scripts

TLDR: If you have been hunting for privescs before you will know it’s normally not a fast task, you will have a shed ton of data to look at. Sure WINPEAS is good but it’s not a silver bullet.

Here is a really small script which focuses on system administration files/scripts, scheduled tasks and scheduled task history to help you hunt for weaknesses:

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Guides

SSH oh MY: no matching key exchange method found.…

Have you ever tried to SSH into a server and recieved the following error?

no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

Well that’s probably becuase you are using a bit of kit with legacy software or firmware.

Then when you try to SSH and you add diffie-hellman-group1-sh1 you get the following back?

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Education

Creating a tracker and dashboard for Cyber Essentials

I was talking to a friend about a requirement to “measure” cyber essentials compliance. Now if you know a thing or two about standards and applying standards to complex technology environments you might come up with:

  • Can’t we just script a checker?
  • Don’t we have all the audit data in the *checks notes* 1000 inventory systems we have?

Well sure, you could write a massive set of rules which ignore any context and try and cater for a huge number of different scenarios. You could use the Q&A approach as well (which is how the standard workbook works anyway so that already exists). But let’s say you are an IT manager, and you want to KNOW how your environment stacks up!

The question is simple, it’s easy to ask, look:

  • “How compliant are we against Cyber Essentials?”
Read more “Creating a tracker and dashboard for Cyber Essentials”