Guides
Ever stuck in an environment where your internet access isn’t what you want it to be? Ever need to exfilrate data and bypass some DLP? Obviously I’m talking like a pentester (don’t use this if it beaks policies on anohers assets) so this is useful for some scenarios in testing but also in real life!
Read more “How to use Putty as a SOCKS Proxy”
Education
Honestly, it feels weird writing this, however I feel there’s a real issue with penetration testing and some myths that (for understandable and obvious reasons) exist in some people’s minds. So I’ve taken to trying to explain to people what an external penetration test actually entails in the real world of business. So here goes!
Read more “Infrastructure Penetration Testing Realities”
Defence
Working out what exploits to care about is a tough job, kill chains, availability of exploits, complexity, data flows, controls etc. all play a part in understanding a vulnerability and how it affects your organisational risk. To support this effort I’ve started to compile a list of public exploits against CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV). This may be useful for defensive and offensive security pros.
Read more “Offensive KEV Alpha 0.1”
Education
Exploitation of common windows services is an important area of knowledge for both offense and defence.
Other common technology platforms in the Windows Stack Include
For now I’m just going to look at a few of the common protocols and vectors.
Read more “Common Windows Services”
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”