What type of reconnaissance do you do before a phishing attack? Recently, I was having dinner with new friends and inevitably, our conversation became a war story swap. One person started telling funny stories about calling help desk staff, trying to social engineer system information from them. I’m a lousy social engineer. When I was […]
Read More… from Phishing System Profiles without Phone Calls
To the observant network defender, notepad.exe connecting to the internet is a key indicator of compromise. In this blog post, I’d like to explain why attack frameworks inject code into notepad.exe and how you may avoid it in your attack process. Let’s say I email a Microsoft Word document that has a malicious macro to […]
Read More… from Why is notepad.exe connecting to the internet?
Hacking involves managing a lot of contextual factors at one time. Most times, the default situation works and a tool will perform beautifully for you. Sometimes though, there are things you have to check on and work around. That’s what this blog post is. I’d like to give you a list of contextual factors you […]
Several times now, an author has introduced Armitage, and the main value add to the hacking process that they emphasize is the “devastating” Hail Mary attack. I’m most proud of Armitage’s red team collaboration capability–it’s why I built the tool in the first place. The Hail Mary attack? Meh. That said, I’d like to share with you […]
Read More… from The Origin of Armitage’s Hail Mary Mass Exploitation Feature
Last month, I announced Beacon’s ability to control a host over DNS. I see Beacon as a low and slow lifeline to get an active session, when it’s needed. Sometimes though, Beacon is all you have. There are times when Meterpreter gets caught too quickly or just can’t get past the network egress restrictions. For these […]
The Metasploit Framework decouples exploits from the stuff that gets executed after successful exploitation (the payload). Payloads in the Metasploit Framework are also divided into two parts, the stager and the stage. The stager is responsible for downloading a large payload (the stage), injecting it into memory, and passing execution to it. Staging first came […]
Read More… from Staged Payloads – What Pen Testers Should Know
One of my favorite Cobalt Strike features is its ability to quietly manage a compromised system with DNS. Being rather proud of this feature, I talk about it a lot. During some conversations, I’ve heard the response “that’ll never work, we don’t allow port 53 out, unless it’s our internal DNS server”. To which I reply, […]
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In 2011, I participated in an exercise. The exercise ran for 60 hours straight, forcing the red team to work in shifts. The event was a typical red and blue exercise. Red team attacks. Blue teams defend. Blue teams were scored on their ability to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of tokens (text files with […]
Many networks are like sieves. A reverse TCP payload or an HTTP/S connection is all it takes to get out. Once in a while, you have to whip out the kung-fu to escape a network. For these situations, DNS is a tempting option. If a system can resolve a hostname, then that host can communicate […]
Read More… from DNS Command and Control Added to Cobalt Strike
The 2013 National CCDC season ended in April 2013. One topic that I’ve sat on since this year’s CCDC season ended is feedback. Providing meaningful and specific feedback on a team-by-team basis is not easy. This year, I saw multiple attempts to solve this problem. These initial attempts instrumented the Metasploit Framework to collect as many data points […]