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, […]
Read More… from That’ll never work–we don’t allow port 53 out
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 […]
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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 […]
Last weekend, I was enjoying the HackMiami conference in beautiful Miami Beach, FL. On Sunday, they hosted several hacking challenges in their CTF room. One of the sponsoring vendors, a maker of network security appliances setup a challenge too. The vendor placed an unpatched Windows XP device behind one of their unified threat management devices. […]
Before developing Cobalt Strike, I conducted interviews with several penetration testing practitioners. I wanted to dig into their process, the tools they used, the gaps they saw, etc. Three folks from the Veris Group sat down with me for three hours to go over these very questions. It was at this time, I became familiar […]
Saturday, 6:30pm ended my 2013 red teaming season. I’ve participated in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition as a red team volunteer since 2008. I love these events primarily because of the opportunity I get to interact with the student teams and learn from my peers in this field. But, since 2011, I’ve also traveled to […]
Last week, I received an email from Tod B. at Rapid7 stating that the next binary installer of Metasploit would ship without Armitage and msfgui. Metasploit 4.6 drops both programs. According to Tod, the Metasploit Framework repository on Github will also drop both projects in the near future. The reason given is that Rapid7 does […]
Read More… from Metasploit 4.6 – Now with less Open Source GUI
Western Regional CCDC was pretty epic. Given the level of interest in red activity, I’d like to share what I can. So much happened, I couldn’t keep up with all of it. That said, here’s my attempt to document some of the red team fun from my perspective at Western Regional CCDC. * . . […]
This is a pretty quick tip, but still useful. When you SSH to a host, you may use the -D flag to setup “dynamic” application-level port forwarding. Basically, this flag makes your ssh client setup a SOCKS server on the port you specify: What you may not know, is that it’s possible to send your […]