Cyber Strategy Magic

Strategic this, strategic that

People band strategy around like it’s some sort of mythical beast that requires no knowledge of the subject involved but is done by wizards and executives (it’s just done by people, but I digress) so I thought I’d talk about strategy development.

Now forewarning you might come out of this post thinking… there must be something else… something you are missing as Dan’s not showing any secret magic…. Often what is commonly lacking when looking at strategic execution is effective communication, consensus, and marathon like commitment to deliver on said goals and objectives. Why? Because that part is really, really, hard, if it wasn’t we’d all be sipping Bollinger in the Bahamas.

Know the business

If your first thoughts are to run to Sun Tzu or grab an ISO27001 document then you should probably pause, grab a tea, and take a breath. In my experience cyber security is:

Not a war
Does not require anything to do with the military
The answers are not simply in a book or standard document

People often think that a framework, guide, or standard will give them the answers. Sure, they are often useful tools to help, hell the domain of cyber is broad as hell and there’s so much to do and often so little time, so job aides and not re-inventing the wheel is a good thing, that doesn’t however just mean that with documents you will be in a good position. Read more “Cyber Strategy Magic” →

Defense

Razer Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

“And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

Firstly, Kudos to @j0nh4t for finding this!

I woke up this morning to see twitter fun with a LPE discovered in the Razer driver installation. Basically, when you plug a Razer mouse into a Windows machine, it will download (via windows update) and execute a process as system which has user interaction. This interface includes an install path selector, with this a right click + SHIFT (LULZ) on whitespace will allow you to launch a command prompt/PowerShell window (as SYSTEM).

Guides

Rapid Active Directory Security Testing of Windows Server 2022…

Introduction

Ever needed to test active directory in a hurry? Well, here’s some common commands to test active directory domain services. In this post today we are going to focus on DNS and username enumeration, there are however a range of weaknesses you want to look for:

SMB Null Session/Guest Access
LDAP Null Bind
Sensitive Information Disclosure
Weak Password Policies
Unpatched Software Vulnerabilities

Active Recon

Port Scanning and Service Fingerprinting

nmap -p- -sC -sV -Pn -v -A -oA ecorp.local.txt 192.168.1.22

Domain Name and Domain Controller Enumeation

Guides

Hacking Windows Server 2022

WIndows Server 2022 is RTM! I love new operating systems, but also with the new, what is old? There will be loads of new blogs and articles on new features of Server 2022 however I wanted to see what mischief we can have with it! So I’ve decided to start looking at common vectors and exploits (from the fun to the serious) so that we can see how much of the world has changed (or not!)

So let’s take a look. The first thing I did was to offline replace stickykeys with cmd.exe – yes this method still works. But as lots of people will realise, you neeed physical access to the disk (well you don’t if you have access to someone’s vcenter you don’t!) but also the reg key methods also work! We can still backdoor RDP – here’s a script to disable NLA, Enable RDP, configure the firewall rules and set the registry keys to backdoor the system (clearly for lab use only!)

https://github.com/mr-r3b00t/RDP_Backdoor

Defense

Windows Remote Management 101

Windows Remote Management is easy if you are using a domain joined machine and have a CA. But what if you are off the domain and you want to connect to WINRM that has an HTTPS listener? (by default WINRM uses HTTP on TCP 5985, you can clearly chop out the TLS related configs in the example scripts and they will work for plain old WINRM)

This is useful from a sysadmin and penetration testing/red team perspective. Now obviously you could export the certificates and import them into your store, however that’s more work. So, let’s look at how we ignore revocation, CA name and Computer Name checks.

WinRM via HTTPS (self-signed)

Defense

Windows Security Fundamentals & LPE

Introduction

Recently I decided to do the Red Team Operator: Privilege Escalation in Windows Course by Sektor7 (thanks for the recommendation Justin!). I thought I’d write some notes but also create a quick blog covering some of the Windows fundamental areas. It’s easy to actually forget how this stuff is at a detailed level so figured it helps both myself and the world to share a snippet. I’m litterally listening to the course as I type this, I’ve just imported an OVA to vmware workstation so this is litterally live! (I’m 7 video modules in!)

There’s some key parts around Windows Security Architecture that is important to know, the course does cover this off at the start so I thought I’d share a tiny bit of my notes. Read more “Windows Security Fundamentals & LPE” →

Defense

Penetration Testing

Overview

Penetration testing is the activity of conducting security testing with the aim of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities to identify strengths and weaknesses. I include strengths because I believe it’s important for security testing to promote both positive and negative findings. I also think that there is a huge mis conception with what penetration is, what it helps with and how to best get value from a penetration test.

My definition isn’t too far from the NCSC one: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/information/check-penetration-testing

A penetration test is a security assurance activity, but it’s one of many activities that I recommend people conduct. This is however largely only adopted by the few, for many a penetration test is a compliance tick box, either from a regulatory or contractual requirement.

When looking at a system a penetration test is not usually the most efficient starting point, especially if it’s from a black box perspective. Read more “Penetration Testing” →

Guides

What do you need to be Cyber Leader?

Introduction

What does it take to be a cyber leader? How do we address a broad challenge we have in today’s business world?

There are a huge number of organisations whereby the leadership do not have domain expertise in cyber and related disciplines. There are decision makers who are having to best guess. On the other end of the spectrum, we have thousands and thousands of people trying to “break into cyber” yet they face largely insane entry requirements with the forementioned adding things to junior and entry level role which include:

Must have a CISSP (CISSP requires 5 years’ experience and is an Information Security certificate that is very broad and not very deep, it also covers a range of areas that in my opinion aren’t even required for many cyber security capabilities inside organisations)
Must have a Certified Ethical Hacker (this exam includes remember historic malware dates, is that really what we need from our leaders?)
Must have a very large level of experience of be from an existing cyber role

Leadership

There’s never any time – A mRr3b00t Adventure

Introduction

I’ve been working with technology and its security for a while, I have travelled to different parts of the world, I’ve worked with major organisations, and I’ve worked with a whole range of organisations both from strategic advisory and at the coal face perspective. Now over the last twenty years I thought about how much has changed… and honestly, I don’t think much has.

Technology innovation, miniaturisation and adoption rates are through the roof, but I still see massively similar patterns. I’m not going to try and quote statistics, but I think it’s a fair to say the threat landscape has changed somewhat (for the worse!)

Back in the 2000s era we had networks running Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2000/2003, we had clients with open services which could largely be accessed from anywhere on the network. We had host-based firewalls from third party vendors, but these were rarely implemented, MSBlaster and Windows XP changed this dynamic somewhat, to say things haven’t improved on one front would be a lie, however the level of crime and access to technology globally has changed massively. Read more “There’s never any time – A mRr3b00t Adventure” →

Defense

Why are ransomware attacks so devastating? – Part 1

Introduction

“Ransomware is a major issue!”

Hang on maybe we need to re-phrase that:

“Weak security postures are a major issue!”

or perhaps.. why not both!

I’ve been working with digital technology management for over 20 years, I started out when I was a kid (literally) fixing people’s PCs in their offices, removing malware, improving configurations, writing batch file menus, and playing games. As time has gone on technology has shrunk and continually become more and more of our everyday lives.

Back in 2003 I responded internally to MSBlaster, an SMB worm that had a devastating effect for the time, by today’s standards it was child play, however I remember saying “it’s a good job it didn’t delete everything whilst it was here.” (Or something very similar. Post NACHI/Blaster my friends and I were talking about how worse it could get. Fast forward in time and it’s much worse. Yet when I look at networks, they don’t look very different to how they did back in the 2000s.

Despite a multi-billion-dollar cyber security industry, it seems daily that organisations are succumbing to “cyber-attacks” which commonly include ransomware. Why are they successful and why are they so impactful? Well, let’s take a look! Read more “Why are ransomware attacks so devastating? – Part 1” →