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.
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Category Archives: Tools
Install/Setup Graylog 3 on Ubuntu 18.04 – Zeeks logs + threat intel pipeline
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.
Tales of a Blue Teamer: Detecting Powershell Empire shenanigans with Sysinternals
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.
Tales of a red teamer: Deploying shenanigans to Windows with Ansible
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.
Part 1: Threat hunting with BRO/Zeek and EQL
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.
PoC: Using Cloudflare as an HTTP C2 with Powershell Empire
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.
Part 1: Running TOR exit node – Install/Setup exit node
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.
Tales of a Red Teamer: How to setup a C2 infrastructure for Cobalt Strike – UB 2018
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.
How to red team: Domain fronting with Powershell Empire and CloudFront
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.
Part 4: How to Red Team – Obtaining initial access
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.
Tales of a Red Teamer: How to setup a C2 infrastructure for Powershell Empire – UB 2018
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.
Install/Setup Kolide Fleet + Graylog + OSQuery with Windows and Linux deployment
In this blog post we will be installing, setting up, and utilizing Kolide Fleet as our OSQuery fleet manager. As stated by Kolide, ” Fleet is a state of the art host monitoring platform tailored for security experts. Leveraging Facebook’s battle-tested OSQuery project, Fleet delivers fast answers to big questions.” In future blog posts I plan on using this tool for incident response and threat hunting scenarios.
Part 1: Intro to Threat Hunting – Setting up the environment
In this blog post series, I am documenting my novice pursuit for knowledge to become a threat hunter. This series has a strong focus on utilizing OSQuery to hunt for different techniques used by adversaries. The first post of this series, will consist of instructions to set up a lab environment. The second post of this series will be walking through red team scenarios with Powershell Empire, and MITRE’s cyber adversary emulation system called Caldera.
The third post in this series, will utilize OSQuery to hunt red team activity by discovering artifacts and modifications made to the system. The fourth post in this series, will integrate our successful hunts into Graylog for logging and alerting. Lastly, this series will be generating threat-hunting playbooks and scoring our detection capabilities using Cyb3rWard0g’s system.
Install/Setup MITRE Caldera the automated cyber adversary emulation system
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!
Part 1: Intro to Threat Hunting with Powershell Empire, Windows event logs, and Graylog
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“.
Part 3: How to Red Team – Setting up a red team infrastructure
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.
Setup/Configure OPNsense router in AWS VPC
For the longest time I was under the assumption a router in an AWS VPC could only have one NIC. Writing IPtables/firewall rules for one interface can be tedious!!! However, I have discovered how to setup OPSense in an AWS VPC with multiple NICs. That is right, you will have a WAN NIC(public subnet) and a NIC for each private subnet.
Install/Setup Wazuh 2.0, ELK 5.0, and client deployment
Visualize, analyze and search your host IDS alerts. Elastic Stack is the combination of three popular Open Source projects for log management, known as Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana(ELK). Together they provide a real-time and user-friendly console for your OSSEC alerts. OSSEC Wazuh integration with Elastic Stack comes with out-of-the-box dashboards for PCI DSS compliance and CIS benchmarks. You can do forensic and historical analysis of OSSEC alerts and store your data for several years, in a reliable and scalable platform. This post is updating a pervious post of mine using Wazuh 1.0 and version 2.0 of the ELK stack. This post will contain a general setup and configuration for a central logging server.
Install/Setup Doorman + OSQuery on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux deployment
In this post I am going to explore the tool OSquery. OSquery allows you to easily ask questions about your Linux, Windows, and macOS infrastructure. Whether your goal is intrusion detection, infrastructure reliability, or compliance, OSquery gives you the ability to empower and inform a broad set of organizations within your company. It is a tool that is used by system administrators, incident responders, and ole mighty threat hunters. However, in this post I will not be posting how to use OSquery for threat hunting. I hope to utilize the tool in my environment and write a later post :).
Rekall memory analysis framework for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX
Rekall is the most complete Memory Analysis framework. Rekall provides an end-to-end solution to incident responders and forensic analysts. From state of the art acquisition tools, to the most advanced open source memory analysis framework. Rekall provides cross-platform solutions on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. Additionally, as stated above each operating system has it’s own memory acquisition tool provided by Rekall called pmem.