Sysinternals is my go to Windows toolkit for malware analysis, incident response, and troubleshooting. Sysinternals contain tools that enable the user to analyze the inner workings of a Windows system. In this blog post, I will be covering how to use Sysinternals in Red vs.Blue competitions to detect Red team activity.
Deployment is commonly referred to as “the process of distributing the red team’s malware into the blue team’s machines”. Ansible provides a mechanism to connect to a Window machine, configure it, run command(s), and copy files to the target. Therefore, I often say, “If it’s good for sys admins, it’s good for red team”. In this blog post, I have provided an Ansible playbook that can be used to distribute the red team’s shenanigans to a list of targets, regardless of the red teamer’s host OS.
One of the biggest challenges for blue teams is using logs to hunt for malicious activity. Tools like BRO provide fantastic logging of the events that transpired on a network but don’t provide a mechanism to ask those logs a question. Threat hunting is the process of generating a series of hypotheses about malicious activity that might be occurring on your network. EQL provides a tool that can ingest logs and provide the threat hunter a mechanism to ask questions to prove or disprove their hypotheses. Furthermore, I have extended the EQL platform to support Zeek/BRO logs for network-based threat hunting.
For a red teamer, one of the biggest challenges is utilizing a command-and-control(C2) server without being discovered and blocked. This is because the detected traffic is not coming from a trusted source. One way around this is to use CloudFlare’s free HTTP reverse proxy service as your C2. By pivoting all HTTP traffic through these proxies, it becomes much harder for a network defender to detect malicious intent.