In this blog post, I continue my pursuit of knowledge to become a threat hunter. This blog post will introduce the following concepts: understanding the attacker mindset with the Mandiant Attack Lifecycle, performing a red team exercise to demonstrate the tools and techniques used by attackers with Powershell Empire, and observing how attacker activity leaves behind a trail of artifacts. These concepts will create the foundation we will use in future blog posts to hunt for malicious activity.
This blog post is going to demonstrate a proof of concept (PoC) of sending an e-mail to trigger the Mail app (mail.app) to create a reverse shell. The Mail app has built-in functionality that can trigger an Applescript to execute code when certain conditions (new e-mail in inbox from bob, deletion of e-mail, or an e-mail containing certain text) occur within the Mail app. This functionality provides a method to initiate a reverse shell without user interaction or placing a persistent mechanism in a well-known location. The method below will utilize this functionality to monitor e-mails from a particular user, upon receiving an e-mail from said user, a reverse shell will call back to our Powershell Empire server.
This blog post is going to demonstrate a proof of concept (PoC) to exfiltrate data from macOS with a built-in functionality called Folder Actions. The Folder Actions functionality triggers Applescripts to execute code when certain conditions (creating files, deleting files, etc.) occur by interactions with Finder. This functionality provides a method to exfiltrate data without the need for a shell to execute the actions. The Applescript provided below will utilize this functionality to monitor for new files in the user’s Download folder and, upon detection of a new file, exfiltrate a copy of the file to a remote server.
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.
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.
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of red teaming at University of Buffalo’s competition called Lockdown. It was a great competition and I had a lot of fun learning new red team tools and challenging the blue teamers on Windows. This blog post will focus on my C2 infrastructure setup for Cobalt Strike. I did a similar post last semester with PowerShell Empire, which can be found here.
Domain fronting is a new a technique to obfuscate the intended destination of HTTP(S) traffic. This allows attackers to circumvent security controls by masking the intended destination with “trusted” domains. In this blog post, I will setup AWS’s CloudFront CDN service to mask the destination of my Empire TeamServer.
In this blog post, I will be demonstrating different techniques to obtain initial access to Windows and Linux machines. Initial access is the action of using credentials or an exploitation of a remote machine to execute malicious code. In a Red vs. Blue competition, gaining initial access is one of the very first things the red team does. The dynamic of the entire competition hangs in the balance of the red team gaining initial access.
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of red teaming at University of Buffalo’s competition called Lockdown. It was a fantastic competition and I had ALOT of fun interacting/challenging the blue teamers on Windows. This blog post will focus on my C2 infrastructure setup for Powershell Empire.
In this blog post I will be covering how to setup and utilize MITRE’s new tool called Caldera. Caldera is a cyber adversary emulation system that operates on a server/agent model. On the server you can create adversary campaigns that are deployed to your agents. Your agents will periodically call back with their results and progress. Let’s begin!
One of the biggest trends in infosec, besides the word cyber, is threat hunting. First, I want to start by defining threat hunting as the action of “investigation without cause” and this concept is nothing new. It’s been around for years but we didn’t have a catchy marketing term associated with it. In this post, I will breakdown the Sqrrl threat hunting model, Powershell Empire for adversary activity, and instructions on setting up Graylog for log aggregation and a search platform to perform threat hunting. Finally, I would like to point out all Ansible playbooks used in this post are publicly accessible on my Github page in a repo called “AgileFalcon“.
In this post I thought I would demonstrate how to setup an environment for a red teamer. PLEASE take this environment with a gain of salt because everyone will have a different setup!!! This guide is to show the basics and hopefully a template based on the Armitage/Cobalt Strike architecture. If your interested in the pinnacle of red team setups take a look at Alex Levinson’s post about the CCDC Red team or the blog Room 362 by Rob Fuller.
In this post I am going to briefly cover the exploitation process with the Metasploit framework. A framework is defined as a real or conceptual structure intended to serve as a support or guide for the building of something that expands the structure into something useful. The Metasploit framework allows red teamers to configure an exploit, choose a payload, an encoding technique to obfuscate the payload, and post-exploitation modules after access is gained. The next couple of sections are going to walk through the process of exploitation. I believe the Metasploit approach is a template to know because other frameworks and tools follow the same flow. Continue reading
I have to be honest that my red team skills could use some improvement. I firmly believe that red teaming is a skill and a mindset that people have. I believe some people are naturally born with this mindset and others develop it, I am a developer :).Currently, I am aspiring to become an incident responder because the thrill of the hunt seems like A LOT of fun to me. But to be an effective incident responder I have to understand my adversary and their strategies.
This blog post series will include my approach of learning how to become a red teamer in a competition type of environment. Now my reasoning for this is because I have the ability to compete in multiple competitions as red teamer as a college student. Additionally, I hope to periodically return to these posts and update them with new tactics and tools that I find and use.