Leadership
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!
Read more “Board Level Security Metrics”
Guides
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 typically operated on TCP 445
Education
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!
Read more “Nmap & CrackMapExec (CME)”
Guides
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):
Read more “I AM BRUTE”
CTF
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.)
I’m not going to talk through every step but here’s the commands you would need to run:
Read more “Using CTFs for offensive and defensive training – Purple Teaming”
Hacking
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:
Read more “Hash Cracking for Modern OS X (10.8+)”
Hacking
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:
Read more “Linux Privilege Escalation”
Guides
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?
Read more “Measuring Cyber Essentials: Windows Security Configuration”
Threat Intel
When running honeypots you never have to wait too long for something to drop!
This moring we had a new hit in the pot, so I decided to invesigate but also to blog and show how we could go about investigating the logs and paylods etc.
Read more “Learn to SOC: Java Webshell via confluence”
Hacking
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:
Read more “Priviledge Escalation Hunting – Scheduled Tasks and Scripts”