ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) language model developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating human-like responses to natural language input. It is based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture and has been trained on a vast amount of text data, enabling it to understand and generate coherent and relevant responses to a… Continue reading How AI Chatbots can Expedite Penetration Testing Service Delivery

OverPass-the-Hash Mimikatz can perform the well-known operation “OverPass-The-Hash” to run a process under the security context of another account’s credentials. This is extremely powerful and should not be underestimated. Behind the scenes, Mimikatz requests a Kerberos ticket from the domain controller using the NTLM hash provided. The Kerberos ticket allows authentication to Kerberos services within… Continue reading Using Mimikatz

When is penetration testing required? You have developed an application (in-house or outsourced), purchased an application (commercial off the shelf product), or purchased a software as a service (SaaS) and have concerns or compliance requirements regarding the security of the application or data stored. These concerns can be broadly categorised, in that an adversary or… Continue reading Penetration Testing Frequently Asked Questions

What is Penetration Testing? Penetration testing, whether it be black box or white box, is a form of risk assessment that aims to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities and risks within a system. Usually, security is considered a balancing act between confidentiality, integrity and availability. Confidentiality being the ability of the system to keep personal information secret.… Continue reading Why is penetration testing required?

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a defence-in-depth mitigation against common web attacks by monitoring and filtering HTTP traffic. WAFs work by analysing the plaintext content of HTTP messages between the client and server to determine if the given message is malicious. If it’s deemed to be malicious, the WAF stops the message from reaching… Continue reading Penetration Testing and Web Application Firewalls

There are two main ways to conduct penetration testing: black box and white box.  Both provide different approaches to the methodology and require different levels of interaction from the client. White box can often return more findings while improving the tester’s efficiency. We’ve already covered black box testing in the first part of this two-part… Continue reading White Box Penetration Testing

Penetration testing – or pen-testing as we colloquially call it – is a crucial component to a robust security programme in any organisation. As management, it’s critical you understand where pen-testing fits into your programme and what it can do for your organisation. Equally important is what it can’t do, and how the different “flavours”… Continue reading Black Box Penetration Testing

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

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