In this blog post, we are going to cover how to install MISP on Ubuntu 18.04. Once MISP is installed, we will do an introduction to the PyMISP API to store indicators of compromise (IOCs) in MISP and query IOCs from MISP. This blog post will serve as the foundation for future blog posts moving forward.
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.
Most guides on the internet show you how to upgrade Proxmox 5.4 to 6.0 via the built-in mechanism. However, for major version upgrades, I prefer to do an installation from scratch, NOT applying the update via apt-get upgrade. This method of upgrading allows me to clean up any crud that has accumulated over the years. Lastly, this guide will cover how to backup your VMS before upgrading to Proxmox 6.0. Continue reading
This proof-of-concept (PoC) will demonstrate how to use Osquery to monitor the browser activity of users. Not only will this PoC collect browser activity, but it will also use VirusTotal to rank each URL to detect malicious activity. In addition to VirusTotal, this PoC will utilize Rsyslog, Osquery, Kafka, Splunk, Virustotal, Python3, and Docker as a logging pipeline. Once this pipeline has been implemented, your security team will have the ability to protect your user’s from today’s most serious threats on the web.
Wow, the last time I really used the Elastic Stack it was called the ELK stack, and it was version 2.0. A lot of things have changed since then, so I am going to do an updated post on installing and setting up the Elastic stack.
This blog post will explore how to set up a simple logging pipeline to detect maliciously downloaded files. This setup will utilize technologies such as Osquery, Rsyslog, Kafka, Docker, Python3, and VirusTotal for a logging pipeline. If this pipeline detects a malicious file, a Slack alert will be triggered.
In this blog post, we will explore how Zeek detects SSH brute forcing. We will explore the SSH handshake to understand how it works. Next, I will demonstrate several test cases of Zeek detecting SSH brute forcing. Finally, this post will lay down the foundation to implement active defense controls with Zeek in future posts.
Monitoring your home network can be challenging without enterprise-grade equipment. Although monitoring your home network can prove to be difficult, Proxmox and Zeek provide the perfect solution to monitor your home network. This blog post will cover how to setup Zeek+PF_Ring to monitor network traffic on Proxmox.
This blog post is going to cover how to ingest OSquery logs with Rsyslog v8. Most setups I have come across have Rsyslog ingesting the logs from disk, but this setup will ingest logs via the system journal. OSquery supports writing logs to disk and to the system journal. This post also contains a setup via Ansible and a manual walkthrough. Lastly, explanations of Rsyslog and OSquery configs.
Graylog has released version 3 with new features and major changes. This blog post will explain how to setup up Graylog version 3 on an Ubuntu server. Once Graylog is running, we will explore setting up logging clients, logging inputs, data extractors, threat intel pipelines, Slack alerts, dashboards and more.
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.
In this blog post series, I will be covering how to setup a Tor exit node for security research. The educational goals of this series is to learn more about network security monitoring, logging, and enrichment to create a threat intelligence pipeline. My exit node will collect data that will be ingested and returned to the community as intelligence.
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.