Breaking and Building a Secure Network – BSides San Antonio

This past weekend I gave a talk at BSides San Antonio titled “Pigs Don’t Fly – Why owning a typical network is so easy, and how to build a secure one.” I took a top-down look at the security barriers in a typical organizational network, the many techniques attackers use to break them, and how [...]

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Using the GUI in Metasploit 4.6

Unfortunately, Rapid7 recently informed me that they would no longer be including msfgui from the official distribution of Metasploit (along with Armitage). But don’t worry, because even though it is now a separate program, msfgui is still supported and still provides (in my humble opinion) the best way of harnessing all the power of Metasploit.

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Saving shells with PrependMigrate

One of the more frustrating experiences in infosec is getting a session back – just to have it die a second later. Often, exploited processes are simply unstable; after smashing the heap or some other data structures, the process crashes not long after starting the shellcode. Sometimes the process freezes and the user exits the [...]

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Economics in One Lesson

This is off the security topic, but I was really excited to find this online, so deal with it. Everyone who votes needs to understand this. We have all heard the fallacies before, and it’s hard not to disagree. When people need jobs, why can’t the government create jobs with public works projects? Don’t all [...]

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Authenticated Remote Code Execution Methods in Windows

All of the below are supported ways of remotely executing code that are built-in to Windows. If psexec isn’t working since a service is not running or ports are blocked, you can try all these other options; defenders who want to detect intruders moving through the network need to detect all of these; incident responders might want to look for evidence of these…

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Running Code From A Non-Elevated Account At Any Time

You may have found yourself in a situation where you have access to a system through a limited user account, or could not or did not want to bypass UAC (AlwaysOn setting for example) and you needed to continue running code even when the account logged off and/or the system rebooted (and even if you [...]

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Attack Test

Well, the Mayan Apocalypse came and went, and since we’re all still here, it’s time to get back to computer security. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the most likely way you’ll get exploited is through your browser, so you should routinely check for vulnerabilities there. I was inspired by some of the free browser [...]

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Hoarder, HIPS bypasses, and Ambush

I gave an updated Ambush Presentation at Derbycon today… On the attack side, I demonstrated Hoarder, which is a proof of concept to bypass standard hook-based host intrusion prevention systems by avoiding making any calls to OS DLLs at all, and only making raw syscalls to the kernel. It works in two steps. First, the getdlls program opens the target executable and recursively reads it and all of its required DLLs into C language byte arrays.

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Vulnerable systems setup

I frequently get asked how to set up a test lab to practice hacking on… So I looked through some release timelines and oldversion.com postings to figure out which versions of your favorite browser, plugins, and PDF reader would be installed if you had up-to-date versions of each on January 1st of the past three years, and where you can get them from. Enjoy.

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Shellcode sizes in Metasploit

When working on DNS tunneling shellcode, I was wondering how small the shellcode needed to be to work with most exploits. In case you have the same question, this is how you find out how much space, for example, all Windows exploits have, or see how many exploits a given payload will work with, although [...]

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