In the age of threat hunting, automated mass scanning, and the occasionally curious SOC, properly securing your command and control (C2) infrastructure is key to any engagement. While many setups today include a CDN Domain Front with a custom Nginx or Apache ruleset sprinkled on top, I wanted to share my recipe for success. Fully…
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During an Internal Penetration Test or Adversarial Attack Simulation (Red Team), TrustedSec will deploy a rogue, Linux-based networking device onto a client’s network. These devices will sometimes obtain an IP address via DHCP and establish an outbound connection wherein we can perform our testing. Every client network is different, but we have noticed that a…
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We’ve all been there: you’ve completed your initial recon, sent in your emails to gather those leaked HTTP headers, spent an age configuring your malleable profile to be just right, set up your CDNs, and spun up your redirectors. Then it’s time, you send in your email aaaaaand…nothing. You can see from your DNS diagnostic…
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In this post, I will cover some easy things that defenders can do to make it harder for attackers to succeed. As you all know, there is never a silver bullet when it comes to security, so these tips will only make it harder for attackers by focusing on the basics, and sometimes, that helps…
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Since joining the TrustedSec AETR team, I have been spending a bit of time looking at tradecraft for MacOS environments, which, unfortunately for us attackers, are getting tougher to attack compared to their Windows peers. With privacy protection, sandboxing, and endless entitlement dependencies, operating via an implant on a MacOS-powered device can be a minefield….
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Recently, I was on an engagement where I discovered I had plaintext credentials to an account that could modify Active Directory Group Policy Objects (GPOs). This proved to be a fun challenge, as Group Policy files and properties can be bent to our will even when hacking through a straw (SOCKS only, in this case)….
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Since beginning work as a red teamer almost two years ago, I’ve had to learn a lot of new information and tooling. I had never worked with Cobalt Strike before and there were features not obvious to me until I had used it for a while and gained some experience with it. This post will…
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On offensive engagements, we frequently encounter centralized internal password managers that are used by various departments to store incredibly sensitive account information, such as Domain Admin accounts, API keys, credit card data, the works. It used to be that these systems were implemented without multi-factor authentication. “Hacking” them was as simple as finding somebody that…
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As the red team infrastructure needs continue to expand (and grow more complicated), so does the need for infrastructure automation. Red teams are adopting DevOps to improve the speed at which their infrastructure is deployed, hence the rise in usage of tools such as Terraform and Ansible for red teams. In this post, we will…
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Background OAuth is an open authorization standard that facilitates unrelated servers and services working together, allowing access to their assets without sharing the initial, related, single logon credential. I have been thinking of it as a kind of Kerberos for external services, without a shared domain or forest. A familiar instance would be authentication to…
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