One of my favorite features in Cobalt Strike is its ability to pivot over named pipes. A named pipe is a way for two programs on a Windows system to communicate with each other. From a programming perspective, working with a named pipe is a lot like working with a file. I use named pipes […]
CTA Type: Resource
Advanced Threat Tactics – Course and Notes
The release of Cobalt Strike 3.0 also saw the release of Advanced Threat Tactics, a nine-part course on red team operations and adversary simulations. This course is nearly six hours of material with an emphasis on process, concepts, and tradecraft. If you’d like to jump into the course, it’s on YouTube: Here are a few […]
Cobalt Strike 3.0 – Advanced Threat Tactics
Cobalt Strike’s mission is to help security professionals emulate “advanced threat tactics” during their engagements. I’ve executed on this since the product’s 2012 release. Cobalt Strike 3.0 is the next iteration of this. Cobalt Strike 3.0 is a ground-up rewrite of the client and server components in this product. Notably, Cobalt Strike no longer directly depends […]
Rethinking Reporting for Red Team Operations
Cobalt Strike 3.0 is coming in a few weeks. This upcoming release is the result of a large engineering effort that paralleled my existing efforts to maintain Cobalt Strike 2.x. One of the big motivators for this parallel effort was to take a fresh look at logging and reporting. Today’s Cobalt Strike produces reports that […]
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The Aggressor Project (Preview)
If you’ve run into me at a conference during the 2015 calendar year, there’s a strong chance you’ve heard about or saw the Aggressor project. Aggressor is a ground-up rewrite of Cobalt Strike’s team server and client to better serve its Red Team Operations and Adversary Simulation use cases. I expect to ship this work […]
Raphael’s Magic Quadrant
BlackHat is about to start in a few days. I think this is an appropriate time to share a non-technical, business only post. There is a new market for offensive tools and services. Our trade press doesn’t write about it yet. I don’t believe industry analysts have caught onto these ideas yet. The leaders behind mature […]
Cobalt Strike 2.5 – Advanced Pivoting
I spend a lot of my red time in the Access Manager role. This is the person on a red team who manages callbacks for the red cell. Sometimes, I like to grab a Beacon and drive around a network. It’s important to get out once in a while and enjoy what’s there. Cobalt Strike […]
WinRM is my Remote Access Tool
One of my favorite blog posts last year was Adversary Tricks and Treats from CrowdStrike. In this post, CrowdStrike details the tradecraft of an actor they dub Deep Panda. In an attempt to skirt advanced malware hunting capability, Deep Panda leverages native tools to control target systems and spread laterally in a network. With the […]
Models for Red Team Operations
Recently, I had an email from someone asking for a call to discuss different models of red team operations. This gentlemen sees his team as a service provider to his parent organization. He wants to make sure his organization sees his team as more than just dangerous folks with the latest tools doing stuff no […]
How to Pass-the-Hash with Mimikatz
I’m spending a lot of time with mimikatz lately. I’m fascinated by how much capability it has and I’m constantly asking myself, what’s the best way to use this during a red team engagement? A hidden gem in mimikatz is its ability to create a trust relationship from a username and password hash. Here’s the […]