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

Port Forwarding with WSL2

have you ever wanted to port forward from a Windows Host to a WSl2 KALI VM when you are using a NAT’d virtual switch configuraiton with WSL2?

Hacking

Stealthy Active Directory Username Enumeration with LDAPNomNom

My friend Lars and I were just talking about some of the research areas we are working on and randomly the conversation turned into “what shall we call it?” and then LDAPNomNom came up! So I whilst laughing (coz the name is lulz) with my buddy I downloaded and ran LDAPNomNom against a lab vm quickly! (Lars also fixed an error with readme.md that I pointed out coz my debug skillz ROCK! 😛 )

So here we have me doing username enumeration via LDAP Ping using LDAPNOMNOM!

Education

Active Directory Enumeration with ChatGPT

I’ve not slept well for the last week and my brain is hurting, so I thought I would see if I can take our lovely new SKYNET overload AI “CHATGPT” and make it do all my work for me!

A common vulnerability in systems like Active Directory is where a system administrator writes a password in the description field. So the easy answer to this is DO NOT DO THIS. However during penetration testing we want to check. There’s tons of ways to do this but I thought I’d ask our AI roboto to help, so let’s see!

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

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:

Guides

How to use Putty as a SOCKS Proxy

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!

Education

Common Windows Services

Exploitation of common windows services is an important area of knowledge for both offense and defence.

Server Message Block (SMB)
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
Windows Remote Management (WinRM)
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Other common technology platforms in the Windows Stack Include

Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)
Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS)
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL)

For now I’m just going to look at a few of the common protocols and vectors.

Education

PWNDEFND: Known Exploitable Vulnerabilities (KEV) – AKA: Offensive KEV

There’s thousand of vulnerabilities, but do you ever struggle work out what ones might actually be useful to you if you are defending or attacking?

Well don’t worry I’ve started to document some things that might help you both attack and defend in CYBERSPACE!

Education

Learn to SOC: Cryptominer Analysis

I’m totally in the middle of doing some work but this alert just came in so I have quickly dumped the data:

This came in via a Confluence exploit (not sure which CVE yet). I’ve not got time to analyse but thought I’d share this as an educational excercise for people! It’s a good excercise to see the apache tomcat logs and then decode, obtain samples and analyse the activity/imapct (as well as yoink IOCs etc.)