Hacking involves managing a lot of contextual factors at one time. Most times, the default situation works and a tool will perform beautifully for you. Sometimes though, there are things you have to check on and work around. That’s what this blog post is. I’d like to give you a list of contextual factors you […]
CTA Type: Resource
The Origin of Armitage’s Hail Mary Mass Exploitation Feature
Several times now, an author has introduced Armitage, and the main value add to the hacking process that they emphasize is the “devastating” Hail Mary attack. I’m most proud of Armitage’s red team collaboration capability–it’s why I built the tool in the first place. The Hail Mary attack? Meh. That said, I’d like to share with you […]
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Hacking through a Straw (Pivoting over DNS)
Last month, I announced Beacon’s ability to control a host over DNS. I see Beacon as a low and slow lifeline to get an active session, when it’s needed. Sometimes though, Beacon is all you have. There are times when Meterpreter gets caught too quickly or just can’t get past the network egress restrictions. For these […]
Staged Payloads – What Pen Testers Should Know
The Metasploit Framework decouples exploits from the stuff that gets executed after successful exploitation (the payload). Payloads in the Metasploit Framework are also divided into two parts, the stager and the stage. The stager is responsible for downloading a large payload (the stage), injecting it into memory, and passing execution to it. Staging first came […]
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That’ll never work–we don’t allow port 53 out
One of my favorite Cobalt Strike features is its ability to quietly manage a compromised system with DNS. Being rather proud of this feature, I talk about it a lot. During some conversations, I’ve heard the response “that’ll never work, we don’t allow port 53 out, unless it’s our internal DNS server”. To which I reply, […]
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Red Team Data Collection
In 2011, I participated in an exercise. The exercise ran for 60 hours straight, forcing the red team to work in shifts. The event was a typical red and blue exercise. Red team attacks. Blue teams defend. Blue teams were scored on their ability to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of tokens (text files with […]
DNS Command and Control Added to Cobalt Strike
Many networks are like sieves. A reverse TCP payload or an HTTP/S connection is all it takes to get out. Once in a while, you have to whip out the kung-fu to escape a network. For these situations, DNS is a tempting option. If a system can resolve a hostname, then that host can communicate […]
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Telling the Offensive Story at CCDC
The 2013 National CCDC season ended in April 2013. One topic that I’ve sat on since this year’s CCDC season ended is feedback. Providing meaningful and specific feedback on a team-by-team basis is not easy. This year, I saw multiple attempts to solve this problem. These initial attempts instrumented the Metasploit Framework to collect as many data points […]
Goading Around Firewalls
Last weekend, I was enjoying the HackMiami conference in beautiful Miami Beach, FL. On Sunday, they hosted several hacking challenges in their CTF room. One of the sponsoring vendors, a maker of network security appliances setup a challenge too. The vendor placed an unpatched Windows XP device behind one of their unified threat management devices. […]
Red Team Training at BlackHat USA
Before developing Cobalt Strike, I conducted interviews with several penetration testing practitioners. I wanted to dig into their process, the tools they used, the gaps they saw, etc. Three folks from the Veris Group sat down with me for three hours to go over these very questions. It was at this time, I became familiar […]