A user-driven attack is an attack that relies on a feature to get code execution. Most penetration testers I know rely on user-driven attacks over public memory corruption exploits. User-driven attacks are less likely to see a patch and they usually target an application in a way that works across many versions. What’s not to […]
CTA Type: Blog
Cobalt Strike 2.1 – I have the POWER(shell)
For a long time, I’ve wanted the ability to use PowerUp, Veil PowerView, and PowerSploit with Cobalt Strike. These are useful post-exploitation capabilities written in PowerShell. You’d think that it’s easy to run a script during the post-exploitation phase, especially when this script is written in the native scripting environment for Windows. It’s harder than […]
The Post Exploitation Team
I often get asked about red team skills and training. What should each team member know how to do? For exercises or long running attack simulations, I believe it’s fruitful to put junior members into the post-exploitation role first. This post describes the post-exploitation team, where they fit into the overall engagement, and their core […]
Infrastructure for Ongoing Red Team Operations
Recently, I’ve had several questions about how to set up infrastructure for long running red team operations with Cobalt Strike. This is an ideal use case for Cobalt Strike. In this post, I will reiterate the advice I’ve shared with these users. System Requirements You will need to set up infrastructure to use for your […]
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Why can’t I psexec with EXE::Custom?
Seasoned Metasploit Framework users know that it’s a bad idea to let the framework generate an executable for you. The framework’s encoders are not a tool to get past anti-virus. By happy accident, an encoded payload would get past some anti-virus products, but that was four or five years ago. If the Metasploit Framework generates […]
Evolution of a Modern Hacking Payload
One of the most important features in Cobalt Strike is its Beacon payload. This is my capability to model advanced attackers. In this post, I’d like to share my insights and reasons for the design decisions I made. If you’re a Cobalt Strike user, this post will help you reason about Beacon and fit it […]
That was a fun fire drill…
Last week saw the release of Metasploit 4.10. Those who use Armitage and Cobalt Strike noticed that neither tool worked after running msfupdate on Kali Linux. That’s resolved now. Last night, I pushed Armitage and Cobalt Strike updates to fix the database.yml not found issue AND to make both tools compatible with Metasploit 4.10’s new […]
Puttering my Panda and other Threat Replication Case Studies
Cobalt Strike 2.0 introduced Malleable C2, a technology to redefine network indicators in the Beacon payload. What does this mean for you? It means you can closely emulate an actor and test intrusion response during a penetration test. In this blog post, I’ll take you through three threat replication case studies with Cobalt Strike. In […]
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Introducing Morning Catch – A Phishing Paradise
Morning Catch is a VMware virtual machine, similar to Metasploitable, to demonstrate and teach about targeted client-side attacks and post-exploitation. On this virtual machine, you will find: a website for a fictitious seafood company, self-contained email infrastructure to receive phishes, and two desktop environments. One desktop environment is a vulnerable Linux client-side attack surface. The […]
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Pass-the-Golden-Ticket with Cobalt Strike’s Beacon
Back in May, I wrote up some impressions about Meterpreter’s Kiwi extension. It’s Mimikatz 2.0, complete with its ability to generate a Kerberos “Golden Ticket” with domain-admin rights offline. I’ve had a very positive experience with this capability since May. My best practice is to create a Golden Ticket catalog. When you capture a domain controller, […]
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