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!).

Education

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

Hacking

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.

Defence

Threat hunting with some funny results!

You never know what you will find when you go hunting! So here’s a quick tale of an explore I did using Advanced Hunting!

I went hunting here in Advanced Hunting:

Uncategorized

Hunting for New Group Policies Where Scheduled Tasks are…

A common way to deploy an encryption routine used in Ransomware scenarios is to create a scheduled task to launch a cyptor exe. This is commonly deployed via a Group Policy Object (GPO).

So I wanted to look at how with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) we could detect this both on domain controllers but also on CLIENT devices (MEMBER SERVERS/PCs)

Guides

Volume Shadow Copy

If you are having fun today with Defender ASR deleting lnk files then you will see the MS Script has a v1.1 which looks to VSS to see if it can restore shortcuts from shadow copies, so whilst here I thought I’d note down a few different ways to list the Volume Shadow Copies.

You will need admin rights for these to work:

Defense

Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service with new CU Update

This is a big thing in the Exchange world from my POV! I believe this is dropping sometime today (28th September!)

History

Exchange OWA, ECP etc. are exposed online not only for mailbox access, calendar sharing but also are a requirement for hybrid mode sync capabilities.

Vulnerabilities in Exchange this year (ProxyLogon/ProxyShell) have shown how problematic an attack surface this is. The good news is, Microsoft have created a feature for Exchange to help mitigate these attacks in the future via the EM Service!

Defense

How to restore AdminSDHolder Object Permissions using ADSIedit

Ok so the other day “we” as a community put out some guidance around post active directory compromise actions for when you can’t simply nuke the forest from orbit. Well, following on from that a friend asked about how to restore AdminSDHolder permissions? Read more “How to restore AdminSDHolder Object Permissions using ADSIedit” →

Defense

Windows Security Fundamentals & LPE

Introduction

Recently I decided to do the Red Team Operator: Privilege Escalation in Windows Course by Sektor7 (thanks for the recommendation Justin!). I thought I’d write some notes but also create a quick blog covering some of the Windows fundamental areas. It’s easy to actually forget how this stuff is at a detailed level so figured it helps both myself and the world to share a snippet. I’m litterally listening to the course as I type this, I’ve just imported an OVA to vmware workstation so this is litterally live! (I’m 7 video modules in!)

There’s some key parts around Windows Security Architecture that is important to know, the course does cover this off at the start so I thought I’d share a tiny bit of my notes. Read more “Windows Security Fundamentals & LPE” →

Defense

Hardening Office 365 PowerShell Access

Only admins can use PowerShell, right? Wrong! In Office 365 and Azure AD standard users can connect using PowerShell.

In this quick post we are going to look at how to disable users from being able to read other users data using the MSOL cmdlets. (this also appears to limit AzureAD cmdlets access as well)

Disable MSOL Read Access

Run the following command as a global admin: Read more “Hardening Office 365 PowerShell Access” →