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AWS is an incredibly powerful cloud platform that enables businesses to quickly and efficiently deploy a wide range of software and services to end users.  This feature-rich environment does of course increase the attack surface that bad actors have to exploit, especially when combined with lax configurations and poorly designed APIs. In this blog post,… Continue reading When it all goes wrong on AWS – how an SSRF can lead to full control of your EC2 infrastructure

All Active Directory user account password hashes are stored inside the ntds.dit database file on the Domain Controllers. However, if you have ever tried copying the file, you’ll probably have received the following error message. Well as it turns out, the LSASS process has already opened the file, and when it called CreateFileW to open… Continue reading Dumping Active Directory Credentials

Starting with Windows 8.1 (and Server 2012 R2) Microsoft introduced a feature termed LSA Protection. This feature is based on the Protected Process Light (PPL) technology which is a defense-in-depth security feature that is designed to “prevent non-administrative non-PPL processes from accessing or tampering with code and data in a PPL process via open process… Continue reading Bypassing LSA Protection (aka Protected Process Light) without Mimikatz on Windows 10

Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC), formerly known as Device Guard, is a Microsoft Windows secure feature that restricts executable code, including scripts run by enlightened Windows script hosts, to those that conform to the device code integrity policy. WDAC prevents the execution, loading and running of unwanted or malicious code, drivers and scripts. WDAC also… Continue reading Upgrading from AppLocker to Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC)

In a recent engagement I had to compromise a hardened desktop running CrowdStrike and Symantec Endpoint Protection. The initial code execution method was my reliable favourite MSBuild (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe) which could be leveraged to execute C# code as an inline task. Initially I wrote a very basic loader that used a bruteforce decryption algorithm to run… Continue reading Bypassing CrowdStrike Endpoint Detection and Response

Using the tool Zeek, formally known as bro, is a high-level packet analysis program. It originally began development in the 1990s and has a long history. It does not directly intercept or modify traffic, rather it passively observes it and creates high-level network logs. It can be used in conjunction with a SIEM to allow… Continue reading Using Zeek to detect exploitation of Citrix CVE-2019-19781

Cutter is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) built around the long-lived radare2 disassembler. The largest problem with radare2 is it’s usability. Whilst radare is efficient to use once mastered, it has many problems for first time users. Running pdf to ‘print disassembled function’ or aaa to analyze and auto-name all functions might seem intuitive to long time users but… Continue reading Introduction to Cutter

This blog post will provide an overview of the methods available to force NTLM authentication to a rogue server, and capture or relay the credential material. These attacks can be leveraged to escalate privileges within an Active Directory domain environment. I like to look at these attacks as having 3 stages which are: Positioning a… Continue reading Capturing and Relaying NTLM Authentication: Methods and Techniques

On Windows a privilege is the right of an account, such as a user or group account, to perform various system-related operations on the local computer. There are 36 privileges defined in the Privilege Constants although a number are used internally by the operating system. There are a number of privileges that are considered game over, in… Continue reading Game Over Privileges

socat is a general-purpose networking tool that allows the creation of two bidirectional streams. It has a large amount of support for different protocols and data sources, including OPENSSL, SOCKS4, TCP, UDP, TAP, SCTP and more. When performing a penetration test this tool can be leveraged to bypass basic firewall restrictions and transfer files across… Continue reading Advanced socat

Recently Clément Labro released a blog post about an arbitrary file move vulnerability he discovered. This was CVE-2020-0668 which involved abusing Service Tracing to cause an arbitrary file move with the help of symlinks.   I confirmed the vulnerability using the Google Project Zero symboliclink-testing-tools but wanted to create a standalone executable, that could be easily shipped to a… Continue reading Making a PoC for CVE-2020-0668

This post explores how an ASP.NET project incorrectly disclosing its web.config containing static keys allows for remote code execution. The common cases for exploiting this vulnerability would be if the web application has published it’s static machine keys to GitHub, such as with the example project for this post (https://github.com/ozajay0207/EGVC) or if the application has… Continue reading Exploiting ASP.NET ViewState Misconfigurations for Remote Code Execution