What if not everyone is a cyber expert?

Developing a Cyber Roadmap

Ok so this topic comes up a fair bit, but organisations and their management are often looking to ensure they are doing the right thing (no really this is a common phrase I hear with organisations) with regard to cyber security. THe challenge I think quite a few people have is even understanding what that even means. Sure you have a firewall, and antivirus and you had a yearly peneration test of a site that isn’t even touching your corproate network. You thought you were fine, but you keep seeing organisations get ransomared in the news and the board keep asking “are we ok?” so this then leads to a common position of maybe buying more widgets or thinking, well we haven’t been “hacked” so we must be doing ok.

Defense

Vulnerability Management – Actually doing it!

Vulnerability Management, Assessments and Vulnerability scanning is sometimes treated a with distain in the Offensive security community, I personally don’t understand that. Vulnerability management is key to inputting into security strategy, architecture, and operations. It’s coupled heavily to many other processes such as:

Asset Management
Risk Management
Patch Management
Change & Release Management
Security Testing
Security Monitoring

Before we start deploying let’s think about some areas for consideration when performing vulnerability scans:

Scope
- Asset/Hosts
  - IP Ranges
  - Hostnames
- Connectivity
  - VPNs
  - LAN/WAN
- Device Types and Configuration
  - Domain
  - Workgroup
  - Appliance
  - ICS
  - Printers
  - Network Equipment
- Unauthenticated View
- Authenticated View
  - Auth Types
  - Protocols
- Scheduling
- Authority to execute
Impact
- Performance
- Availability
- Confidentiality
Objectives and Outcomes
Reporting
- Information Flow
- Report Storage and Confidentiality

CTF

Abusing AdminSDHolder to enable a Domain Backdoor

If we have high privilege access to a domain, we will likely want to establish persistence with high privilege access. One mechanism to do this is to assign ourselves permissions to the adminSDHolder object in active directory:

Here we have the default adminSDHolder permissions. We are going to add our user “low” in here with modify or full control permissions: Read more “Abusing AdminSDHolder to enable a Domain Backdoor” →

CTF

How to Identify Hashes

Some hashes are obvious but even then, it’s a good job to check. There are a few ways to check a hash outside of manual validation.

Using the Hashcat example list:

https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=example_hashes

Using hash-identifier:

https://github.com/blackploit/hash-identifier

Using cyberchef Analyse hash:

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Analyse_hash()

Using hash-id:

https://github.com/psypanda/hashID

Using HashTag:

https://github.com/SmeegeSec/HashTag

As you can see there are range of tools available to you, and remember if you want to keep the hashes to yourself you can download Cyberchef and run it locally!

Guides

Cracking an SSH key with John the Ripper (JTR)

This is a super-fast blog to show how to crack sshkeys with JohnTheRipper from Kali VM.

Create a key

Guides

Redirecting Traffic with SOCAT

Ever wanted to run honeypots all over the world but don’t want to deploy actual servers, or psudo servers everywhere? Ever wanted to run a C2 server but don’t want to expose your own IP and want a pool of redirectors? Well here’s a quick look at using SOCAT to forward HTTPS traffic from a VPS to a backend web server.

Process

Create a linux virtual machine in a cloud services provider: Read more “Redirecting Traffic with SOCAT” →

Defense

Would you know if these remote access tools were…

Introduction

Remote management and monitoring (RMM) and other remote access solutions are fantastic for enabling remote support of environments. Like most things in life though the intent of the user changes the tool from a force for good to a weapon of evil (I hate the use of the word weapon with software but it’s a blog so I’ll self-cringe).

Kill Chain Summary

The kill chain in the attack outlind by sophos isn’t one that you will be suprised at:

Initial access was via a known software vulnerability (unpatched Exchange server)
The attackers dropped a web shell
The attackers had SYSTEM level access
The attackers dumped memory to obtain hashes
The hashes were cracked (they escalated to domain admin)
7 (yes seven!) backdoors were implaneted into the target network (hence this blog post)
Lateral movement was made to domain controllers
Large volumes of data were exfiltrated
The rest of the environment was then pwn3d

What might shock you more is the speed at which this was conducted. It’s not months or weeks, it’s hours and days (see the Sophos blog for more details!)

Conti Actors Remote Access Toolkits

Remote access tools being abused isn’t a new thing but following a great writeup (https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2021/09/03/conti-affiliates-use-proxyshell-exchange-exploit-in-ransomware-attacks/?cmp=30728) of a Conti kill chain from Sophos Labs I figured I’d try and raise more awareness of some of the threats that organisations face, and the reality that defending against all threats is actually quite difficult for a lot of organisations (hell it’s technically not simply for anyone!) Read more “Would you know if these remote access tools were being used in your network environment?” →

Strategy

Nine to Five in a digital first, always on…

We never used to have to worry

As technology becomes more and more embedded into our lives, into our businesses and into our realities, you must wonder why it’s so hard for some to adapt to the changes this brings.

With more connectivity, with more services online, with more systems connected and with people wanting always on, always available services you must consider the realities of technology management in today’s world.

Is it right to expect your systems to be online 24/7 365 days a year? Do your staff want flexibility? Do you operate services which are exposed to the internet? Not only is keeping the services online (and well maintained) a consideration, how do you keep them secure?

System security is probably viewed by many still as something that a monthly hotfix or upgrade looks after. Unfortunately, whilst that might be “got by” in the 90s and early 2000s the reality is that doesn’t work anymore. Read more “Nine to Five in a digital first, always on cyber hellscape!” →

Defense

Decoding Powershell Base64 Encoded commands in CyberChef

Firstly, you need some Powershell Base64 commands, you could search your security logs or Sysmon logs for these, or simply generate some yourself!

powershell.exe -noprofile -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -EncodedCommand bgBlAHQAIAB1AHMAZQByACAAcwBlAGMAYQB1AGQAaQB0ACAAUABAADUANQB3ADAAcgBkADEAMgAzACEAIAAvAEEARABEADsAbgBlAHQAIAB1AHMAZQByACAAcwBlAGMAYQB1AGQAaQB0ACAALwBhAGMAdABpAHYAZQA6AHkAZQBzADsAbgBlAHQAIABsAG8AYwBhAGwAZwByAG8AdQBwACAAYQBkAG0AaQBuAGkAcwB0AHIAYQB0AG8AcgBzACAALwBhAGQAZAAgAHMAZQBjAGEAdQBkAGkAdAA=

Next, we head over to Cyber Chef!

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/